THREE TIMES A LADY Page 3

  Dana waved her own hand in the air, thankful to be taken off the hook and painfully aware of just how bare her own ring finger looked in comparison. Not so much as a faded tan line there testifying to a failed engagement. ‘Absolutely,’ Dana said, trying her best to not think about the fact that Jeremy Brown had been carrying around an engagement ring in his pocket with him when he’d died. ‘Go. It’s no problem at all. Besides, Bradley and I are good friends now, anyway. We’ll be just fine.’

  The woman let out a quick breath and reached across the seatback to touch Dana’s shoulder. ‘Thank you so much. You’re a real lifesaver, you know that? And I mean that from the very bottom of my cold and blackened heart.’

  Dana winced a little at that, but was pretty sure she was able to stop the emotion from reaching her face. Still, lifesaver hadn’t been a very accurate description of her lately. Quite the opposite, unfortunately. Just ask poor Jeremy about that much. ‘We’ll be fine,’ Dana repeated.

  The woman nodded and leaned down to kiss her son on the top of his head. Cupping his chin in her palm, she lifted his tiny face to hers and held his gaze. ‘You be a good boy for this nice lady while I’m gone, OK, Bradley? Mama will be right back and you know what happens if you misbehave.’

  Bradley grinned mischievously at his mother. ‘You’ll throw me out the window over the Grand Canyon, right?’

  The woman nodded again. ‘That’s absolutely right, buddy boy. And that’s a heck of a long drop, so be good.’

  Bradley giggled as his mother scooted out of their row and into the aisle before heading for the restrooms in the rear of the plane. When she was out of sight, the little boy reestablished eye contact with Dana. ‘You’re really pretty, you know that? Almost as pretty as my mama. I like your yellow hair a lot. You sort of look like Goldilocks, only way shorter. And you’ve got eyes just like mine.’

  Dana sucked in a sharp breath at the unexpected pang of regret that stabbed her deep in the gut at the boy’s words. From the look of things, though, she hadn’t done a very good job of locking away her desire to have children of her own one day. No big surprise there, however. But at nearly forty years old now that particular window seemed pretty much nailed shut for good. ‘And you’re a very handsome little guy,’ Dana answered, clenching her stomach muscles tightly together in a futile effort to strangle the sad feelings in her belly. ‘Come to think of it, you’re just about the handsomest little guy I’ve ever seen in my whole life. A regular GQ model if ever there’s been one.’

  Bradley chewed playfully on his lower lip and cranked up the cuteness factor at that. Apparently, he wasn’t interested in playing fair here. ‘That’s what my mama always tells me.’

  ‘Well, your mama’s absolutely right. You’re the handsomest little guy in the whole wide world.’

  Bradley widened his smile ear-to-ear, showing off world-class dimples in both cheeks. If he could be any more adorable, Dana couldn’t possibly imagine how. ‘Well, we can get married someday if you want,’ the little boy said. ‘When I get bigger than I am right now.’

  Dana lifted up her eyebrows on her forehead in surprise. If she were to be perfectly honest about the whole thing, she’d have to admit that it was the first reasonable marriage proposal she’d ever received in her life. Jeremy hadn’t quite had the chance to pop the question before he’d died…

  Dana chased away the gut-punch thought with a quick shake of her head, cursing her brain’s remarkable ability to undermine her mental stability at the worst possible time. Everything that had happened with Jeremy was still just too fresh for her to handle right now, too painful; too hard to sort out. Probably would be for a very long time to come – if not for ever. ‘Hmmn,’ Dana said, clamping her stomach muscles together again and managing to keep her overwhelming grief at bay, at least for now. ‘We can get married someday, huh?’

  Bradley nodded. ‘Yep. And after we get married we can live in a castle on the beach and ride horses and pick flowers all day long and go swimming whenever we want to.’

  Though she’d never been very big on physical contact with her fellow human beings – especially not with one she’d just met – Dana surprised herself by reaching out a hand and touching the boy’s smooth cheek. He didn’t pull away. ‘OK, handsome. You’re on. Consider it a date.’

