Kill Me Once Read online

  She waits beneath the bed for five more minutes just to be absolutely certain, carefully timing it on her wristwatch. When the time finally passes several lifetimes later, she once again strains her ears for the sound of his maniacal breathing.

  Still nothing. The only sound in the room now is coming from the annoyingly incessant hum of the fluorescent light above. With every last fibre of her being, Ahn wishes the goddamn humming would just stop! If she doesn’t get out now the sound will surely drive her mad.

  An intense combination of fear and shock and adrenalin convulses her tiny body as she peeks out from beneath the bed skirt, determined not to look at the gruesome sight of her murdered friends – her murdered sisters – before walking through the room and to a telephone from which she can call the police. But in the exact instant her head appears she looks up in horror to see his heavy black boot coming down on her face.

  The back of her skull is driven into the floor with the sheer blunt force of a sledgehammer slamming into a cinder block. The fragile bones in her face have little choice but to shatter away into a thousand tiny pieces at the crushing impact. Somehow, he has stationed himself right next to the bed, right next to her, without ever having made the slightest sound. He has tricked her.

  The demon has tricked her.

  Ahn Howser does not have time to worry further that her gaze will fall unintentionally upon the grisly scene in which Lindsey McCormick and Liza Alloway have played out their final acts, for this night will serve as her curtain call as well. Just as it is that there are angels who walk the Earth, so it follows there must be demons as well. The delicate bones in her face have splintered as easily as an eggshell beneath his heavy foot, and the waffled sole of his huge black boot is the last thing she will ever see in this life.

  A moment later, her world fades away blissfully into eternal darkness.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Nathan grabs the Asian girl beneath her slender arms and drags her petite body roughly from beneath the bed like a rag doll before giving her the same treatment with the knife that he’s given her friends. Though the little gook is already quite dead, he wants to be fair to the others, so he removes the switchblade from his back pocket and slices her windpipe with a quick flick of his powerful wrist.

  It is easy work, he thinks. Easy and not in the least bit unpleasant.

  No one has heard the commotion in the room. The campus is a ghost town for the Thanksgiving holiday break, and Nathan has planned these murders to take place at precisely this time for exactly that reason. When you have years to plan a mission, you can afford the luxury of getting every last detail right. And that’s exactly what he’s done. Now all he has to do is avoid the goddamn security guards on his way out and he’ll be home free.

  His gloved hands now very slick with the beautiful blood he has spilled here tonight, they slip a little as he wraps them around the Asian girl’s impossibly thin neck. Finally finding purchase in her throat, it pleases him greatly to hear the birdlike bones snap as he viciously squeezes the remaining air from her dead lungs.

  He leans down and gently lifts her destroyed face to his own, pressing his lips to hers with great tenderness. He lingers there for several long moments, tasting the blood on his lips, on his tongue, in his mouth.

  He has waited so very long for this moment! He has waited long but it has been well worth the wait.

  Regretfully breaking the kiss, he brushes the back of a gloved hand across the girl’s mouth to remove any trace of saliva that he may have left there. He is a very careful man. He has to be. He requires everything to be perfect. Everything. Perfect and clean. Anything less is unacceptable.

  From the briefcase come a hammer and a nail. From the pocket of his black jeans comes the parking ticket he swiped off the Chrysler Sebring. Five swift and accurate blows affix the citation squarely to the centre of the Asian girl’s fragile breastbone.

  Breadcrumb hammered home, he moves back to the others and favours their corpses with his blood-kiss as well before once again rising to his feet.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, his voice cracking with such great emotion that he thinks he will surely cry.

  Their wonderful gift is now part of something far more important than anything they could ever have hoped to accomplish on their own. They are connected in eternity now, the whole of their beings much greater than the simple sum of their parts.

  They will all go down in history together.

  Bowing to them with a graceful flourish, he bends deeply at the waist in a courtly manner, the brilliant actor acknowledging his breathless and appreciative audience.

