The Collie Murders: A Serial Killer Crime Thriller (20 page)

It took Louis all of two seconds before he snapped out of his doubt of what was happening around him. He couldn’t understand what was going on, but his gut was telling him that he was looking at the face of someone whose face was a mask to the evil thing that lurked underneath it. It was clear that Rebecca didn’t have information, or a lead to help find Reyna, but that she had Reyna.

“Why are you doing this? What did Reyna ever do to you?”

Rebecca scoffed as she placed her rose gently back on her dining table. “You don’t understand do you? Reyna was in the way. After you allowed her in your home, let her rest her body in your bed, I knew that the only way I could have you would be to get rid of her. So many of the others had people in the way, and like the others, I have to make you see how much you need me. Don’t you get it?”

Louis shook his head. At least Rebecca was right about one thing. He said, “I don’t understand. What others, who are you talking about?”

Rebecca set the all-important glass of wine down next to her rose and moved back to her kitchen. She opened the door to her refrigerator and pulled out a glass canning jar. It was full of what appeared to Louis at first to be pale and dark pickles in yellow liquid, but then as she moved forward, inching closer to him, he could see that they were not pickles, but the remains of several ring fingers in a multitude of sizes.

“You see now, don’t you? These are all I have of the men who I’d been fated to marry. They all refused me, so I was forced to do what I had to do. I loved them all, Louis. I loved them as much as I love you now, and not one of them could ever see that they were supposed to be with me.

“They all begged me, Louis. They begged me to leave them alone, to spare the ones they foolishly thought they should be with, but they were all blinded by lies, just as you’re blinded.”

Louis felt like a child that was being told that the existence of Santa was nothing more than a fairy tale. He asked, more because he had a sick desire to know than anything else, “How did you become a police officer? Why did you come here?”

Rebecca smiled. “I go where ever I’m told to go. I have a mission, Louis. I had to become a police officer so that I could find the man that is worthy of me. Don’t you know that’s why we’re supposed to be together? You’re my
partner.
”

Louis again, shook his head. “How do you love me? How can you love me, when I don’t love you? It isn’t love, Rebecca. How can I be with you, where there’s nothing more between us than exchanged words?”

‘Shut up! You don’t know a damned thing about me! You think I’d go to all this trouble if I wasn’t certain? You’ve been brainwashed by that woman into thinking that she’s the only one for you. Don’t you dare lie either; I’ve seen that way you look at her. That night at the bar, even as she shouted at you and told you that she never wanted to see you again, you were such a fool because all there was in your eyes was pain! You wanted her even though she told you she was leaving!

“I’ve been here all this time. I know you look at me. I know that you need me as much as I need you. When she left you, I was there. What makes her better than me? I’m more beautiful than she ever thought of being!”

“You are beautiful, Rebecca, but only on the outside. You’ll never be beautiful on the inside, and that’s why no matter who you go after, no matter how many times you kill, you’ll still be alone. In this case, it’s really not them but you.”

Rebecca’s face twisted, her eyes slitting so far that she appeared to be feline. The moment she moved to run at him, Louis was ready knowing that as far as she’d pushed her deranged mind, that she was bound to snap at him at some point. What he didn’t expect was that she’d toss her jar of fingers at him or that it would hit against his head as it smashed into the tile of her kitchen floor.

Louis reeled from the impact of the jar, and the smell of the formaldehyde as it rose to infiltrate his nose. He gagged and tried to cover his mouth as confusion took its place over purpose and he wasn’t almost shocked as Rebecca grabbed hold of him and forced him to the floor. She had him, lock stock and barrel, her thighs wrapped around him as she straddled him, her face looking down on him in a maniacal gleam with a knife pointed downwards, poised directly over his heart.

“You have one last chance, Louis. Just one.”

Louis didn’t know what option he had, other than to tell Rebecca what she wanted to hear. He considered hitting her, harming her, but even as the thought entered his mind, his conditioned brain forced him to remain still. Even though she was a monster in a beautiful woman’s skin, even though she’d murdered countless men and women in the pursuit of her demented delusions, he couldn’t harm her. However, he couldn’t force himself to tell her that he loved her either. That word, that simple four-lettered word was meant for one woman, and one woman only.

“Get bent.”

Rebecca screamed, “Why?! Why can’t any of you love me! I’ll kill you!”

Louis was aware when Rebecca’s knife hand moved, aware when his instinct to live took over his
lifelong conditioning to never place his hands to a woman was over run, and he shoved his hands outwards as the knife nicked his right arm and Rebecca was thrown from him on her back. As soon as she hit the floor, the knife she’d been brandishing flew from her grip and Louis was moving, the tables turned as he straddled her. With his hands to her neck, and his grip tightening, he shouted, “Tell me where she is, damn you, or I’ll kill you!”

Before Rebecca would have had a snowball’s chance in hell to answer him, even if she’d had a mind to, the front door to her home flew open and Jon and Agent Douglas, flanked by two other men rushed inside, their guns pointed at him.

“Let Rebecca go!” Jon commanded.
 

********
 

Louis, for the moment in time that he had to let his mind absorb what was happening, couldn’t understand why Jon would command him to let go of the neck of a serial killer. It made little sense to him, even though part of his mind understood that Jon himself thought he was addled from his supposed loss of Reyna and that he was bound to attack anyone that came across his past. From the outside looking in, he couldn’t blame Jon for his actions.

He let his grip slide on Rebecca just enough so that she could breathe. It was clear that he’d given her too much latitude when she started squirming and shouting, “He’s trying to kill me, he’s the killer! He broke into.”

Louis returned his grip to Rebecca’s throat, ready to squeeze the life from her right then and there. If he hadn’t needed her to tell him where Reyna was, he’d have done just that, regardless of what would happen to him after the fact.