  From there, the conversation drifted amiably from Bradley telling Dana the difference between fledglings and real vampires (fledglings hadn’t yet tasted human blood) to the main reason he didn’t especially care for broccoli. ‘Cuz it tastes gross,’ was his concise explanation. ‘Sometimes I feed it to our dog underneath the table when mama’s not looking, though. Don’t tell her, OK?’

  Dana shook her head. ‘Absolutely not. Your secret is safe with me.’

  Bradley held Dana’s gaze. From the look in his eye, she could tell that he was deadly serious about this. ‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’

  Dana nodded. ‘And stick a needle in my eye.’

  The little boy nodded back, apparently satisfied by Dana’s eye-sticking promise. After all, only a complete lunatic would ever agree to such a horrible thing if they weren’t one hundred per cent reliable. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘And since we’ve got a secret now that makes us best friends forever, right?’

  Dana reached out and touched the boy’s smooth cheek again. This time the physical contact didn’t seem so difficult for her to initiate. Didn’t seem so difficult, at all. ‘You bet it does, handsome.’

  From there, the five minutes alone with Bradley seemed to pass in the blink of an eye for Dana. As he continued talking about everything under the sun (including his slow-but-steady progress on learning how to tie his own shoes), she wondered how long an entire lifetime with him would take. Probably two eye-blinks; max. If that long. The little boy was in the middle of describing to her what he wanted for his next birthday (a DVD of Aladdin, an oversized beanbag and a new puppy dog would do for starters – just so long as the new dog also enjoyed the taste of broccoli) when his mother finally returned from her hasty trip to the bathroom. ‘Thank you so, so much,’ the woman said, smiling in relief and wiping away an imaginary layer of sweat from her brow as she slid back into her row. ‘A million times thank you. I can’t tell you how much I needed that. He talk your ear off while I was gone?’

  Dana smiled – a real smile this time. She felt happy to find that she still retained the ability. She’d begun having her doubts lately. ‘Yep,’ Dana said, ‘but in a good way. That’s quite the little conversationalist you’ve got there.’

  The woman shook her head in bemusement and reached down to tousle her son’s hair again. Obviously, hair-tousling marked one of her favourite ways of showing affection to her son, and despite Dana’s very best efforts to cut off the ugly emotion at the pass, she couldn’t help feeling a stab of jealousy. She wondered briefly if her blue eyes had turned green in their sockets yet. If that had been the case, she wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. ‘And such a hopeless flirt, too,’ the other woman said, still smiling down at her boy as only a mother could smile down at her son. ‘Always has been and always will be. Oh well, at least he always picks the pretty ones. Say what you will about him, but the boy’s got great taste in women.’

  Dana widened her smile as Bradley and his mother settled back down into their seats before falling into a lengthy discussion about what the Tooth Fairy did with all the teeth she took and why in the heck she needed so many of them in the first place. Ten minutes of this passed before the flight attendants took their positions at various sections of the plane and ran everyone through the standard preflight instructions. Exaggerated arm movements pantomimed the placing of oxygen masks over faces while a prerecorded message droned on in the background imploring everyone onboard to secure their own masks before attempting to assist their fellow passengers. Ten minutes after that, the plane finally streaked down the runway and lifted off, shooting sharp little thrills of excitement through Dana’s stomach and eliciting a delighted whoop of gle
e from little Bradley in the seat in front of her.

  Dana sighed and looked out her window again, watching Los Angeles disappear behind them in a swirling fog of gray-and-white jet exhaust. Like it or not – and she still wasn’t quite sure which one it was for her yet – it was time to get back home to Cleveland, back to her old life in Ohio after six solid months of traipsing around the country chasing deranged serial killers.

  Dana sighed again, even more deeply this time. At least, what was still left of her old life. Because not counting Oreo – her beloved black-and-white cat who she’d left under the care of her kindly old landlords at a price and security level she never would’ve been able to find at a kennel – there wasn’t much left of her old life back in Cleveland to speak of.

  Wasn’t much left to speak of, at all.