  And so it is that Nathan Stiedowe is solemn as he walks out of the dormitory room and down the empty hallway, finally allowing the tears of gratitude freely to sting his eyes like a million tiny needles.

  Shoving open the heavy outer door with ease, he descends the metal staircase and slowly disappears across campus, a solitary figure fading away into the inky darkness of the cold night.

  Looking up into the night sky, he sees that it has begun to snow. This makes him smile. A new season is upon them.

  It is the season of the eagle.

  PART IV

  REPRISING DAVID BERKOWITZ

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Dana found a cab outside the terminal at O’Hare and reached into the front pocket of her jeans before handing the driver the address she’d hurriedly scribbled down on a Post-It note. It was almost midnight by the time they finally pulled up to the entrance of Chicago Police Headquarters on a busy downtown street bustling with traffic.

  Dana rubbed at her temples and stifled a loud yawn. Chicago was her fifth major city in the space of little less than a week, and they were all beginning to look oddly the same to her weary eyes.

  A squat man with a powerful build and the boxy scrunched-up face of a bulldog met her as she ascended the cement steps in front of the building. ‘Special Agent Whitestone?’ he asked in a deep voice tinged with an unmistakable southern drawl.

  ‘That’s me.’

  He smiled. ‘I’m Detective Constantine Konstantopolous, but you can just call me CK. Everybody else does. We’ve been trying to call you for an hour now.’

  Dana felt in her pocket for her cellphone, suddenly realising that she hadn’t remembered to turn it back on when her plane touched down. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  The Chicago cop’s face darkened. ‘The killer slipped right through our fingers.’

  Dana was so shocked for a moment that she couldn’t even breathe. ‘Not again,’ she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

  The cop shook his head in disgust. ‘He stayed away from the hospitals, but three nursing students were found murdered an hour ago in a dorm room at Loyola University. The killer hammered a parking ticket into one of their chests.’

  Dana’s stomach lurched. For a brief moment she was afraid she was going to throw up again. She’d been on the plane when the killer had struck this time. Not only were three more people dead, Dana had stopped off at home in Cleveland to play chicken at the house of her childhood instead of heading directly out to Chicago. No way in hell they were going to let her stay on the case now. Still, her brain automatically snapped into action, processing the parking-ticket clue – the mental equivalent of a whiplash reflex.

  David Berkowitz. Wait until she told Crawford.

  The notorious serial killer known as the ‘Son of Sam’ had terrorised New York City in the 1970s. He’d finally been caught when somebody had decided to check out the parking citations handed out on the night of one of his murders. Not exactly a subtle connection there.

  To CK, she said, ‘What else do you have?’

  The Chicago cop pulled open the door to the station house and held it for her as she stepped inside. ‘Well, there’s also a chance there may be a link to some unsolved murders out in Wyoming. We’ve got the ex-boyfriend of one of the victims in custody now – found him hiding in a dumpster on campus shortly after the discovery o
f the bodies.’

  Dana’s heart flipped despite the dread of knowing just how badly she’d messed up by not immediately coming out to Chicago. They had a suspect in custody? Their killer?

  CK filled her in on the rest as they walked down a bustling corridor past petty thieves and painted-up prostitutes handcuffed to O-rings on holding benches.

  ‘Campus was pretty empty because of the holiday break, so no witnesses. Nobody we’ve talked to so far saw or heard anything. Pretty grisly scene, knife was used. Finger marks around the throats of all three victims, but no prints to run through Interpol. Coroner says it’s tough to figure out what actually killed the girls – the knife or the strangling – but she figures either method could have turned the trick on its own.’

  CK paused and ran his stubby fingers through his thinning black hair. ‘Oh, and get this. The ex-girlfriend of our suspect also had all the fingers on her right hand chopped off with some kind of heavy-duty scissors or something.’

  Dana winced.

  ‘Yeah. Not pretty. Anyway, his clothes were all crusted in dried blood. Said it’s hog-slaughtering season back home on the ranch in Wyoming and he just didn’t bother changing before heading out to Loyola. The clothes are at the lab now, just waiting for the test results to come back. Should be tomorrow, Thursday at the latest. Like I said before, turns out he’s the ex-boyfriend of one of the murdered girls. His name is Trent Bollinger.’

