He didn’t tell Amber those words because he didn’t want to add to his stress. He didn’t want to disappoint the love of his life if he failed to salvage his business. He could tell Riley because she couldn’t understand him, even if she were awake. He was a stubborn, anxious, frightened man, but he loved his family.
He went down to his office. It was a small room with a desk, an iMac and a printer, and an executive rolling chair and a recliner. Shelves filled with business textbooks, self-help books, novels, and memoirs from successful entrepreneurs cluttered the shelves behind his desk. Pictures of his family decorated the green walls.
He paced around in his office, floorboards creaking with each step. He mumbled incoherently, as if he were hoping a random word would spark a genius idea. His computer was open to a blank Word document, the text cursor blinking continuously. He spent about forty-five minutes walking in circles in his office.
An idea never hit him.
He fell into his rolling chair and stared at the monitor. He could hear someone laughing with each blink of the cursor—ha… ha… ha… HA! He closed the document and opened a web browser. He searched the news. Every headline concerned the pandemic: Sporting events canceled, schools closed nationwide, the stock market tumbling. It all made him anxious.
So, he turned his attention to the local crime news. He read about burglaries, shootings, Harvey Weinstein’s prison sentence, and a car accident caused by an intoxicated mother.
One headline caught his undivided attention: Dead man found horribly mutilated inside a vehicle in Skid Row. The article detailed the discovery of Matt Wolfe’s body days earlier and the police’s call for help from the public in finding the unknown assailant. The author described every graphic detail of the murder. Adam’s balls ached as he read about Matt’s severed genitals, then his throat tightened as he read about the amputated penis found hanging from Matt’s neck.
However, the description of Matt’s Glasgow smile—tame compared to the rest of the article—shocked him the most. Terrible memories of his last night in Tokyo shuffled in his mind.
“Mi… Miki?” he whispered.
14
YOUNG PREY
Alexa Pérez—a ten-year-old girl—sat on a toilet, surrounded by the stall’s blue walls. Her sneakers barely touched the grimy tile floor. A surgical mask hung from the door’s sliding lock. She used her cell phone while urinating, watching clips of dogs on Instagram and videos of people dancing on TikTok. Only the grating noise from her cheap cell phone blared through the park’s public restroom.
Her phone buzzed with the arrival of a text message. Riddled with errors, it read: U comming 2 Lulu’s house?
Alexa responded: Omw.
Schools had been closed statewide for three days now, and they were expected to stay closed until the end of the academic year due to the ongoing medical crisis. Alexa’s parents managed to keep her home during the first two days, but they couldn’t watch her all the time. They couldn’t lock her in her bedroom and throw away the key, either.
Alexa’s father was a manager at a grocery store and her mother worked at a gas station. They were considered essential workers. So, while they worked, they allowed Alexa to go out as long as she agreed to stay in their neighborhood, wear a mask, and wash her hands thoroughly with soap. Schools were meant to educate, but parents often looked at them as a form of daycare.
And without daycare, they didn’t have a lot of options to take care of their kids.
Alexa wiped herself, then she pulled up her pants and flushed the toilet. She exited the stall and headed over to the sinks. The restroom door was closed but unlocked. It could only be locked with a key. She rinsed her hands, then she lathered them in soap. She rubbed her hands together for about fifteen seconds before she rinsed them again.
She headed to the exit while drying her hands with a brown paper towel. She gasped before she could reach for the door handle. She remembered about her mask. She hurried back to the stall and found her mask hanging from the door’s lock. Just as she grabbed it, the restroom door swung open. The hinges howled like an injured dog. Slow, clacking footsteps approached.
Alexa put her mask on. When she turned around, she found Miki standing in front of the sinks, blocking her path to the exit. It was a warm day, so Miki’s trench coat was unusual. Three big beads of sweat rolled down from her hairline. Her cloth mask and gloves were normal, though. Alexa had seen people wearing everything from surgical and cloth masks to goaltender masks and plastic bags to cover their faces since the pandemic began.
“Excuse me,” Alexa said as she stepped forward, planning on squeezing past her.
“Am I beautiful?” Miki asked.
Alexa stopped and looked up at her, then she glanced over her shoulder before she brought her gaze back to Miki. Her actions said: Are you talking to me?
“What?” she asked.
“Am I beautiful?” Miki repeated in a chillingly normal tone.
“What are you talking about?” Alexa asked, brow creased in confusion.
“You’re a very pretty girl, sweetie. What do you think about me? Am I beautiful?”
“Can I… go now?”
Stepping forward and pausing between each word, Miki said, “Am… I… beautiful?”
Walking backwards, Alexa said, “You… You’re weird.” Miki snickered as she closed in on her. Alexa said, “I wanna go. I’m gonna scream if you don’t let me go.”
“You can go. I’m only here to use the bathroom, sweetie.”
Alexa kept stepping back, inadvertently cornering herself. Then she hugged the wall to her left and slunk forward to squeeze past Miki. Miki pushed a stall door open, but she didn’t step inside. Alexa wanted to run, but her body’s fight-or-flight response told her to freeze. They looked at each other. They could hear a faint police siren and the whizzing tires of a speeding bicycle.
Miki said, “You should have screamed when you had the chance.”
Tears in her eyes, Alexa said, “I just wanna—”
Miki grabbed a fistful of Alexa’s hair and pulled her away from the wall. Alexa screamed and stumbled. She lost her footing on the moist floor and fell into the stall. Her forehead collided with the toilet bowl’s rim, knocking her unconscious, then she collapsed next to the toilet, her head resting on her right arm. Her mask fell from her face.
She awoke about ten seconds later, groggy and disoriented. She heard the stall door close, followed by the sliding lock.
She looked up and, although she saw double, she could see Miki standing over her. She couldn’t hear the emergency sirens or the bike anymore. The restroom was close to a baseball field and a trailer park, but there was no one out there. She rolled onto her back and reached for her cell phone. The blow to the head weakened her, so she had trouble finding her pockets.
Miki crouched in front of the toilet. She tilted her head from side to side as she examined the child squirming at her feet.
She caressed Alexa’s swollen, rosy forehead and, in a soft voice, she said, “I’m going to ask you one more time. Am I beautiful?”
Alexa was breathing so fast that she couldn’t speak. She slid her clammy hands into her pockets. Her cell phone fell out and hit the tile floor with a thud. The screen flickered on, revealing the cracks at the bottom and a picture of herself hugging her mother as her wallpaper.
Miki said, “I’ll take that as a no.”
She pulled her shears out of her coat pocket and thrust them at Alexa’s left arm. Alexa’s eyes bulged as Miki closed the shears over her thin wrist. She cried and jerked her arm back, unintentionally smashing her elbow on the floor, which sent a tingly feeling down to her fingertips. The blades cut both sides of her wrist horizontally, but the cut across her inner wrist was the deepest.