Prey Drive (2 page)

“A personal interest? No. My interests are strictly professional. I wish to study the defendant.”

“And whether he is convicted or not doesn’t matter because you would still have access to study him either way?”

“That is correct.”

“So then your opinion could be considered completely objective and would be based solely on your knowledge of psychology, your experience with signature sex murderers during your years as an FBI profiler, and your examination of my client?”

“That is correct.”

Mr. Leyendecker began to pace again.

“The defendant is charged here with the offense of first degree murder in the death of Alicia Rosado. Doctor, have you formed an opinion as to whether the defendant was sane or insane at the time he committed the crimes for which he is being indicted?”

“Yes, I have.”

“What is that opinion, may I ask?”

“In my opinion, he was insane when he murdered that woman.”

Mr. Leyendecker again locked eyes with the jury as he asked his final question.

“And, Doctor, have you an opinion as to whether he is sane or insane at the present time?”

“In my opinion, Joseph Miles is completely insane.”

The gallery erupted and the judge pounded her gavel to silence them. Joe was hardly aware he had been masturbating in open court until he let out a roar as the orgasm jerked his body like a ragdoll in the mouth of a vicious dog and he ejaculated onto the defendant’s table. The bailiffs rushed in to restrain him as the judge banged her gavel again, harder this time, breaking the head off.

“Get this pervert out of my courtroom!” she yelled, pointing at Joe with the handle of her gavel, seeming to want to stab it through his heart. Joe’s erection jutted forth from his unbuttoned jumpsuit, pearlescent droplets of semen still glistening on the engorged head of his massive cock.

Even as he was dragged from the courtroom, Joe could not tear his eyes away from the picture on the screen of Alicia’s skull, cracked open, the brainpan licked clean. He remembered the taste of his lover’s thoughts. It had been the deepest ecstasy he’d ever known. One he longed to know again.

“Get him out of here! Now! Court is adjourned!”

Over the next few days the jury heard closing arguments from both the district attorney and Joe’s defense attorney. Both sides acquitted themselves well and Joe had to retract his previous assessment of his attorney as barely competent. His defense rebuttal was brilliant. It took less than an hour before the jury returned a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity and Joseph Miles was committed to the state hospital for the criminally insane. Four years later, he was declared legally sane and transferred to state prison, super maximum security.

Part I

Raw Fillipino Kinilaw 

5 cloves of garlic minced 

2 pieces of siling mahaba chopped 

1 medium sized yellow, red, or white onion sliced into rings 

1 scallion chopped 

4 stalks of green onion chopped 

1 small piece of ginger root minced 

½ cup coconut vinegar 

2 medium-sized cherry tomatoes chopped 

salt and pepper to taste 

One large circumcised penis, skinned and chopped 

Two testicles skinned and thinly sliced

Marinade chopped man meat in coconut vinegar for at least 30mins to an hour, Drain, then combine with all ingredients. Let stand refrigerated for another 30mins to an hour. Serve chilled with your favorite drink.

One

Dear Lana,

I know you must think me a monster for what I did to your beautiful sister. Your continued silence confirms this and I can hardly blame you. It must be as difficult for you to understand what I did as it is for me to explain, but I’ll try. I owe you that.

The hardest thing about being what I am is that no one recognizes it as a disease. To most, I’m simply evil. But that explanation could not satisfy you. Evil is not a reason any sane human understands. My curse (and a curse it is) defies all the normal fetters of morality and civilization. It confounds the reasonable mind. I have puzzled for years over my nature and my conclusions sound irrational, even to me, though every experience, every urging, every lust confirms my prognosis.

I have a disease and it has made me a monster. It has made me a creature far removed from the society of men, a pariah. I’m as hopelessly addicted to the consumption of human flesh as an addict is to his next shot of heroin. Yet the drunk, the junkie, the coke fiend, and even the glutton inspire more sympathy and compassion than I could ever hope for because their compulsions do not disfigure or destroy others. Their obsessions leave only themselves and their own loved ones in tears. It destroys their own friends and families, their own lives. I could only hope for such a benign addiction. I would gladly trade my curse for theirs.

The addiction that tortures me is like the terrific thirst of a vampire combined with the rapacious hunger of a werewolf and I’m convinced the curses are one and the same. That’s why I was judged insane and sentenced to life behind bars instead of put to death, because no one understands this thing inside me and no one will listen! They do not believe this monstrous thing that I am has little choice or freewill involved in it, except for the choice whether or not to indulge it, which, for me, would be like choosing not to drink when my throat is parched or eat when my stomach churns with hunger pains. That is hardly a choice. This thing that has led me to such loathsome crimes is a disease that was passed to me. It does not describe my character. I’m a naturally mild person. I would not willfully harm the tiniest flea were I not compelled to do so by this terrible curse.

The man I see when I look in the mirror is not the man I once was, not the man I aspired to be. It is not the man who first met Alicia and, I believe, not the man I would have been had I never been accosted by my own homicidal fiend, Damon Trent, or had I not been born of the seed of a malevolent father, a sadistic pederast far worse than Damon Trent. I know how this must sound to you, like I’m avoiding responsibility for my actions, but make no mistake. I know I’m responsible. The lives I took haunt me, even those who were not so innocent. I’m a predator who grieves his prey and my immense remorse is the only proof I have that I’m still human. I mourn Alicia every day. I miss her as you could never imagine. She is the only woman, besides my mother, who ever truly loved me. I loved her too, more than I could ever express. My desire for her brought out the monster within me and I failed us both by letting it overcome me and then her.

I’m sorry for what I’ve done. Please find it in your heart to forgive me. 

