Kill Me Once Read online

  Over in the playpen Tamara was beginning to stir, making soft cooing noises in her sleep and trying to lift her head.

  The young mother looked over at the playpen and let out a resigned sigh. ‘Look, lady, I don’t know nothin’, OK? I ain’t seen no strangers because I ain’t been looking. Are we done here yet? I need to feed my baby.’

  Dana stood and walked to the door. She was clearly unwanted here, but where was the surprise in that? In this part of town, law enforcement was just one step above the KKK in the social pecking order, if that.

  Out in the hallway, she turned and handed Tyesha a business card. ‘Thank you very much for your time. If you happen to remember anything – anything at all – please call me at this number. Any time. Day or night.’

  The young woman took the card and glanced down at it, then looked back up at Dana. ‘Like I said before, lady. I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.’

  And with that she simply closed the door in Dana’s face.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  2250 Drexel Street – South Central Los Angeles – 9:39 p.m.

  If there was one thing that Mary Ellen Orton knew better than anything else these days, it was that being old was no fun at all. Though her mind was still remarkably fresh considering her advanced years, her frail old body just wasn’t up to the exhausting task of simple day-to-day living any more.

  The heat only made things worse.

  She’d spent most of the long, tiring day trying to ignore the unforgiving temperature all around her, but nothing had worked out very well. Like most people her age, Mary Ellen hadn’t grown up with the unimaginable luxury of air conditioning, and as a youngster in Chicago each summer she’d read horrible accounts of the elderly citizens of the city literally dying from the heat.

  Back when she’d been a fresh-faced girl, those sad tales had seemed little more than abstract concepts – nothing to worry about very seriously. But she had been young then. Now seventy-nine and still not fully recovered from a badly shattered right hip brought about by a nasty slip in the shower three years earlier, those old newspaper articles seemed to hit a lot closer to home.

  Moving to Los Angeles in order to be closer to Jerry – her last living child and the only thing she had left on this Earth in terms of family – had brought with it a certain sense of emotional comfort, but the City of Angels wasn’t exactly known for its mild weather. And the cloying layer of smog always hanging over the city like a thick blue cloud of cigar smoke in a crowded bar certainly didn’t help matters, either.

  Mary Ellen sighed and wiped her sweaty palms against the sides of her thin yellow housedress, desperately trying not to cry despite her many frustrations. How she wished Ed were here with her now. If Ed were here he’d hold her close and kiss her face and tell her not to worry, tell her everything would be all right and that he’d never, ever let anybody hurt her. He’d just smile that little smile of his and pull her to her feet to sway to imaginary music. Oh how they used to dance!

  But Ed wasn’t here any more, hadn’t been for more than ten years now, so these days Mary Ellen simply filled out her time the best she could. But it really was lonely being old. Nobody had ever warned her about that part of life when she’d been a little girl, and as a result she was finding the Golden Years badly tarnished. They seemed more like something suspiciously along the lines of tin.

  Word Searches with oversized type helped combat the excruciating boredom for short periods of time. Reading was a tolerable activity for a while, too – just so long as the words on the page were large enough to save what precious little remained of her failing eyesight. The Social Security cheques and small pension from her deceased husband’s job as a postal worker certainly didn’t allow for such outlandish modern expenditures as cable television, but Mary Ellen made do just fine with her old black-and-white set equipped with its rabbit-ears aerial.

  Sometimes the set-up managed to pick up a halfway decent signal, allowing her to stay updated on her soap operas and the latest news, but even that much had become a chore lately. Tonight, however, the television was picking up only a snowy-white static – not to mention the obnoxious buzzing sound accompanying the flickering picture – so she simply flicked it off.

  Mary Ellen tried knitting for a while, but it wasn’t very long before the arthritis shook the needles from her hands and they clattered down noisily onto the cheap TV-tray table in front of her. Old Arthur had been living with her for years now, and she’d be damned if he weren’t just the rudest house guest she’d ever known – even if the folksy term for the crippling affliction was a bit dated even for her taste.

  A bead of sweat slipped down the back of Mary Ellen’s neck in the stifling heat of the apartment. The damn air conditioner had broken again and Jerry hadn’t quite gotten around to fixing it yet. Although basically a good boy in most respects, her son had just as many issues as anybody else. Probably a few more than most.

  Mary Ellen’s gnarled fingers lightly brushed the Life Alert medical call hanging around her thin neck like a forlorn plastic cross. She’d never fallen before and been unable to get up, of course – as those silly commercials so condescendingly suggested – but neither had she ever been the type to tempt the fates. Besides, Jerry had absolutely insisted on it for the nights when he was out there doing whatever the hell he was out there doing and she’d grown fairly accustomed to it by now.

  The heat rose high in her paper-thin cheeks as she struggled to her feet and crossed the living room in her small apartment to go do battle with the sticky window in the far corner. It was an oven inside the apartment and she knew she’d never be able to fall asleep if she didn’t at least try to do something to cool the place down. But when she finally managed to wrestle the window up, the arthritis in her wrists immediately screamed at her for her foolishness. The weak breeze that followed hardly seemed worth all the pain and effort involved.