  CK nodded at the desk sergeant and took in a lungful of air before resuming his narrative. ‘We called up to Wyoming to check him out and when they heard about what’s going on around here they told us they’ve had a spate of similar murders up there. Spate – helluva nice word, huh? But that’s exactly what they said. A spate.’

  CK shook his head and continued. ‘Anyway, we’ve got Bollinger in lock-up now, but he’s not talking. Says we’re a bunch of assholes and we can just go fuck ourselves seven ways to Sunday. Doesn’t want a lawyer, either. Claims we’re trying to pin a murder rap on him and he’s not saying anything to anybody from now on. To tell you the truth, we were kind of hoping you could use your female powers of persuasion to change all that.’

  Dana turned to him as they came to a stop in front of the holding cells. ‘I’ll see what I can do, CK, but I’d really prefer to take a look at the murder scene before I talk to Bollinger. Is there any way someone could take me over there for a look around?’

  The Chicago cop didn’t miss a beat. ‘How would I do, ma’am?’

  Dana nodded. ‘Thank you, sir. You’ll do just fine.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CK led Dana through a labyrinth of halls in the sprawling metro police station and out to the parking lot where the unmarked cars were kept. They got inside a battered 1986 Toyota Corolla with peeling brown paint and a heavily dented front fender and talked on the short ride over to Loyola. Dana found CK’s inconsequential everyday chatter reassuring. She needed it right now to block out the turmoil of emotion she was feeling, let alone the incessant negative chatter going on in her own head.

  ‘Married, three kids here,’ he was telling her over the static of the police radio. ‘I swear to God, my Becky’s an angel for putting up with a mug like this one. Luckily the kids all got their good looks from her. How about you? Married? Boyfriend? Any kids?’

  Dana shook her head. ‘Nope. Not married, no boyfriend. No kids, either, unless you wanna count Oreo, of course.’

  ‘Who’s Oreo?’

  So she told him all about the day she’d found her furry little friend at the animal shelter near her home.

  Oreo was one of about thirty kittens she’d stopped to pet in their cages. After scratching him behind his pointy ears for a moment, she’d started to move on to the next cage when Oreo had stuck his little paw through the bars and snagged the arm of her sweater. Looking directly into her pale blue eyes with his greenish-yellow ones, he’d let out a soft, heartbreaking meow – as though to ask her where the hell she thought she was going. Wasn’t he good enough for her? The kitten had stolen her heart in that very moment and they’d been together ever since.

  CK whistled appreciatively. ‘Sounds like a real ladies’ man you’ve got there.’

  ‘He’s neutered, CK. Doesn’t have much interest in females any more, I’m afraid.’

  He winced. ‘Ouch. Tough break, but better him than me, I suppose.’

  Ten minutes of easy conversation later they drove up to the guard shack on the east end of campus and CK flashed his badge before wheeling the car in. He manoeuvred through a few mostly deserted streets before coming to a stop outside an old red-brick dormitory building just as a light snow began to fall. Emergency medical technicians were loading rubber body bags into the backs of three different ambulances. No fewer than fifteen cruisers lit up the night sky with their blue-and-red flashers, casting weird dancing shadows on the facades of the surrounding buildings. It was time to get serious.

  CK turned in his seat to face Dana. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘They cancelled classes for next week. Called all the students up and told them their Thanksgiving vacations had just been extended. That means we’ve pretty much got the place to ourselves.’

  ‘Fantastic.’ At least that was something.

  They got out of the car and CK led her through the police line and up a metal staircase on the outside of the building.

  He opened a heavy outer steel door on the second floor that segued into a long narrow hallway. They stopped in front of Room 232. More yellow police tape was stretched across the threshold. At least a dozen crime-scene technicians were processing the room inside.

