"Let me think about it."
"Nothing else to think about. There's no way they'd let you out of here with me."
"If you had to go to the hospital for an emergency, where would they take you?"
"Right here. This is a ful y functioning medical hospital as wel as an insane
asylum."
"And what's security like in the medical wards?"
"Penetrable." Trent smiled. Joe wanted to peel his face off and leave him smiling forever.
Thirty-six
With the threat of death temporarily less imminent, Alicia had time to deconstruct herself. To tear herself apart piece by piece. She looked down at her body and
began to catalogue her flaws, something she had not done since this ordeal
began. From the moment she'd set foot
into Joe's apartment, seemingly a
lifetime ago, she had felt terrified,
helpless, revolted, angry, aroused,
ecstatic, and confused, but not for a
moment had she felt unattractive. A man was ready to kil her because she was
so sexy. What greater affirmation of her beauty did she need? It was her sex
appeal that had first brought her to the notice of Joseph Miles and it was her
sex appeal that was leading her to
whatever fate awaited at the end of this journey.
Stil , with the naked 100-watt bulb glaring down at her from the ceiling, the various bulges and blemishes seemed to glow
as if lit by a spotlight. And with no one's eyes to see herself through but her own, her hypercritical nature rose to the fore and she began dismantling herself.
Alicia wished Joe had been thoughtful
enough to turn off the lights before he left. She'd gone more than seventy-two
hours without once thinking that she was too fat, without worrying about the rol s at her hips or the stretch marks or cel ulite. Now al she could see in herself were
flaws.
She looked down at her oversized
breasts, which had flattened out and
fal en to either side of her rib cage,
tucked beneath her armpits like pale,
fleshy, water wings, and wondered why
anyone would want to touch the hideous
things. They were not round and perky
like the silicone queens and faint stretch marks ran through them from the missing nipples nearly to her col arbone. They
were so light and thin that no one else would have noticed them, but she did.
She looked at the thick black mole
beneath her left breast, wishing that Joe had had the empathy to bite that off
instead of her nipples.
Sighing and scowling in disgust, she ran her judgment like a sharp scalpel over
her bel y; the lightning bolt-shaped
stretch marks radiating up from her hairy pubic mound where her skin had yielded
to the fat cel s multiplying like cancer beneath it. Her bloated stomach jiggled with each sob as self-hate overcame
her. She wanted Joe to hurry back. She
needed him to tel her how beautiful she was. She needed him to look at her with those voracious eyes ful of lust and
appetite that seemed to gather her
entire body into them and cradle her in their unwavering gaze. She wept herself to sleep praying for the return of her
murderous kidnapper.
It was past dark when he returned. The
door opened and slammed behind him.
Alicia moaned softly in her sleep and
tugged on her restraints before lying stil once more. Joe slipped into the
bathroom and clicked on the lights.
Alicia winced and whimpered as the
mortifying sound of metal on bone
clawed its way into her deep, dreamless sleep, stirring up terrible butcher-shop fantasies.
Images of car crashes, autopsies,
bondage, and blood play swirled through Alicia's mind in a kaleidoscopic orgy of meat and steel. She tried to resist the urge to look, not wanting to abandon the safety of sleep, not wanting to see any more horrors this day. But the scraping sound went on and on, slowly wrestling
her up from her deep slumber to that
hazy twilight just before waking. Here the sound inspired more dreams. Dreams
of Frank being carved up and served to
her. She saw herself taking a knife and sawing through his tibia, removing his
foot and lifting it to her mouth. She bit into it and the taste was wonderful.
Revolted, she forced herself ful y awake. Alicia opened her eyes and looked to
her left where the scraping sound
continued, echoing from the tiny
bathroom. She looked inside and could
see Joe's face reflected in the vanity
mirror. He was deep in concentration.
Intently filing his teeth into sharp points. For a long moment Alicia just sat there, transfixed by his transformation. When
she'd first met him at the sex club in San Francisco, Joseph Miles had looked
clean-cut and conservative, the type of boy you took to family dinners and office parties to impress your friends and
relatives. Now, just days later he looked like some type of psychotic modern
primitive. Feral lust sparkled in his eyes like a drug addict fiending for that next hit. His face was unshaven. His pupils
were dilated and his chest heaved with
his quickening breaths. The hunger was
obviously ful y upon him. Now Alicia
wished she had not talked him out of
taking along some of Frank's meat for
the rest of the trip as a snack. But the prospect had just seemed too horrible at the time, with her own guilt at
participating in Frank's death stil so fresh in her mind and the taste of his
flesh stil swimming on her tongue.
