Trevor scowled. “Put those on when you’re done. You have twenty minutes. Use them wisely. You don’t want to see me when I get angry.”
He shut and locked the door.
Lucy picked up the clothing. It was a white filmy layered dress with a wide belt with studs and hoops. There were no underclothes, just the dress and belt.
She turned on the water, almost in a daze. Maybe there was something she could use as a weapon-against five men? Hardly. Her self-defense skills hadn’t even done damage to one.
Still, she looked through the cabinets.
They were empty. Not even a bobby pin. Not only empty, but unused. Not a stain of toothpaste or perfume in the drawers, not even a strand of hair.
The shower beckoned. It wasn’t only her legs that were sore. She now saw the blood on her stomach, the blood on her thighs, the dried semen. She looked in the mirror and saw the spot on her neck where Roger’s knife had cut her, the deeper cut on her breast.
She climbed into the shower, sat on the tile floor, and cried as she scrubbed herself, ridding herself of the scent of violence, trying to reclaim her dignity.
And failing.
EIGHT
JACK AND HIS TEAM had driven them to the base of the mountain in two hours; then two more were spent trekking up the mountain to the observatory at the top. The morning had started cool, but as the sun rose so did the heat. The dust from the dirt roads coated Dillon, and he drank heavily from his water bottle.
“I made some inquiries after your call,” Jack had told Dillon. “Learned that an old man up here, Professor Fox, has had some female company for the last couple of years. No one knows who she is, but she’s treated the locals well so they haven’t bothered her.”
Dillon absorbed the information. “You could have gone for her yourself,” he said. “You didn’t have to wait for me.”
Jack shrugged. “I promised I’d meet you.” He stared Dillon in the eye. For the first time in many years, Dillon saw a real complexity to Jack. He couldn’t say if it was good or bad, but Jack was a man of his word.
Without comment, Jack motioned to his team. They’d already circumvented one group of rebels who’d been camping at the base of the mountain. They faced another up ahead.
Dillon was completely out of his element. Both Patrick and Connor were armed and taking orders from an older brother they barely knew. As cops, they were used to a command structure. Jack’s team of soldiers acted as a unit with a mere hand signal. Dillon had no weapon to protect himself or anyone else. Being physically fit and able to keep up with the others was a small consolation. He was being protected, he sensed it even though Jack didn’t say it.
The position made him uncomfortable. Dillon was used to being in control of any given situation. People came to him-cops, prosecutors, doctors-for his advice and opinions. He had the respect and admiration of everyone he worked with, his family, and his friends. He was good at his job, his vocation, his ability to crawl into the mind of society’s most sick and depraved and find justice for their victims.
And until now it had never touched him. Until now he’d believed he was providing a service. After someone had been killed, he helped find the killer by
He’d never been responsible for finding a victim alive. His analysis largely came from the kill itself, looking at the body scientifically, the life and death of the victim, understanding the victimology, determining through an almost empathetic process-the antithesis of science-what human makeup had done such an evil act. Then peering into the shadows of the victim’s life, narrowing suspects using logic and experience. Forensic psychiatry was as much a social discipline as a scientific one.
His inadequacies came crashing down. The sheer enormity of what faced them over the next thirty-six hours, that they might not be able to save Lucy, that only through her death might he be capable of finding her murderer.
“Connor,” he said quietly, “can I have your backup weapon?”
At first Dillon thought his brother was going to balk. Connor knew Dillon was a novice with fire-arms.
But he handed it over, butt first. “Safety’s on,” he said.
Dillon hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. He’d prefer to use words and diplomacy to finesse any tense situation.
But an arrogant, remorseless killer had Lucy, and if talking couldn’t save her life, a gun just might.
The dress Lucy wore was identical to the one April Klinger had worn during her final show. It seemed fitting, Trask thought, to have Lucy wear it. They had a lot in common. Not so much the way they looked-April had been petite, curvy, and blond, while Lucy was tall, lithe, and brunette-but Lucy was a dancer, Trask knew that from their months of online conversations. Twelve years of ballet. So was April, until she ran away from home after her grandmother told her she was sending her to drug rehab.
Trask had liked April, and had used her drug addiction to keep her compliant. He liked April because the girl hated what she did. Her fake rapes were popular because she wasn’t faking most of the time. She was feisty. Still, her drug addiction kept her in line, kept her coming back every week for another live show.
He remembered when he killed her. As with Monique, he hadn’t planned it exactly, but once his hands were around her neck, he couldn’t stop himself.
For years, he’d been distributing snuff films through Achilles Distribution. Nervous, because mailing them was dangerous. Still, that was how he learned to hone his sixth sense, to discern what mail drops were monitored by the feds, and whom he could trust. When the Internet bloomed, he created Trask Enterprises. No longer did he need to risk exposure by mailing the films-he could have customers download them.
But snuff films were dangerous because someone died, and while most of the women he killed were society’s throwaways-prostitutes, drug addicts, runaways-there was always the chance someone would be looking for them.
With the Internet, the niche market for snuff films was irrelevant.
He’d carefully planned the show. April would play a dance student. Her instructor would call her in for after- class lessons. Denise had always played the lesbian role well. They’d have a little lesbo action, whet the viewers’ appetite, then three men would burst in and rape them both.
Trask knew it’d be a bestseller.
But as he watched April dance, he grew hard. In the porn industry, sex was business. It took a very special woman to make Trask feel anything. Unless of course she was chained and fighting him, then he had no problems.
He let Denise and April go at it, let them titillate the audience, but he stopped the three actors from storming in.
He walked onstage instead, a mask on, naked.
One look in April’s eyes and she knew.
“No.”
He took her every way he wanted, her fighting egging him on. The act that wasn’t an act. And then she was beneath him. His hands went around her neck. And just like Monique, he knew that only in April’s death would he achieve pure ecstasy.
The fact that the entire scene was being filmed turned Trask on even more.
He wished his father could watch. See what he had created. Women would no longer dominate him; he was in control. He would always be in control. He had the power, the money, the brains to have his pleasure and not pay a hypocritical legal system that thought what he did was illegal.