  Sighing as she gently rubbed her tender wrists, Mary Ellen stepped inside her tiny bedroom and slowly slipped out of her clothes, neatly folding them up and placing them on the old wooden chair next to her bed. She would wear the same clothes tomorrow. It was just too much of a hassle to do laundry more than once a month any more. Besides, who in the hell did she have left to impress, anyway?

  Her aching muscles throbbed in hot protest as she pulled a thin white nightgown over her wispy silver hair and squinted her watery blue eyes at the digital alarm clock on her bedside table. Almost midnight now – well past her usual bedtime.

  Her ancient joints sang with pain as she carefully climbed up into the rickety double bed with its lumpy old mattress in the middle of the room and leaned over to switch off the bedside light. The metallic sound of squeaking springs filled the darkness as she covered herself with a thin sheet and closed her exhausted eyes, desperately trying to think about the good old days. Sometimes that helped her forget the pain. On good nights it even helped her forget the loneliness for a little while.

  Soft strains of remembered music echoed gently in her mind as she floated slowly back in time and once again became the picture of grace on the dance floor, hovering over the wooden planks like a lace-covered ghost whom all the men desperately loved and all the women desperately envied.

  As she gradually drifted off into the painless world of her dreams, a contented smile finally played across Mary Ellen Orton’s wrinkled old face.

  It would be the last smile in a very long, very well-lived life that once upon a time had been full of them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dana left the squalid apartment complex on the east side and fought her way through the insatiable press corps that had flooded into the parking lot. The questions rained down on her from all directions as she hurried to her Mazda Protégé.

  A man with perfect hair in the middle of the pack stepped forward and shoved a microphone in her face. ‘Special Agent Whitestone!’ he shouted. ‘Chip Hall, Channel Three News. Was this murder the work of the Cleveland Slasher?’

  D
ana squinted against the bright television lights. She focused on the man’s perfectly plucked eyebrows, not wanting to encourage him by making actual eye contact but also not wanting to look evasive when they ran the footage on the eleven o’clock news. ‘There will be a press release in about two hours,’ she said, her voice steady and strong as she continued walking. ‘That’s all I can say right now.’

  She unlocked the Protégé with the keychain control and hopped inside. Slipping the car into gear, she slowly backed the vehicle through the mass of humanity and out of the parking lot, being very careful not to run over anyone’s toes. That was the last thing she needed right now.

  As she hit Interstate 90 and headed for home, Dana felt guilty about the little white lie she’d just told. There would be no press release coming in two hours, of course, but sometimes you had to throw the wolves a little meat to distract them. Her comment would keep them satisfied for tonight and buy her some time, though, and that was the important part. Most of the reporters would probably be happy enough with her empty promise, and if she was lucky they might even forget about it for tomorrow night’s broadcast and move on to chasing the next big story of the day.

  One could always hope.

  Half an hour later she was inside her own apartment on the west side of Cleveland, seated at her dining-room table with her notebooks scattered on the tabletop in front of her. She felt wired, unable to wind down after the events of the day as she tried desperately to map the case out in her mind. The MO for Jacinda Holloway’s murder matched the previous four murders exactly, but none of the few clues that the Cleveland Slasher had left pointed anywhere. The pattern was clear – little girls were his targets – but to what end or for what purpose? And why had he left behind a photograph of a pentagram at the Holloway apartment? What exactly was he trying to tell them?

  When her mind started to grow fuzzy from information overload, Dana went into the kitchen and grabbed a Corona from the refrigerator, leaving her notebooks abandoned on the table. That was enough for tonight and she needed the beer after the day she’d just had, needed a little something to take the edge off. She found that alcohol usually did the job quite nicely, even if she knew it was an extremely dangerous friend to lean on. But it was when she was here at home – when she wasn’t actually out working in the field – that the seams started to show. For all its faults – and there were a lot of them, Dana knew – booze helped her keep the stuffing inside where it belonged, kept all the emotions from spilling out. She knew it was a crutch but she also knew it was the only thread keeping her tattered psyche together at this point.

  Beer in hand, she went into her living room and curled up on the couch underneath a soft blanket with a classic text by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross – the Swiss-born psychiatrist who’d written the groundbreaking book On Death And Dying. Dana had always found the book helpful, both personally and professionally. It was comforting to know that other people had gone through the same things she had, soothing to know she wasn’t all alone in the world and wasn’t crazy for still feeling the way she did after all these years. Still, Dana wished like hell she could just let go of the terrible events of her past instead of endlessly wallowing in them like she’d been doing for more than three decades now.

  She sipped on the Corona and tried to relax while the sounds of Regina Spektor played softly on her living-room stereo. The beautiful voice led viewers into Dana’s favourite show each week – the hit series Weeds on Showtime. Most people around the country had professed their allegiance to Dexter or True Blood on HBO, but Dana saw enough blood and guts in her real life to make watching dramatisations of it on television rather pointless. When she watched TV, she wanted to stop thinking, not be reminded of how cruel human beings – or vampires, for that matter – could be to one another.