Alicia closed her eyes and prayed that
she was not his next intended meal,
while part of her longed to be consumed by him. She winced at his touch as he
bent down to remove the gag from her
mouth. Her eyes flew open and she
nearly screamed as she found herself
face-to-face with her cannibal lover. His eyes were intense, sparkling bril iantly with that dangerous psychotic lust that both excited and mortified her.
"What are you doing?"
"I need to feed again."
He turned away from her and walked
back into the bathroom, where he
picked up the metal file again.
"But-but we just ate F-Frank?"
"It wasn't enough. Not enough to face Damon again. I need more food. More
power."
"But who?"
Joe could see the fear in Alicia's eyes as he continued to sharpen his canines,
filing them into tiny arrowhead-shaped
fangs.
"I want you, Alicia. I want you so badly." He stared at her large breasts and thick thighs and Alicia saw the erection swel in his pants as the monster awakened.
She sucked in a quick breath as fear
raised the hackles on her neck and arms and desire renewed the flow of moisture between her thighs.
She wanted to beg for her life. She
wanted to scream and fight. But she was so weary. Alicia stared up at the big
col ege boy as he grinned into the mirror with his remodeled smile. The jagged
shards of ivory looked almost reptilian. Joe's gums were bleeding down his chin
in long ropes of crimson saliva. There
was very little humanity in the
expression. Alicia shivered. Her entire body trembled with want. Her muscles
locked in mortal terror.
Slowly Joseph turned toward her without bothering to wipe the bloody drool from the corners of his mouth. His hunger
accompanied him like a separate entity
that had taken up residence within his
body and now shared it with the rest of his mind. A demon lurked behind his
retinas, eager to unseat reason from its dominant position in his consciousness, leaving only a wanton bestial thing. She could see the monster within him now,
mirrored in his flesh and in his ghastly smile. It was the same feral rictus she'd seen on his face after he'd consumed
the librarian's breasts, the same snarling leer he'd displayed after biting through Frank's testicles. That smile was his
hunger's true face and the sharpened
canines gave it even more demonic
ferocity. It was now the physical
manifestation of his increasingly violent appetite and it was coming for her. Alicia cringed and tried to wriggle away as that horrible maw widened, obliterating
everything else in the room, even the rest of Joe's features. It was only inches from her bedside where she lay bound
helpless to the mattress. His face, his body, al that he was, swal owed up in
that smile, drowned and washed away
by that al consuming hunger she could
not understand.
When she felt his fingertips glide over her flesh it was like an electric shock going through her nervous system. She
had never known such exquisite,
sensuous terror. Her body convulsed
beneath his touch as if his very proximity could bring her to orgasm or death.
Joe's fingers slid down her stomach and between her thighs into the slippery wet warmth of her and soon she was
quivering on the edge of climax. She
watched the predator's mouth descend
toward her chest and swooned as her
flesh ruptured between his teeth. Joe bit down on her tremendous mammary and
began to chew through it, sawing deep
through the fatty tissue and into the
muscle beneath. Alicia screamed even
as she reached orgasm, watching her
breast tear free from her chest.
Thirty-seven
The detectives showed up the next
morning and sat in the back of the
lecture hal during Professor Locke's
lesson. Their presence unnerved him. He felt as if he were the one under
investigation. The professor stumbled
over his words and lost his train of
thought in midsentence on more than
one occasion. He knew that he probably
looked guilty and wondered if that was
why they were here. Had they shifted the focus of their investigation? Did they
now think he was somehow involved?
Maybe they thought he was hiding
Joseph Miles somewhere or that he
knew where the man was? In fact, he did know where Joseph was, or at least
suspected. He was somewhere in
Tacoma, Washington, preparing to
break into a state mental hospital and
murder a patient. He stil wasn't sure that he wanted to tel the detectives, though. They had been right about one thing. He had fucked up. He should have known
how disturbed Joseph was. He should
have known how dangerous he was.
Joseph had come to him looking for help and he had failed him. He owed it to the boy to try to find a cure. He owed it to himself and his reputation as a criminal psychologist to stop him.
The lesson ended and Professor Locke
turned his back on the class and began
erasing the blackboard as they filed out of the room. He heard twin pairs of
footsteps heading down the aisle and
approaching him. There was no doubt in
his mind who the footsteps belonged to.
"Professor?"
"Detectives. What can I do for you today?" Professor Locke kept his back turned as he continued erasing the
words of Bertrand Russel from the
board. He paused for a second to
examine the last quote before scrubbing it away.
