Prey Drive (8 page)

Officer Addison’s lips were thin and pink. She wore no makeup and needed none. She had chubby cheeks and when she smiled, dimples erupted on both sides of her face. Staring at her, Joe couldn’t help but smile, and this time, there was nothing manipulative behind the expression. The guard was “cute.” That was the best way to describe her. She was practically adorable. Her obvious bashfulness only made her more endearing. Joe knew he had to win her over. If Selene’s lawyers failed, she could be his ticket to freedom. He only hoped he wouldn’t have to kill her when it was over. His conscience was still struggling with Alicia’s death. He didn’t want any more regrets.

The elevator doors opened and Joe was led down two more long halls and through three more doors before finally being led into a room to be strip searched. He was walked through a metal detector and then Belton patted him down and waved a wand over him before handing him off to a slender, pockmarked older officer Joe didn’t know. They usually had a CO from another cellblock do the strip search. COs and inmates often got too familiar and the warden didn’t want a CO letting something slip or getting paid off to ignore a piece of contraband. If the guards and the inmates didn’t know each other, that type of collusion was a lot less likely.

Both Officer Belton and Officer Addison remained in the room as Joe was ordered to strip.

“Normally, there’s only two of us in here for this. But since this is your first day, I didn’t want to throw you to the wolves so soon. And this motherfucker right here is the goddamn wolfman! Don’t let him fool you. He’d rip your goddamn throat out if he could. He’s in here for eating a woman alive along with three other folks. Did you know that? They said there was nothing left of her but bones when he was done with her,” Belton said, watching the new officer for a reaction.

Joe turned to see her reaction too. She shivered and rubbed her arms like she was trying to rub away goose bumps.

“I’ve got it from here,” the pockmarked old CO said as he donned plastic gloves. “All right, Mr. Miles, you know the drill. Everything off.”

Belton unshackled him so Joe could remove his shoes, shirt, pants, and underwear. Joe folded them neatly and placed them on a metal cot. He made eye contact with Officer Addison while the old pockmarked CO checked under his tongue, in his hair, under his arms, beneath his ball sack. He saw her appraise his striated chest muscles, chiseled triceps and biceps, pronounced six-pack that was nearly an eight-pack, the thick trapezius and deltoid muscles in his shoulders, his huge quadriceps and calf muscles, and the impressive length and girth of his sexual organ, which was thickening and hardening as he stared at her. She inhaled sharply and managed, with obvious effort, to pull her eyes away from his groin.

“Touch your toes, son.”

Joe bent over and the officer checked his rectum with a flashlight before probing it with his fingers.

“He don’t look so tough now, do he? Huh? He still look sexy with a fist in his ass?” Belton asked Officer Addison, glaring at her in disgust.

“Okay, he’s good.”

“Get dressed, Miles. Your visitors await,” Belton said gleefully.

There was something different in the way Belton spoke to him now. There was a smirk on his face. Earlier he seemed incensed at the idea of anyone coming to visit him, especially two women. Now he seemed to be delighted by the idea.

“Who are they?”

Belton waved toward the visiting room. “See for yourself.”

Joe hurried back into his prison clothes and the two officers walked with him into the visiting room. Seated on the opposite side of a thick glass partition was a voluptuous Spanish woman with long, black, curly hair, pudgy cheeks with deep dimples, full bow-shaped lips, and large, timid eyes with heavy eyelashes. She was young, barely twenty, and painfully pretty. Even through the conservative, high-necked blouse she was wearing, it was obvious that her breasts were larger than average.

Joe paused in the doorway of the visitor’s room and staggered backward a few steps. “No. It can’t be.”

“What’s wrong, Joseph? You see a ghost?”

Behind the Spanish girl was a woman in her forties with the same long curly hair, the same dimpled cheeks and bow-shaped lips, the same voluptuous bosom, the same fiery, explosive aura. It was evidently the girl’s mother and she looked familiar. Joe remembered seeing her at the trial. She was Alicia’s mother. He shuffled forward as if in a daze, pulled out the metal folding chair, and sat down. With trembling hands, he picked up the phone and the woman on the other end did the same.

“A-Alicia?”

The woman shook her head slowly. Her eyes filled with tears and her bottom lip trembled. “No, you piece of shit. I’m her sister. Lana.”

