Trial Junkies

shoulder as he made a beeline for the opening doors.

He was in a hurry, but didn't seem stressed, his black eyes showing about as much emotion as the battered Chatty Cathy doll that Jenny had inherited from her aunt. The thing had sat atop her dresser in the room she and Hutch shared, staring blankly at them as they made love, looking like something spawned in hell.

Funny he should think of that now.

He pulled back as the creep swept past him and found a seat in the nearly empty car.

Ditching his cigarette, Hutch stepped aboard and moved down the narrow aisle as the doors closed behind him and the train lurched into motion. He nodded politely to the guy as he passed, but the creep merely blinked at him behind those glasses, then opened the bag and pulled his book onto his lap, dropping his gaze to it.

Hutch glanced at the title, but most of it was obscured by the guy's left hand. The word DEATH was clearly visible, however, and the thing had the plain, dry look of a textbook without its dust cover, an old-fashioned tome like the ones you'd find in the archives section of the UIC library.

Whatever it was, Hutch doubted he'd be able to buy a copy at his local Barnes and Noble, and that one word-DEATH-summoned up an irrational sense of dread that was hard to ignore. Hutch wasn't sure why he felt this way, but it was strong enough to compel him to take the seat directly behind the guy, in hopes of getting a closer look at that book.

The creep was sitting close to the aisle, so Hutch slid all the way over to the right side of the seat, then glanced around quickly before leaning forward an inch or so to peer over the guy's shoulder. He was trying like hell not to be obvious about it, but the creep was so absorbed in what he was reading it probably didn't matter.

And what Hutch saw made him wish he hadn't been so goddamn curious.

His stomach lurched, the beef sandwich he'd eaten earlier doing a quick and nasty three-sixty before worming its way up toward his esophagus.

He stared at the pages just long enough to see two images that could never again be unseen. The kind that take the direct route from eye to brain, burn themselves onto the cerebral cortex and remain there like scar tissue for the rest of your natural life. On those pages were two of the most gruesome photographs he had ever laid eyes on, each rendered in a stark, clinical black and white-which only intensified the horror.

The first was a photo of a blond woman who must have been in a devastating car accident, because there was a steering wheel embedded in her face-so deep that it looked as if her flesh was growing around it.

And if this wasn't enough to get the upchuck express on the move, the photo on the page facing it featured a corpse of indeterminate origin whose body was half eaten away by maggots, several of which had nested in what was left of the victim's right nostril.

Hutch slammed back in his seat, squeezing his eyes shut, feeling his gorge rise, the acidy burn of bile in his throat. But closing his eyes was a bad idea, because the imprint of what he'd just seen was still floating in the darkness behind his lids. He immediately opened them again and looked out the window at the night rushing by, trying to focus on the lights in the distance.

Jesus H. Christ and all his disciples.

He sat there, trying to purge himself of this optic assault, when something unexpected happened-even more unexpected than the sight of those horrific photographs.

Beneath the clatter of the wheels on the tracks, he heard a faint, high-pitched mewling sound. A quiet keening whimper that wasn't truly a keen or a whimper. A sound not fueled by pain, but by…

…Well… by joy. That was the only way he could describe it.

What. The fuck?

Realizing it was coming from the creep, Hutch once again gave into his curiosity and turned from the window, taking another look over the guy's shoulder. He knew he shouldn't do it, but couldn't help himself.

What he saw this time made him shudder with revulsion. Made him want to jump to his feet and run screaming from the train car.

All of the creep's attention was focused on a new page, a new photograph-this one in garish, living color. And Hutch had been wrong about black and white upping the intensity of the images.

Color was worse.

Much, much worse.

The page was filled with a shot of a naked woman lying face up in an alleyway, her eyes glazed, her throat slit, her bloodied body covered with raw, gaping knife wounds, two of which had been judiciously placed where her nipples should have been.

And as he made that strange, joyful mewling sound, the creep carefully ran his fingertips over the image as if he were caressing the body of a willing and beautiful lover.

— 29 -

'Wait a minute, wait a minute,' Matt said. 'You want to pass that by me again?'

They were standing in his living room, Matt wearing a threadbare terrycloth robe, fresh from a shower and still toweling his hair. He seemed a little distracted, but Hutch was pretty sure he'd heard every word.

Hutch had called the moment he got off the train, then headed straight over. What he'd seen was something that needed to be shared. Immediately.

'I'm telling you, the guy's a freak. A fucking psycho.'

'This is the guy we saw at lunch, right?'

'Right. Crew cut, black glasses. He's a regular. One of the trial junkies.'

This was the first time Hutch had been to Matt's apartment and it was obvious by the clutter-endless stacks of books, piles of newspaper, dirty clothes strewn about-that he lived alone, a confirmed bachelor after a nasty divorce. One of their friends had mentioned that Matt was in the midst of an ongoing relationship with a very much married flight attendant from Boston, but there was no evidence that she'd been around lately. If ever.

'All right,' Matt said, tossing the towel to the floor, 'let's think this through.'

'What's to think about?'

'Just calm down a sec. The book this guy was reading-what did it look like?'

'You mean besides all the dead bodies?' Hutch felt another wave of revulsion shudder through him. 'I don't know, like a textbook of some kind.'

Matt nodded. 'Probably an autopsy manual. There's a guy at the Post, keeps one in his desk. Drags it out whenever he wants to get a rise out of someone. Pretty disgusting stuff.'

'Disgusting doesn't even come close to describing it,' Hutch said.

'But maybe there's an innocent explanation. Maybe this guy's a medical student, studying forensic pathology.'

'And maybe he holds tea parties every Saturday and makes regular donations to the Red Cross. That still doesn't explain what I saw. And heard.'

'So he gets off on the photos. So what? I've seen some pretty weird stuff in my day, and a freakazoid with a death fetish is probably about a three on a scale of ten.'

'You're kidding, right? A three?'

'Have you ever seen that video on the web-Two Girls, One Cup? Now that's some seriously screwed up shit-no pun intended.'

'I don't think you get it,' Hutch said. 'The woman in that photograph might as well have been Jenny. Slit throat, knife wounds and all. And if he's a medical student, what's he doing at the courthouse every day? He's been there since the start of jury selection.'

Matt snorted, reminding Hutch of Nadine. 'So what are you saying? That this guy's the real killer? That's