Science can teach us, and I think our
own hearts can teach us, no longer to
look around for imaginary supports, no
longer to invent al ies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here
below to make this world a fit place to live ...
"Do you believe al that stuff, Doc?" Detective Volario asked. He was
wearing the same suit he had on his last visit and it didn't look like he'd cleaned or pressed it.
"Al what stuff?" The professor wiped the quote away and final y turned to the two detectives.
"Al that stuff you said in your lecture about religion retarding progress and
science rising up to replace it."
"If I didn't believe it, I'd be a theologist instead of a criminal psychologist. I
minored in philosophy as wel . To me it's just another way to study the human
condition. When you ask what motivates
a man to kil or rape or steal or, more importantly, what would keep a man from doing these things, it isn't very far from asking what it al means. What's the true meaning of life? What sense can be
found in al this chaos? You look into the minds of serial sexual predators day in and day out and you have to wonder."
"Why not hard science? Philosophy
always struck me as a halfway point
between science and mysticism for
those who couldn't make up their minds
whether to believe or not to believe," Detective Montgomery chimed in.
Something about the large black
detective's expression instantly put the professor on guard. The man was
"Al the sciences began as philosophy. Once a philosophical theory is proven it becomes the property of science. But
without philosophical speculation,
astronomy, psychology, biology, physics, and even quantum theory would never
exist. Someday the search for the
meaning of life wil leave the realm of philosophy as wel and become a
science and when it does I'l go with it. Now I know you two didn't come al this way to discuss my atheism."
"I entered al the information I had on Joseph Miles and his unique kil ing
signature into the national VICAP
computer and I got a hit today. A young man from right here in the Bay Area was found in a park in Oregon, roasted on a spit and partial y cannibalized. We went to his apartment on a hunch that he
might somehow be connected with Miles
and we found links on his computer to a cannibal-sex message board. We found
the same link on the computer shared by Joseph Miles and his roommate. It's a
pretty safe bet that Miles is the one who ate him. Your boy is out of control. Why do you think he'd be going to Oregon?" Because it's on the way to Washington,
where the man he believes passed this
curse on to him lives. "I have no idea," Locke said.
"Wel , we have an idea. You'l have to tel me if you think this one is apodictic." Detective Volario stepped closer to the professor as if he were about to grab
him and shake him. The professor took
an involuntary step back. "We think he's going home. He grew up in Seattle. We
think he's headed back there. What we
don't know is why. He no longer has any family there. His parents moved to the
Bay Area when he was twelve. They live
right over in Hayward. I doubt he'd stil have any friends there. That was almost ten years ago and none of his phone
records indicate that he's kept in touch with anyone from that state. So why do
you think he'd run there, Doc? "
Professor Locke thought hard before
ans
wering. They'd come for his
professional opinion both as a forensic psychiatrist and criminal psychologist
and as someone familiar with the
suspect. If he feigned ignorance they'd immediately suspect him of covering
something up. If he told them everything, then Joseph would be arrested and put
to death, his reputation as a
criminologist would be forever tarnished and he'd never get a chance to test his cure.
The professor had his own reasons for
wanting to cure Joseph. If he were able to treat the young man's murderous
addiction with serotonin inhibitors it
would be a major breakthrough in the
treatment of sexual predators, a
breakthrough that could inject new life into his career. The rule of the
blackboard jungle was publish or perish and he hadn't published anything
groundbreaking in years. A paper on the treatment of serial kil ers with
medication would put him on top of the
heap, and if he could both prove that the serial kil er phenomenon was caused by
viral transmission and document a cure
for it, he'd be almost assured a Nobel
Prize. Too many possibilities to put it al in the hands of two ignorant cops. But he had to think of a suitable lie.
He's going to kil that man in order to break the curse, Professor Locke
thought.
They were obviously offtrack. They hadn't yet discovered the connection between
Miles and Damon Trent, the serial child kil er. So they wouldn't be looking for Joseph in Tacoma, where Trent was
locked up. They natural y assumed he
was on his way back to the city he was
born in. Al the professor had to do was reinforce that belief to keep them on the wrong track.
"There are many reasons why he might be headed back to Seattle. There's the
possibility that his delusions are actual y centered around a particular childhood
fantasy, a person that he was attracted to who he perhaps fantasized about eating. During puberty he could have easily
gotten his sexual urges confused with his hunger response. Perhaps it was a
babysitter who wore a particular
fragrance that reminded him of food and triggered a Pavlovian response. Maybe
a waitress at a restaurant his family
frequented. It could even have been the cashier at the local donut shop."
"Then he would be going back there ..."
"To live out that fantasy, yes. He would be going back to eat her."