Joe turned to look at the older woman. She snatched the phone from Lana’s hand and hissed between clenched teeth. “Alicia was my daughter. You murdered her! I just want to know why. Why! At the trial, you said you loved her. How could you say you love her and do … do what you did to my baby?”

The tears cascaded from her eyes. Her face creased and pinched in a grimace of pain, mouth snarled, brow furrowed.

Joe looked away from her, and at Lana.

Lana scowled in contempt and took the phone back from her mother.

“Did you read my letters?” he asked.

“No! I don’t want to read some bullshit you spent nights perfecting, picking just the rights words to make yourself sound better! I want you to tell me right here and right now. How the fuck could you do that to my sister?”

Joe dropped his head and his lip trembled. A tear spilled from his eye and he quickly wiped it away. He took a deep breath, raised his head to look Lana in her eyes, and spoke. “I-I did love her. I was sick. It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t help myself. I loved her so much. You have to believe me. I still think about her.”

“We don’t want to hear about you fantasizing about Alicia. You murdered and ate her. We just wanted to ask you why. We want to be able to find closure, to forgive you so we can move on. But we can’t do that until we know why you did it.”

Joe struggled with the words. He could see Alicia so clearly in Lana’s face. Her voice even sounded similar. Her expression, full of pain and anger and fear, marred by his betrayal, was almost identical to the expression Alicia had worn when he began to cannibalize her breasts. Even with all the guilt and remorse Joe felt now, he couldn’t stop himself from staring at Lana’s breasts. He began to salivate and the monster awakened, hungry and mean.

“She was just so beautiful, so sweet, so … so tragic,” Joe said.

Lana dropped her head and cast a look toward her mother at the word “tragic.” The older woman nodded with her eyes down. They both knew what he meant by tragic. He was referring to Alicia’s late father and why he’d killed himself.

“I fell in love with her the moment I saw her. She was going to help me fight this thing inside of me. She was going to help find a cure, but the longer I stayed with her, the harder these … urges were to resist. She was the most flawless, the most perfect woman I’d ever seen. I never wanted to hurt her.”

Lana’s voice was softer now, less combative. “But you did. You did hurt her. You killed her. You fucking ate her alive, you sick fuck!”

“She asked me to,” Joe replied.

“What?” Lana and her mother asked in unison. Joe hadn’t testified on his own behalf at the trial. He’d sat sullenly beside his lawyer as expert after expert, including Professor Locke, testified to his mental state. This was the first time he’d spoken about Alicia to anyone other than the professor.

“She asked me to eat her. She said she wanted to be part of me. ”

Lana’s mother gasped and let out a moan like she’d lost her child all over again. She looked heavenward and clasped her hands in a position of prayer against her forehead. Tears wept from her eyes. Lana’s eyes blazed brilliant with rage.

“No! I don’t believe that. You’re fucking lying!”

“She loved me too, Lana. She understood me.”

“
Bullshit!
You murdered her! She trusted you and you betrayed her. You’re a sick, perverted bastard and you deserve to be locked up forever!”

Joseph nodded. “You’re right. I’m a sick bastard and I do deserve to be locked up, but you’re wrong about Alicia. We loved each other and now we are one. I still feel her inside of me, in my blood. I’ll always love her. She’s part of me forever.” Tears welled in Joe’s eyes and spilled down his cheeks.

For a moment, as she watched the big cannibal weep in obvious pain, Lana’s expression softened. For just a moment Joe could tell she believed him, that she wanted to believe him. Because the way he described Alicia’s death was almost beautiful, poetic, not like the horrific photographs they’d shown at his trial. And Joe knew Lana needed to believe Alicia had died happy, loved, rather than screaming in pain, afraid, and alone, helpless in the grip of a sadistic serial killer. Thinking about her sister dying that way had obviously been tearing her and her mother up inside. Joe’s story offered her another interpretation, one that might allow them both to sleep at night.

Then, as abruptly as it had come the expression was gone and Lana’s dark, beautiful eyes hardened once more.

“No one could ever love you, Joseph Miles. You’re a fucking
monster
! No one could ever love you!”

Joe nodded in agreement. The tears flowed without relent now. “I am a monster. You’re right. And you should never forgive me. I took her away from you. I took her from the world. It was selfish of me … of both of us. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. I tried. I’m sorry.”