Sincerely,

Joseph Miles

Joe folded the letter and placed it in the envelope. He knew the language sounded oddly stiff and formal, antiquated. He couldn’t help it. The longer he remained behind walls of steel and concrete, the more he forgot how real people spoke to one another. All he had for reference were books by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens. They, along with a host of other grand figures of historic literature, were his only friends now. He thought it was better he sounded like them than like one of his fellow convicts or the coarse prison guards.

The next time he saw his lawyer, Joe planned to give the letter to him with instructions to mail it to Lana like he’d done with the rest of them. He didn’t want to know where she lived. He didn’t trust himself. If he ever managed to leave this hellhole, he didn’t believe he could resist the urge to pay the woman a visit. The idea that she might resemble his beloved Alicia in any way would be an irresistible temptation. If she wrote him back, her return address would be on the envelope. Joe knew himself well enough to know he’d take it as an invitation. He’d made a promise to himself to destroy the envelope if she ever returned one of his letters. Joe had been writing her a letter a week since he’d been incarcerated. They had all gone unanswered so far.

Joe placed the envelope on the lone metal shelf bolted to the wall of his cell opposite his bed. Then he wrapped a towel around the shelf, stuck his legs out straight, and began the first of ten sets of twenty pull-ups. The shelf shuddered and buckled under his weight, but it held.

He’d begun his second-to-last set, biceps and lats burning with lactic acid, when the guard in the control tower called his inmate number. He had a visitor. Joe washed his face and armpits in the sink and quickly rubbed deodorant under his arms. In the super maximum (supermax) security wing of the prison, visitors were received from behind bulletproof glass. Still, Joe wanted to look and smell his best. Hygiene was his only remaining connection to his former life, his life before the monster had taken over.

*** 

Lionel Ray Miles had been a cruel and vicious man in whom the milk of human kindness had curdled long ago. He was dead inside long before his son had torn off his head. Few people who knew the man were surprised by the manner of his death. Violent men came to violent ends. The little good there was in him he’d passed on to his son, Joseph, but then Lionel Ray corrupted that as well, turning Joseph into a monster. Few who knew the family were surprised by Joseph’s crimes. His mother least of all.

Agatha Miles was the picture of matronly love and concern as she walked into the visiting room of the state prison’s supermax security wing. Joe hadn’t seen his mother in years. She’d left his father soon after Joe left for college. He always felt the separation had been calculated, like she’d been planning for years to leave his father but hadn’t wanted to break up the family, but then figured it was okay once her son was a man and out on his own.

She took a seat behind the glass partition, fiddling with the leather-bound Bible in her lap and looking far older than Joe remembered. Her hair was almost completely gray and a web of wrinkles fanned out from the corners of each eye. There were hard lines around her mouth and she seemed to have lost a lot of weight. She was no longer the plump, rosy-cheeked woman with the perpetually sunny disposition he recalled from his youth, smiling at him through tears on the day she said goodbye. She looked pale and thin. Her skin looked as if it had been draped over a skeleton. Every movement she made, however slight, seemed capable of injuring her, fracturing her brittle bones.

She raised the telephone receiver from its cradle and even that seemed like a strain. Joe had left her alone without a husband or a lover to take care of her and the effect had been catastrophic. She seemed mere seconds from the grave. She reached out for Joe and her fingers encountered the glass partition and remained there, pressed hard against the barrier. Joe placed his hand against the glass, dwarfing his mom’s birdlike digits with his massive fingers. He kept his hand there, willing his atoms to pass through the barrier to merge with hers. Whether he succeeded, he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t feel her, couldn’t smell her. He imagined her spirit a smoky charcoal gray, the embers of a fire long ago snuffed out, with dim, infrequent flashes of electric blue appearing here and there like lightning through a storm cloud that eventually dissipates without once losing its bolts from the heavens. He imagined that if he could smell her, her scent would not be the scent of electricity, blood, and the nectar of fruit that he smelled wafting maddeningly from the skin of the young people at his former college. It would be the scent of something dead and turned to dust.

His mother removed her hand and Joe eventually did the same, sighing over his failure to connect with her.

“My poor Joey. I should have taken you away from that man. I loved him though. I know you can’t understand that, but I loved your father.”

Joseph Miles never once mourned his father’s death. Seeing his mother weep over her murdered husband was disconcerting.

“He was a killer, Mom. He murdered children.”

“And you murdered him and those other people. Should I turn my back on you, Joey?”

“Maybe you should, Mom.”

His mother shook her head, and for a moment he could see the strength she’d once had. “Your father was sick. He had a weakness inside him, an illness like the one you have. You don’t know all the things he went through as a child. I don’t even know all of it, but what Damon Trent did to you, terrible as it was, was nothing compared to what your father went through. We tried to protect you, Joey. We never wanted you to turn out like him. He never wanted that. If it wasn’t for that Damon Trent …” She shook her head and wiped a tear from her eye with a handkerchief.

Joe’s thoughts paused, stuck on what his mother had just confessed.

“You knew what Dad was? You knew?”

“I suspected. I knew he had a mean streak and I was sure he’d killed people before. I just never knew it was children. I thought maybe he’d killed guys in bar fights or maybe even evening ladies. That’s why I left him. I thought he might have been buying whores and hurting them. Men do that sometimes. I never knew it was children.”

Joe stared at his mother, seeing her through different eyes.
Men do that sometimes.
She made killing prostitutes seem as natural to man as leaving the toilet seat up. Maybe she wasn’t the innocent, clueless victim he’d made her out to be. Maybe she wasn’t exactly a saint herself.

How far did the corruption in his bloodline go? Joseph wondered.

“He was proud that you went off to college. You know that? He was always talkin’ about his big college boy. We thought you were going to do great things. He called me when he saw on the news that a woman was murdered at your school. I didn’t even know he knew how to find me. He knew it was you who did it. I don’t know how he knew, but he did.”