  CHAPTER 2

  Chicago – 22 August 1977 – 2:31 p.m.

  Nicholas was fourteen years old the first time he brought someone to the butcher’s shop without his mother’s permission. Thankfully, he’d managed to survive this long without angering her to the point that made her want to erase each and every last trace of him too. Quite the opposite, actually. Turned out his mother had other plans for him. Plans she’d been feeding him piecemeal over the years until he was old enough to fully understand.

  Plans that excited him.

  Still, that didn’t mean that what Nicholas was doing here at the moment marked a safe proposition. Far from it, as a matter of fact. Three weeks earlier, he’d stolen a key to the butcher’s shop from her lingerie drawer when she hadn’t been home before making his own copy without her knowledge or consent. He knew she’d kill him if she ever found out, of course, but it was a chance he was willing to take. A chance he felt he needed to take. He was getting older now, for Christ’s sake. Becoming a man. Even had a thin line of downy, first-growth hair on his upper lip to show for it.

  So if Nicholas was becoming a man (wispy facial hair and all that in actuality you needed to look at upside down in the light to even see) he figured that he might as well start acting like one. And there was no time like the present, right? Besides, there was still one more step he needed to take, one more rite of passage he needed to navigate.

  The rite of passage that would finally make him a real man.

  Still, burgeoning man or not, Nicholas’s heartbeat had slammed painfully against his bony ribcage the entire time he’d stood waiting in line for the key machine at the Walgreen’s drugstore, half-expecting to see his mother come storming into the place at any given moment to drag his sorry ass out of there by his ear. Thankfully, though, his mother had never come, and Nicholas had given her sufficient time since then to confront him if she had any suspicions about what he was up to.

  When it finally became clear to him that his mother didn’t have the slightest idea of what he had planned – or at least wasn’t going to say anything to him about it – Nicholas supposed he was safe enough. At least as safe as anyone could be around a woman like her. Besides, it was time, wasn’t it? Goddamn right, it was time. Nicholas felt ready for this. Had felt ready for this for a very long while now. Ever since the day he’d watched his little brother brutally murdered in cold blood right in front of his shocked and disbelieving eyes.

  Nicholas chased away the unpleasant memory with a quick shake of his head as he glided his ten-speed into the parking lot a strip-mall three and a half miles away from his house, shuddering violently despite the oppressive heat of the day. If his mother only had any idea that Timmy’s murder had been captured on videotape, as well, one that hadn’t been destroyed …

  He shuddered again, even harder this time. The proposition was just too frightening to even think about.

  Sweat poured in rivers down his back and plastered his too-thick polo shirt against his skin like a freshly applied Band Aid as Nicholas rode his bicycle through the strip-mall. Wiping away a thick sheen of perspiration from his forehead with the back of his right hand, he flung away the excess moisture to the ground with a quick flick of his right wrist, cursing the oppressive summer weather. To put it mildly, the summer of 1977 was an extremely hot one in Chicago, hot enough to kill all the old people around the city who either couldn’t afford air conditioning in their high-rise apartment buildings or just didn’t know how to go about asking for it in the right way. The heat that permeated The Windy City that summer between the hours of two and four p.m. was the kind of heat that made people very angry with one another for no particular reason at all. The kind of heat that made them want to hurt each other. Badly. Years later, Nicholas would learn that it was the same blazing summer the ‘Son of Sam’ had chosen to terrorise New York City eight hundred miles to the east, selecting so many long-haired brunette victims that young women sporting dark tresses all around the Big Apple had eventually begun dying their hair blonde and demanding severe pageboys from their stylists in a terrified – and futile – attempt to avoid David Berkowitz’s unwanted advances. Despite all the elaborate precautions that had been taken, however, the Son of Sam would shoot and kill six people with his .44-calibre hand-cannon and wound seven more before his reign of terror finally came to an abrupt end when he’d received a parking ticket on the night of one of his many horrific crimes.