Joe hung up the phone and stood. Lana and her mother stared at him, hugging each other for support. Hatred burned in Lana’s eyes. Joe had never seen such raw, naked aggression in a woman’s eyes before. Lana looked so much like Alicia it was breaking Joe’s heart to look at her. She could have been Alicia’s twin. It hurt him to see that expression on a face so beautiful, a face he had once loved, that he still loved. He turned and knocked on the door.

The new CO, Officer Addison, opened the door and Joe held out his hands for the shackles. The officer’s hands trembled as she secured the cuffs around his wrists. Joe was weeping openly now. His body jerked and hitched, wracked by the force of his sorrow. He couldn’t get Lana’s face, those eyes filled with rage and sorrow, out of his mind. Her words followed him out of the room.

“No one could ever love you, Joseph Miles. You’re a fucking MONSTER! No one could ever love you!”

She was right. This thing he had become had robbed him of any chance he had of giving and receiving love. Anyone or anything he got close to he destroyed. Joe continued to weep unselfconsciously. Beyond Officer Addison, standing in the hallway, Officer Belton smiled.

Ten 

Officer Cindy Addison didn’t know what to think of the giant serial killer weeping and moaning the name Alicia over and over again as he lumbered along beside her, shackled at the wrists and ankles. There was something so painfully tragic about him. He’d looked so dangerous and intimidating when they’d come to remove him from his cell, so arrogant, powerful, even sexy. But now he looked perfectly pathetic. He’d been almost hysterical with grief ever since she’d escorted him from the visitor’s room, and she could tell by Belton’s demeanor that he had known this would happen.

Immediately after Joe went into the room, Belton had told Cindy that Joe’s visitors were the mother and sister of one of his victims. The warden had granted their request to visit Joseph even though they weren’t on his visitor’s list. The warden had made an exception and Cindy wondered if it had only been to help the two women get whatever closure they had come seeking or if it had also been done to further torture Joseph, to punish him for his crimes, to break him. Obviously, Joseph Miles wasn’t the remorseless sadist the tabloids and talk shows had made him out to be. And that confused Cindy. She’d read quite a bit about serial killers. It was a bit of a hobby. They were sociopaths, incapable of guilt or empathy or remorse. That didn’t fit at all with Joseph Miles’ reaction to confronting the family of his victims. If it was an act, it was damn convincing and he was staying in character long after the curtain had fallen.

Before she knew what she was doing, Cindy’s maternal instincts took over. She reached out and patted Joe on the back, consoling him. He turned to look at her, eyes red from crying, and nodded, acknowledging her moment of compassion. Belton jabbed the big cannibal in the small of his back with the baton, ushering him forward.

“Keep your ass movin’, Miles! We ain’t got all damn day!”

Joe nodded and continued shuffling along the tier toward his cell.

“Cryin’ like a little bitch! I bet you wasn’t cryin’ when you was eatin’ that woman’s daughter. How much you think your victims’ loved ones are crying now? Fuck your bitch-ass tears!”

Cindy saw the look that passed over Joe’s face when he locked eyes with Belton. There was no remorse in it now, no mercy, no forgiveness. They didn’t waver and he didn’t blink once. His eyes looked completely empty, cold, like the eyes of a snake. He smiled, revealing a mouthful of teeth that had been filed to points. For a moment she was afraid the big inmate was going to lunge for her new partner, and despite his restraints, she wasn’t sure either of them could have stopped him before Joseph Miles tore Belton’s throat out.

Belton’s mouth dropped open and his eyes got big and watery. He could sense it too, his own fragile mortality confronted by a force of merciless savagery.

Then Joe turned and continued shuffling forward toward his cell.

Cindy and Belton swallowed hard. They didn’t relax again until Joseph Miles was once again safe in his cell.

As Cindy uncuffed his wrists and ankles and then turned and slowly closed the door, Joseph Miles turned to her with a bashful, wounded look, staring at the ground before slowly raising his tear-filled, ice blue eyes to hers. “I want to thank you for … your kindness. This entire ordeal has been so hard on me. Professor Locke has been the only one who understands my illness, the only one trying to help me. I don’t want to hurt people. I want to get better. Anyway, thanks.”