“Let her go, Louis! Come on man, this isn’t the way. We’ll get you help, I swear to you. If you don’t let her go, man, Agent Douglas will shoot you.”

Louis tried to swallow the bitterness that was rising in the back of his throat and which was threatening to choke him. He looked around him, trying to find some inspiration to help him get the message across to Jon that what the man was seeing with his eyes was not the truth. It was then he was reminded of the foul smell of rotting fingers and was gifted with all the inspiration he needed.

“Jon, brother, walk around the room. Trust me, for the love of God, trust me. She’s lying.”

Jon didn’t move from his position behind him; Louis could tell this from the reflection of Jon he could see in the glass of a China hutch to his right. If Jon didn’t move, then he wouldn’t see the evidence spilled all over the floor.

“Let her go, Louis. We’ll sort all of this out once you let her go.”

Louis shook his head, his eyes boring into the eyes of monster he had in his grip. “I can’t man; she has Reyna. I have to find Reyna. Time’s running out for her I know it. Please, man, look around you. You’ll see them.”

Louis let his eyes drift to the China hutch, and remarkably, Jon did as he’d asked this time. The worried expression on Jon’s face went together with the determined expression he could see on Agent Douglas. The man was prepared to kill him, and if one single thing went wrong, he knew that Douglas wouldn’t miss and that there’d be a bullet in his back for all of his effort.

“I don’t see”

Louis interrupted Jon. “Yes you do. They’re hers. All of them.”

The turn in Jon’s expression, the knowledge that something vital had shifted in the man’s knowledge had relief flooding through Louis, so much so that he let his guard down, let his grip on Rebecca slip and then, Hell broke loose from
its place in the bowels of the Earth and spewed it’s chaos out all around him.

Rebecca screamed and shifted her weight, throwing him from her as if he wasn’t a man that weighed nearly twice as much as she did. In the confusion, she was able to pick her knife back up, and as shouted, “No one will have you but me!” a gun shot rang out as
blood flew around him like red rain.

Louis didn’t notice the pain in his chest until Jon came to stand over him, and then it was as if someone had heated a poker until it turned white and then run him
through with it. “Oh, damn that hurts!”
 

********
 

Jon stayed with him until the ambulance arrive and then Louis was forced to endure the paramedics as they checked out the knife wound Rebecca had managed to give him before she’d been shot in the back of her head by a well-placed shot from Agent Douglas. As he’d been given a shot of morphine and the wound dressed, Douglas walked over to him, a frown on his face,
and his one bruised eye next to his good eye staring at him together. It was clear that he wasn’t happy with how things had gone down.

“Seems like I owe you an apology. Can’t tell you how long we’d been after her, but she’d been killing people from state to state with a trail of bodies behind her a mile wide. We didn’t even know she was a woman
until an hour or so ago when our suspect confessed to doing her bidding. Even then, we had nothing to go on.”

“I don’t give a damn about that woman, or anything concerning the case. She had Reyna, and still has her somewhere. You killed her.”

Agent Douglas seemed to be a loss for words, and even before he answered, Jon was walking up to them, his eyes that shade of thought that told Louis he’d been thinking in that way of his that made smoke come from his ears.

“You know, Louis, when I sent her home, she’d gone here and stayed here. If she has Reyna somewhere, wouldn’t she have gone to where she had her?”

It was then Louis knew. Disregarding the shout behind him from the paramedic to remain where he was in the back of his ambulance, Louis ran at Rebecca’s house and then stormed inside, not looking to where her brains had splattered all over her kitchen, but to the rest of the house.

The house was immaculate, and beyond the living
room, there didn’t seem to be any sign that someone lived there at all. The girly decoration ceased as soon as he stepped into her hallway.

Even though he didn’t expect an answer, Louis shouted, “Reyna! Reyna where are you! Answer me! Reyna!!”
 

********
 

Reyna could hear Louis again, and as weak as she was, as convinced as she was that his voice was nothing but her imagination once again playing tricks on her, she felt stirred by the desperation she could hear in Louis’ voice. It sounded pained and excited, afraid and demanding. She’d never heard that tone in Louis’ voice before, and because of that, her heart began to beat just a little faster, forcing blood to rush though her desiccated body, and she found that she could summon enough energy to shout, “Here! I’m here!”

Over and over again she shouted, so loudly in fact that she couldn’t hear a response from Louis, even if her ability to fantasize couldn’t allow him to respond. She felt, no, she knew that she had to reply, even if it was useless. She had to live, didn’t she?

There was a shift in her world, a shift in the coffin that surrounded her body like a wooded glove, and then light flooded her. It was so bright that at once she had the surreal thought that she’d been plucked from Hell and thrust into Heaven, since she knew that no mortal could look on anything so bright and still be alive.

It was then that warmth and strength surrounded her, then that she felt herself move for the first time in what had to be a millennium. Surrounded in the brilliance, the only thing she heard was the sound of a heart beating. It couldn’t be her heart, since she was dead, so it had to be the heart of another. If she as in Heaven, then she knew her soul had found Louis and that the arms around her were his.

“Reyna? I heard you Reyna, I heard you. Oh god Reyna, talk to me. Reyna?”

She felt herself shake and the light the surround her dimmed as she blinked, and she frowned. “Louis?”

“Oh, thank God. Doll, look at me. Are you okay?”

Reyna bean crying. She didn’t know how her body was able to make tears, as dehydrated as it was and she assumed it was the last of whatever she had left at her disposal that she had running down the sides of her face. She let her head fall forward and she sighed into the comfort that it met.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t find me.”

“Never doubt it Reyna. I told you I loved you, didn’t I? I meant it. I’ll always come for you.”