  Dana glanced around her apartment and tried to feel a sense of home, but it didn’t work. The furnishings were literally straight out of a Pier One showroom but she’d never been especially proud of them. Why should she be? Who besides her ever saw it? But that was what you got when you didn’t have anyone else in your life to spend your money on. You tended to buy the good stuff for yourself.

  In addition to the couch there were matching plaid armchairs, a coffee table with a thick cut-glass top and an old-fashioned coat rack over in the corner next to the front door. The furniture was three years old now, but for all intents and purposes it might as well have been brand new. Material things aged slowly when you hardly ever used them. Emotional things, too.

  Above the plasma-screen television – no doubt the most expensive Weeds-watching device ever constructed – a gilded frame hugged an old Sears portrait featuring a four-year-old Dana flanked by her mom and dad, Sara and James Whitestone. The four-year-old Dana smiled down without a care in the world on the thirty-eight-year-old version. The short blonde hair and fair skin were the same, making her a carbon copy of her mother – and most likely the milkman’s daughter, considering her father’s swarthy good looks. But there was something missing now in the current version’s pale blue eyes. The sparkle was gone. Dana knew because she looked for it every single morning in the bathroom mirror.

  Dana closed her eyes, missing her parents badly as the stereo kicked over to John Cougar Mellencamp’s ‘The Authority Song’. Opening her book to chapter five, she began to read. The five stages of death and dying had stuck in her brain since she’d first learned the catchy anagram in freshman psychology at Cleveland State almost twenty years earlier.

  DABDA. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.

  Over the years Dana had found that the stages could be applied to just about anything, and since there’d been a lot of death and dying going on in her world lately she didn’t think applying Kubler-Ross to her current situation was going to hurt. She needed something – anything, really – to give her a better idea of just who exactly she was dealing with here in the Cleveland Slasher – a sadistic killer who’d already murdered five little girls around Cleveland and probably wasn’t going to stop there if Dana couldn’t catch him before he killed again.

  She started with denial. What was he denying when he murdered his victims? His own mortality? Or was he simply denying them life?

  Anger was pretty obvious. He was sure as hell pissed off about something, but what was it? Most serial killers had experienced horrific childhoods, so that might be it, but Dana’s own childhood had been no walk in the park either and she didn’t go around killing innocent little girls to make herself feel any better about it.

  Bargaining was a bit trickier. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth it wasn’t. If nothing else, he was still alive, though he made damn sure none of his victims shared that particular trait for very long.

  Depression was another obvious one. The killer had undoubtedly suffered more than most as a kid, like most serial killers, but the truth was that Dana really didn’t give a shit. She only wished he’d suffered a whole lot more – like right down to the point of dying over it. If that had been the case, five beautiful little girls would probably still be alive today.

  Lost in her reading, she was startled by the knock at her front door. She glanced down at her watch – a gold Rolex that had belonged to her mother. It had been a first-anniversary gift from her father, who wore a matching men’s version and said that he and Sara matched so perfectly as husband and wife that the least their jewellery could do was the same.

  Almost eleven p.m. already. Way too late for it to be anything good. Dana had learned the hard way over the years that late-night phone calls and visits invariably meant somebody was in trouble. Or hurt. Or even dead.

  Especially dead.

  She kicked off her blanket and rose to her feet. Crossing the living room, she cast a wary eye at the wooden Louisville Slugger baseball bat leaning up against the wall behind the coat rack before putting her eye to the peephole. A familiar face smiled back at her.

  ‘You in there, Dana? I saw your light on underneath the door and I thou
ght I’d say hello. I haven’t seen you in ages. I was beginning to worry.’

  Dana let out a relieved breath and opened the door. Other than her black-and-white cat Oreo, who was now sleeping peacefully over on his soft bed next to the couch, the person on the other side of the door was her very best friend in the whole world.

  ‘Eric!’ she said happily as her across-the-hall neighbour breezed past her right shoulder and into her apartment. ‘What are you doing still up?’

  Eric turned around to face her and held up the last two Bud Lights of a six-pack by one of the empty plastic rings. The smell of Woods by Abercrombie & Fitch – his signature scent – filled Dana’s nostrils.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ he said. ‘Care for a nightcap?’

  Dana briefly considered the proposition. Very briefly. Truth was, another drink didn’t sound half bad right now, and she could use the company. She knew his offer of a nightcap was just an excuse to check up on her, but right now his concern was welcome. No one cared about her as much as he did.

  ‘Twist my rubber arm,’ she said.

  She’d first met Eric Carlton, a newspaper columnist at the Plain Dealer, when she’d moved into the apartment complex three years earlier. On the second day in her new home, a knock had sounded at her door. When Dana opened it, expecting to see the pizza-delivery guy she’d called an hour earlier or perhaps her new landlord wanting to tie up a few loose ends concerning the lease, she was puzzled to find Eric standing there instead.

  He was a tall, ruggedly handsome man about fifteen years older than her, and the twin dimples fading in and out, along with his nervous smile, only accentuated his sculpted good looks. A shock of unruly brown hair had been falling softly over his forehead that day, and despite having just met the man for the first time in her life Dana found herself fighting off the urge to smooth it back for him. He’d been holding a plate of home-made brownies in his hands, shyly offering them out to her.