Kill Me Once (6 page)

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 thought 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.

‘I just moved in myself,’ he’d said. ‘I thought it might be kind of nice to have a friend in the building.’

It had been, as they say, the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Dana looked at the beers and smiled. ‘Crack those open and I’ll go see if I’ve got anything in the kitchen for us to munch on.’

Eric chuckled, keeping things light. ‘Don’t hurt yourself in there on my account, Martha Stewart. I know you’re world-famous for your culinary skills and all, but there’s no need to whip up one of your signature feasts.’

Dana laughed – his easy banter was just what she needed right now. She went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door, peering in. Several more Coronas, a week-old container of Chinese takeout and half a block of Swiss cheese stared back at her. Other than that, though, it was a ghost town inside. She was amazed she didn’t actually see tumbleweed blowing across the empty second shelf.

‘Cheese and crackers OK?’ she called out to Eric. ‘I haven’t got anything else.’

She heard him pop the tabs on the beers out in the living room. ‘Sounds great. I’m starving. Haven’t eaten a thing all day.’

Dana sliced the cheese up into reasonable facsimiles of squares with a long knife – whose blade hadn’t seen the light of day in months – from the wooden block on her kitchen counter and in the pantry found some Wheat Thins that hadn’t gone completely stale yet. Putting them on a plate, she returned to the living room and placed the food down on the coffee table before lowering the volume on the stereo with the remote control and taking a seat on the couch three feet away from Eric, who was now stroking a wildly purring Oreo curled up in his lap.

Dana reached over and scratched the cat behind his pointy white ears. ‘Traitor. You act like I never give you any attention at all.’

Eric looked over at her and smiled. ‘Hey, he just loves his daddy, that’s all. Don’t be so jealous all the time.’

Dana felt another twinge in her heart, once again wondering how different things might have been between them if Eric’s sexuality hadn’t been what it was; if they ever could’ve had a future together; what their kids would have looked like.

She shook the thought off, feeling selfish. From the very beginning Eric had been entirely upfront with her about his feelings for men so it was unfair of her to try to make him into something that he so obviously wasn’t. Besides, some people might always have Paris but she and Eric would always have Oreo, and in the grand scheme of things that wasn’t such a bad deal, after all.

Eric leaned forward and topped a Wheat Thin with a slice of Swiss cheese before popping the combination into his mouth. He searched her expression with his gaze. ‘What’s going on, Dana?’ he asked gently. ‘You look exhausted.’

Dana took a sip of her beer. ‘I haven’t been sleeping well lately,’ she admitted. ‘This case.’

Eric frowned. ‘I heard about that murder on the east side today. Another dead little girl. It’s disgusting. Seriously, Dana, I don’t know how you do it.’

‘Neither do I sometimes.’

Eric popped another cracker into his mouth, thoughtful now. ‘This guy’s really got to you, hasn’t he? He’s a real slick son of a bitch, huh? Do you want to talk about it?’

Dana knew she shouldn’t
technically
be discussing cases with Eric, even in the most general sense, but ever since her partnership with Crawford Bell had broken up Eric had been her only outlet, the only person in her private life she felt comfortable confiding in. Besides, he was her only family now and she trusted him with her life. Sometimes the rule book just had to take a back seat to actually
living –
even for a stickler like her.

‘Slick and obviously very well educated,’ she said. ‘Probably by guys like you.’

Eric grunted and took a long swallow of beer. As a member of the media, he knew that these days killers had their pick of any number of the different educational programmes out there to help them hone their craft.
Law & Order; Law & Order: Criminal Intent; Law & Order: SVU
– not to mention the ubiquitous show’s many other offshoots.
CSI
– both the New York and Miami versions.
Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege and Justice
on truTV.
Investigative Reports with Bill Kurtis
on A&E. Hell, they were all practically
instruction
manuals on how to commit murder and get away with it.

Don’t want the bullet traced to a particular gun? Hell, just jam a screwdriver down the barrel to alter the grooves. Problem solved. Thanks, A&E.

Afraid your purchase of rope and a shovel at the local Ace Hardware might be traced back to you after you’ve strangled your wife and buried her in a shallow grave? Shit, just pay in cash and wear a disguise to hide your identity from the security cameras. Problem solved. Thanks, truTV.

Oh, and don’t bother trying to clean up the crime scene after you’ve bludgeoned your mother to death and jammed her bloated body into an industrial-sized basement freezer, either. Haven’t you ever heard of Luminol before? No matter what you do, the blood spatter’s going to show up just as clear as day under a black light.

Dana tightened her lips. ‘He’s definitely better than most of the other killers I’ve come across in the past,’ she said. ‘Certainly smarter, at least. For the life of me, I just can’t seem to figure him out.’

Eric nodded. ‘Well, you’re smart too. You’ll get him. Just don’t let it take you over, Dana. I know you. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll catch a break soon.’

‘That would be nice. I just hope it isn’t in my neck.’

Eric winced and drained the last of his beer. ‘Don’t even joke about it.’ He rose to his feet and leaned down to plant a kiss on Dana’s cheek. ‘Well, it’s late – I’m out of here, honey. Just wanted to say hello and have a quick beer, see you were OK. Get some sleep now – you look like you could use it.’

He glanced down at her book on the coffee table. ‘And don’t stay up reading that goddamn thing all night, OK? You need your beauty rest.’

Dana raised her eyebrows at him; glad he’d lightened the mood again. ‘Is that a fact?’

Eric chuckled and kissed her again. ‘Nah, you look beautiful already.
I’m
the one who needs my beauty sleep. These bags under my eyes aren’t doing a thing for my social life, I’ll tell you that much. Anyway, I’ll talk to you tomorrow, all right? Sweet dreams, kiddo.’

When Eric had left her apartment, Dana read Kubler-Ross for another half-hour before finally snapping the book shut and tossing it back onto the coffee table. To hell with it. She’d reached stage five of her research now.

She
accepted
the fact that she still didn’t have the faintest goddamn clue what made the Cleveland Slasher tick. She also accepted the fact that the beer just wasn’t cutting it any more.

Not even close.

CHAPTER SEVEN

South Central Los Angeles – 12:43 a.m
.

The world to which Mary Ellen Orton awoke forty minutes later wasn’t the safe haven of her dreams. No longer was she lost in a champagne-soaked realm where she passed dizzying hours each night folded into the arms of the most handsome young men in the ballroom. The world to which she now awoke was
very
different.

When she finally understood that the figure’s black outline wasn’t simply a benign construct of her dreams, a violent spasm of fear abruptly slammed her heart out of rhythm. One hard beat was immediately followed by two stronger beats, repeating the discordant thumping until she was afraid it would simply
stop
. Her doctors had been advising her for years now to get a pacemaker implanted but she’d always refused the procedure – thought the whole idea rather silly, really. She certainly didn’t want a ridiculous chunk of metal protruding from her brittle breastbone and making an absurd little bump in her thin floral dresses. People would
know
.