He drove past them, circled the block, drove more slowly this time.
The girl he chose was tall, with long legs and full breasts and an implausible red wig. Skimpy royal blue hot pants were snug on her taut butt, and the tails of her clinging sky-blue blouse were tied in front to create a bare midriff. Her skin was very dark, her nail polish the color of dried blood, and her name, she told him, was Bambi. And her price?
“Twenty dollars,” she said, and sized him up. “Unless you be wanting to spend some money, and then we can go to my room and take our time.”
Her room was the end unit at a hot-sheets motel. She evidently rented it by the night, because there was no charade of going to the office to register. She already had the key, and they went straight to her room.
She set a price of a hundred dollars, and he didn’t bargain. It struck him that he had bought property that same week for no cash down, took title to a sixty-thousand-dollar house without parting with a dime of real money, and here he was shelling out a hundred dollars to rent a girl’s flesh for — what, an hour?
She performed orally, then spread herself on the bed for him and smiled in invitation. He started to mount her and his erection softened. She grabbed and pumped with her hand, impatient, and hurt him, and he slapped her hand away. She looked at him, a measure of irritation showing on her face, and that triggered his rage, an oceanic rage that welled up out of nowhere and turned the world red.
He slapped her, his open hand catching her full force across the face. Her head snapped back. She clawed at him. He caught her wrist with one hand, bending it back, and he doubled his other hand into a fist and buried it in the pit of her stomach.
She opened her mouth to scream. He punched her in the face, hammered at her face with his fists. His cock was rock-hard, a bar of steel.
When he stopped she was unconscious, her nose broken, her mouth bleeding, her face horribly bruised. An orgasm had erupted out of him, as unexpected and unstoppable as his rage, and rivers of semen pooled on her middle.
He stood up, but he had to sit down again. He was shaking so bad he couldn’t stand, scared as he’d never been scared in his life. For all of that, he had never before felt so utterly alive.
But what was he going to do about the girl?
She probably ought to go to the hospital. He couldn’t take her there, but could he just leave her here? Suppose she’d memorized his license plate number. Even if she hadn’t, she could certainly recognize him again. Of course he didn’t come to Kansas City that often, and rarely at night.
Had he told her he was from Topeka? Had he, God help him, told her his name?
“I’m Bambi.”
“My name’s Mark.”
But no last name, and there’d been no card to sign at the desk, no desk at all, no likelihood that he’d been seen or his plate number noted. All she knew was that his name was Mark and he was from Topeka and he drove a Chevy Nova — this was long before the days of the Lincoln. And she might get somebody to come looking for him, because, Christ, he’d really done a job on her, he could have killed her—
Be a lot simpler if he had, he realized. Safer, easier all around. No loose ends.
You could still do it.
His mind didn’t know what to make of the thought. His body, however, responded instantly and unequivocally, his penis springing fully erect, painful in its urgency. Just moments ago he had shuddered in the most powerful climax of his life, and now he was gripped by desire greater than anything in his experience.
She had removed her sky-blue blouse. He got it from the chair where she’d hung it, felt its silky texture in his hands. He got on top of her, spread her legs, thrust into her inert flesh. A low moan bubbled up through her puffy lips.
He wrapped the blouse around her throat, took an end in each hand, and drew his hands apart.
She died. He came, and felt reborn.
After the ecstasy, the horror.
First, though, the urgent need to get away, and to escape safely. He had no idea what he might have touched, but he used a towel to wipe his prints from every likely surface. The five twenty-dollar bills he’d given her were in her purse, and while he didn’t think currency would hold fingerprints well, neither could he think of a compelling reason to leave them behind. He doubted that he’d left many fingerprints; the motel room was soiled and squalid, and his natural inclination had been to avoid unnecessary contact with anything in it.
He fled. He forced himself to observe the speed limit returning to Topeka, not wanting anything that might establish his presence in Kansas City that night. Back home, he drank two ounces of whiskey straight from the bottle, scrubbed himself in the shower. First thing in the morning he took the Nova through a car wash. She had been in the car, and when the boys scrubbed and vacuumed the interior, they might remove some traces of her presence.
There was a three-paragraph story the following day in the Kansas City Star, and no follow-up to it over the next several weeks. When a month had passed without incident he allowed himself to believe that he had gotten away with it.
It was, after all, hardly the crime of the century. A black streetwalker, beaten to death in a sordid motel room. What clues did the police have to work with? No license number, no eyewitness description of the killer, no fingerprints. He’d left his seed on her belly and in her loins, and he’d very likely left pubic hairs entwined with her own, but so, he suspected, had other of her clients. The police could tell a lot about you from that sort of physical evidence, and once they had reason to suspect you they could either clear you or tighten the ring of circumstantial evidence with blood and semen and hair, but in the absence of other clues they would have no reason to beat a path to your door.
He had killed. For no reason more rational than rage he had battered a young woman senseless. With no motive more justifiable than blood lust he had strangled her. The thought sickened him even as the memory continued, God help him, to thrill him.
Well, it would never happen again.
But of course it did.
Again and again and again. In eight years, he had killed an astonishing total of fifty-three women. Every now and then the urge would come on him, triggered by a scent or a smile or a pout or the swell of a breast or the curve of a hip. His blood would race with the need for satisfaction, and there was only one way that kind of satisfaction could be achieved.
Sometimes he fought the urge, stifling it for a greater or lesser period of time. Sometimes he gave in to it as soon as he conveniently could. He was always prudent, always kept risks to a minimum, but as soon as an appropriate victim provided herself, he took her.
He was clever about it, and he took a certain pride in his cleverness. Early on he realized that the best way to avoid detection was to keep the authorities from suspecting that his various homicides were all the work of a single killer. He read about other serial killers, and they all seemed to be wedded to some variable that stamped all their killings as having been done by the same hand. They used the same murder method, or they picked the same type of victim, or they left the same kind of diorama at the murder scene.
He purposely did things differently each time from the last. Now a knife, now a scarf, now his bare hands. An ice spick, a hammer, a length of clothesline. One time the girl would be nude, another time she’d be fully clothed, and on the next occasion she might be tied up. He had a lifetime of delicious fantasies to draw upon and an imagination more than equal to the task of supplying new fantasies. Of his fifty-three episodes, no two had been quite the same.