Frustrated, she decided what she really needed was some exercise. Sassy gave a low hopeful whine as Sophie put on her shoes but she gave her a little hug and a promise to walk her when she returned and left the apartment alone.
The sun hung low in the sky, barely visible above the tall buildings on Fifth Avenue, bathing the people walking with a soft golden glow. Lines of people waiting for food at the carts clogged foot traffic and taxis clashed their gears while their drivers shouted curses at each other and impatient drivers flipped each other off and beeped their horns despite the signs declaring horn honkers would be fined three hundred dollars.
Sophie felt immediately better. She walked fast, having learned that to walk slowly was to risk being run over by other people, slowing only occasionally to peek into shop windows. A thrift store window’s merchandise beckoned and she went in, coming out with a bag that held a small print for her living room wall and a set of fanciful coffee mugs that had colorful fish swirling around the rims.
Her mood had lightened considerably by the time she bounded back into the apartment. She took Sassy back out for a few minutes and then she put herself back into her little nest on the sofa, the book once more in her hands.
It slipped from her fingers as she fell asleep, landing on the floor with a small thud. She rolled over, her face nuzzling into the back of the sofa as she dreamed.
***
The DNA matched. Kane gave the results a grim once-over, before leaning back in the creaking chair that sat at his desk. Forrester lounged over his own chair; his suit had rucked up around his back, causing large and bulky creases in the jacket.
“So this woman didn’t see anything huh?” He asked.
“Just a guy with a head in a bag.”
Forrester riffled through the report in front of him, “Susan Hammond,” he said, “Lives at Thirty-Third and Eighth.”
Kane wondered what report the other man was looking into but didn’t ask, he had learned long ago that to ask what was going on in Forrester’s cases somehow translated to him agreeing to take them on. He didn’t need any more cases on his plate.
The DNA matched, the rush results proved it. The man Sophie had seen had been the same man who had murdered the latest victim. He stood up, rubbing his eyes and lower back. The precinct hummed with activity, below the long staircase various petty thieves and junkies were hustled in and out of the pens, all of them screaming for lawyers or that they were being railroaded. Half of them were in so often they knew most of the cops by name.
Hookers laughed and joked in the lock up space that was referred to as the kitty crawl by the women who frequented it. The Homicide Division’s home building was undergoing major remodeling so the detectives were all crammed into a sprawling open space on the top floor, all the noise drifted upward to them. For some it was a distraction, Kane never noticed it.
The FBI was going to be in by the end of the week and he knew that while the help would be needed he also dreaded it. The news reports were full of the killings: the latest had been a bit different however; the woman who had been killed had not been almost famous, she had been famous. Or, at least, in some circles.
Jenny Fox had been known for her eccentric and flamboyant behavior, she claimed to be a gypsie, to be possessed by the goddess Inanna, and that she was able to speak to the dead. The woman had made a living by holding séances and channeling spirits. She was known for showing up on television shows while being ‘used by the Lady’ as she put it, and even though many people shot her rather ridiculous claims down with logic, she seemed to stay popular with those desperate to talk to their dead until the year before, when her ex-partner had announced to the world that Jenny was a fraud and a liar who had been born in the mountains of North Carolina and that she had left a husband and a warrant for her arrest behind, as well as a past marked by mental illness and drug use, when she moved to the city.
Kane could not figure out where she fit into the serial killer’s pattern, Jenny was older and not at all thin. She was in her forties and she had short hair, all of the other women had been possessed of long hair.
Could there be a copycat? Or was she killed by a person who had taken her head in an attempt to throw them off the trail? His every instinct said she had been a victim of the Creeper but there was no pattern.
He stared down at the photographs, his mouth thinning down to a hard line. Jenny had been killed far more savagely than the last victim, further proof that the killer was accelerating. His neck ached and his mood was black as he decided to call it a night.
Walking home he felt tension draining away from his shoulders. His back muscles loosened and his long legs ate the distance but the movement could not help shut off his mind.
His thoughts drifted away from the case and back to Sophie. He had not realized how much he longed for a new submissive, how much he had missed the rough and intense sex and the trust that made a scene really work for him until he saw the look of yearning wonder on her gorgeous face.
His crotch ached at the memory of her parted lips, widened eyes and flushed cheeks. He walked faster, hoping that that sudden burst of lust would subside but it didn’t, if anything it intensified. It was late, after midnight and he had to curb the urge to go and knock on her door.
“What would you say to her?” he asked himself, “Hi, remember me? The cop you met at a kink club? I was just checking to make sure you were still alive and, hey, by the way, would you mind if I took you to dinner then spanked you and f**ked you senseless?”
The image that conjured up: Sophie on her belly with her firm and pale ass bared to him, made his c*ck grow harder. He growled out an expletive, startling the woman who was walking in front of him.
I want her, he admitted as he opened the door to his apartment. After all these years I want to take a new submissive under hand and, go figure, she does not even know what that means…yet.