  Nicholas shook his head in disgust at the pure amateurish nature of the pudgy-faced killer’s mistake as he passed by a bakery emanating smells delicious enough to make his stomach grumble, reminding him that he hadn’t yet eaten that day. Honest to Christ, though, a fucking parking ticket? How moronic could one person be? And the fact that David Berkowitz would later blame his violent attacks on orders from a neighbour’s barking dog would one day make Nicholas laugh. Some people blamed barking dogs for the adults they grew up to become. Not Nicholas, though. Not even close. He’d blame his mother. And why in the hell shouldn’t he? It was a much more natural way of processing the events of your life when you looked at things with an honest eye. And wasn’t that what it was all about when everything had been said and done? Looking at things honestly?

  Goddamn right, it was.

  In any event, here Nicholas was, finally ready to become a man. And what was the one thing all men needed?

  Why, a woman, of course.

  Nicholas finally came to a stop thirty seconds later and hopped off his ten-speed next to a rusted-out bike rack in front of Miller’s Hardware Store before glancing to his right. Thirty yards away, Claire Bishop was smoking marijuana cigarettes with a small collection of her friends behind a McDonald’s dumpster on the south side of the strip-mall, just like she always did around this time of day. Fucking drug addict.

  Pulling up his shirt in the front in order to let in some air, Nicholas smiled to himself despite the disgust he felt inside for the girl’s smoking habit. He’d been watching Claire Bishop for months now, and after a great deal of planning on his part, he’d finally decided she’d be the one. The first one, at least. After that, who knew? He’d just need to wait and see where life took him from there.

  Behind the dumpster, Claire took a healthy hit of a joint and blew out a huge cloud of smoke before giggling happily and passing it along to one of her friends. Even through the haze, it was easy to see just how pretty she was. Her long brown hair hung freely over her soft shoulders (the hands-down style at the time since nobody had yet heard of David Berkowitz or the preferred physical makeup of his victims) and even from this distance Nicholas could tell that she had a body that just wouldn’t quit. Absolutely perfect for his intentions for the day.

  Twelve years at most, the girl wore tiny blue polyester shorts that showed off long tan legs and just a hint of well-rounded buttocks peeking out from each side. A midriff-baring shirt featured spaghetti-thin straps hanging over her shoulders, which served as the backdrop for her glorious hair. Best of all – most exciting of all, to Nicholas, at least – her pert, slightly upturned breasts had already blossomed like daffodils turning their faces to the morning sun. No bra, of course. Who in the hell needed a bra when you had
tits like that?

  Nicholas nodded approvingly at the way the girl’s hard nipples poked like tiny diamonds through the flimsy fabric of her flower-patterned shirt. Nice piece of ass, that much was for sure. A real fine piece of machinery he wouldn’t mind checking under the hood. Still, hot as she might be, Nicholas knew that not even Claire Bishop presented any match for him when it came to looks.

  Nicholas wasn’t conceited – no way in hell his mother would ever stand for such self-centeredness, not on his part, at least – but even he knew that his sparkling green eyes looked like shining emeralds encased in a face that had been carved out of solid granite. His strong jaw line was set firmly beneath high cheekbones that did a fine job of accentuating his pleasant features, and his short brown hair never seemed out of place, not even when he rolled out of bed first thing in the morning. Not an ounce of fat to be found anywhere on his body. Not so much as the trace of a blemish on his handsome face when so many other boys his age were suffering from the dreaded ‘pizza-face’ syndrome brought about by their own raging hormones. What’s more, Nicholas knew that he would only grow even handsomer as the years passed. Hell, his genetics dictated that much. Just take a look at his mother. Apples – even the rotten ones – never fell too far from the tree.

  Nicholas breathed in deeply through his nostrils and caught a faint whiff of the marijuana the girls were smoking before closing his eyes, feeling a renewed sense of excitement flood through his crotch at the thought of his mother. Perverted as though it might sound to others, Nicholas had already memorised almost every last inch of Annabeth Preston’s exquisite body from a distance, and he would’ve happily jumped at the chance to memorise the inches of her that still remained a mystery to him. The inches of her in which he’d always been the most interested. The inches of herself that she selfishly covered up in her lacy undergarments each night shortly before bedtime.