  ‘I’ll just wait outside for you while you go in and take a look around,’ CK said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Dana ducked under the police tape and into the room, taking a quick inventory as a noisy fluorescent light bathed the room in a pale yellow. What it illuminated took her breath away.

  Dark splotches of maroon covered the carpet in three distinct areas. The spatters of blood on the surrounding furniture and walls made it look as if someone had taken a brush with bright red paint dripping from its bristles and wildly flung it in random directions from the centre of the room.

  High-velocity spatter again, Dana noticed. Still, it didn’t take a world-class forensics expert to see that a terrific bloodbath had taken place here.

  ‘Sweet Jesus,’ she breathed. It was worse than she’d expected. Much worse, actually. She felt a swell of anger. Was there nothing he wasn’t prepared to do? And for what?

  A man wearing full protective gear approached and asked, ‘Special Agent Whitestone?’

  Dana nodded.

  The man handed her a clear Ziploc bag with a student-identification card inside.

  ‘This was under the bed between the mattress and the latticework of the supporting springs,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d probably want to see it.’

  Dana took the bag and looked down at it. The card inside showed the smiling face of a delicately pretty, extremely young-looking Asian girl. The name on the card was Ahn Howser, the murder victim who’d been found – throat slashed, skull crushed and parking ticket hammered into her chest – lying right next to the bed.

  And that was when everything became clear in Dana’s brain. All the nagging little thoughts in the back of her mind that had been bothering her since she’d first started investigating the copycat murders finally made perfect sense to her.

  She felt nauseous as she left the room and found CK on the metal staircase outside, smoking a cigarette in the cold night air. He took a long, final drag on his Camel and flipped the butt over the railing as she stepped out onto the landing. ‘Any luck?’ he asked. ‘You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’

  ‘I think I just might have,’ Dana said. ‘I’ll tell you about it in the car.’

  On the ride back to headquarters she filled him in on the discovery of Ahn Howser’s ID card.

  ‘What do you think it means?’ CK asked when she’d finished. ‘Why was her ID card
under the bed?’

  Dana took a deep breath. ‘How long have you lived in Chicago, CK? What do you know about Richard Speck?’

  The Chicago cop frowned, deepening the already impressive network of wrinkles lacing his forehead. ‘Been here about three years,’ he said. ‘Transferred up from Tennessee. I’m the original redneck Greek. Anyway, as far as Richard Speck goes, the only thing I know about him is what they told me in the briefing. That he killed a bunch of nurses in a boarding house sometime back in the 1960s. Why do you ask?’

  Dana cracked a window to let some fresh air into the car. Cold winter air through her coat sleeves shot goose bumps shivering up her arms. ‘Richard Speck was eventually convicted based on the testimony of a nurse who was in that boarding house that night – a young Filipina woman by the name of Corazon Amurao,’ she said. ‘Amurao managed to slide under a bunk bed and hide from him there while he killed the others. Apparently Speck forgot about her before he left. In all the confusion he must’ve simply lost count.’

  The Chicago cop knitted his thick eyebrows. ‘What the hell does that have to do with anything?’

  Speaking more rapidly now, afraid that if she slowed down even for an instant she’d lose the courage of her convictions, Dana continued. ‘If Trent Bollinger really is our guy, then we’ve got a hell of a lot bigger problem on our hands than I initially thought,’ she said. ‘He’s not just a simple copycat. He’s doing more than that. He’s recreating every single aspect of the crimes, right down to the positioning of the victims. I think he ordered the Asian girl under the bed. In fact, I’m almost sure of it. Somehow, as horrible as it must have been, Ahn Howser maintained the presence of mind to leave us a clue.’

  ‘Why would he order her under the bed?’ CK asked. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’

  Dana held up the Ziploc bag with the identification card inside. ‘But it does make sense,’ she said. ‘It makes all the sense in the world, at least to him. She was under the bed but she wasn’t forgotten this time. So if Bollinger really is our guy he’s not just copying the crimes, he’s practically photocopying the goddamn things. The only people who would know the kinds of details he knows, and make this kind of link between these specific serial killers, are students who studied under Crawford Bell.’