The yet startled him. “Am I planning on training her? I would have to…” realizing where his thoughts had wandered he closed them off and forced himself to go to sleep.
***
The Creeper stood in the small living room of the apartment he had broken into earlier. There was something wrong, and he felt it. His gut tightened and his eyes scanned the gloom, looking at the pictures on the wall. A woman smiled at him from one frame, her arms around a small child. In another she posed beside a man, both of them in wedding finery.
He did not have to check to know he was in the right place, it was the people were wrong. A wave of dizziness swept over him, he had gotten something wrong; he had made a mistake somewhere. But, how?
He could hear her mocking laughter; it gusted through his mind like poisoned wind. “You are so stupid,” she jeered, “You are a fool! Everyone knew but you…”
He clapped his hands to his ears, hoping to drown her out but her voice remained, cutting through him like a chainsaw. He ground his teeth together and crept toward the door. A small squeak caught his attention; he turned his head to see a shadow gather and coalesce in the hallway. Curious eyes peeked at him from a solemn little face.
“Are you lost? “
“Yeah,” the Creeper said gruffly, “Very lost.”
“You should get a phone like my dad’s; it tells you where you are and where you’re going too.”
“I’ll remember that.” How old was the kid, ten? Twelve? What had he been doing when he was that age? He could recall the fourth grade vaguely: the smell of chalk and the taste of the paste he had liked to eat, the bicycle that had dumped him in the driveway and led to two chipped front teeth. His old man had beaten his ass good for that stunt, teeth were expensive to fix, after all.
The kid watched him leave. He closed the door softly then tugged the hat down lower. His hand stayed on the doorknob for a few moments while he weighed the pros and cons of going back in and killing the kid; he had seen him after all. But what had he seen really, a man in dark clothes with a mustache a totally different color from his hair and tufts of the same colored wig sticking out from under a ball cap; that was all. No need to slaughter the whole family.
The rage that always simmered below the surface had grown quiet, leaving just the anxiety. His nerve seemed to be failing him and that alone made a small bud of that anger unfold but luckily for the family on the other side of the door it was not enough to make him reenter the apartment.
He turned and went down the hall, taking the stairs instead of the elevator to keep his face off of the cameras inside of that small steel coffin.
Out on the streets he walked slowly, deliberately pacing himself to appear as if he had no reason to be away from the streetlights and the hot white glow of the headlights. Something she had said to him, years before, about tigers walking in a concrete jungle came back to him and he could feel that same confusion that had haunted him for the last several years bleeding back in.
How had it all gone wrong? The city had changed, or maybe he had grown weary. Their life had somehow gone downhill and she had begun to hate him, to hold him in contempt. The Creeper stared at his face in a dark window for long moments, trying to capture the face of the man he had once been but all he saw reflected back at him was a wavering face whose lines looked indistinct and blurred, he looked like a ghost imprinted on a dead television screen.
The thought of being a ghost frightened him; he turned and fled back toward the subway, running for home and its illusion of safety.
***
Three days had passed and the city lay sweltering under an unexpected and unseasonable blanket of heat. The temperatures rose and the Creeper remained silent. Trucks parked along the curbs served up dripping cones and the tourists huddled on the double decker buses that ran the sightseeing circuits, too tired and hot to walk the steaming streets.
Sophie still had yet to purchase a television but she had learned a great deal about the Creeper since the night she had seen him, and all of it made her very nervous, as did the newly awakened sexual longing inside her. The night before she had lain in bed, surprised to find her crotch slick and wet. She had never masturbated, yet she somehow had known by instinct where and how to touch, and when it had been too hard and when it was too light. The strange and desperate feeling that had come up in her when her fingers had grazed her cl*t had made her gasp, shame had made her stop before she could find release so as a consequence she had woken up cranky and a little sore.
The bookstore was very busy, the usual customers culled the dollar shelves and the tourists drooped in the aisles, loudly comparing the store to the large chain bookstores. Sophie had to smile each time she heard the word quaint used just to keep from swearing out loud. Geoff had long since tired of what he deemed the necessary evils of business ownership and vanished into his office. His door sat decidedly closed and she knew he would not come out until closing time, which was two hours away.
She could understand his feelings; he loved books, old, rare, new and used. He loved classics and trashy novels both and the hunt associated with finding them. He did not, however, like people. He hated seeing his books going out of the shop, even though he understood it was the nature of the business.
The day dragged, a little boy threw a screaming fit and spilled sticky egg cream on a pile of children’s books. While she ran for paper towels the parents scooped him up and left, not even asking if anything was damaged. Three books were soaked with the gooey mess and she knew one was wrecked; the words were smeared across the page too badly to read. She left it open to dry anyway just in case and rang up the old man with a love for Westerns written in the nineteen fifties and the young woman who liked Ayn Rand and self-help books.