The Stranger You Seek (30 page)

“
No
. Not ever.”

“Some men aren’t capable of fidelity,” she said. “Jacob might have been one of them. My husband was not a perfect man, but something you may not realize is that he was a good father and a good companion to me for thirty years.”

I thought about all the times I’d seen Dobbs take off his wedding ring and drop it in his pocket when he was flirting with someone—the new girl in the unit, a woman in the cafeteria, a contact when we were on assignment, someone in local law enforcement. He’d once slept with both a female deputy
and
the sheriff when we were on a serial case in Wyoming. I’d said something to him back then about a tan line on his finger, and he’d laughed at me.
“Only a sociopath could be unfaithful to a devoted wife while wearing a thing like that, Keye. I don’t remove it to disguise my marital status. I remove it out of respect.”

“I’m so sorry,” I told Mirror Chang. “What you’re feeling must be excruciating.”

“You must have been very angry at him for costing you another job. In fact, you must have hated my husband.”

I waited, stung by the venom in her voice.

“Did you kill Jacob, Dr. Street? Were you the whore who murdered my husband?”

I pulled over before I reached the guard shack where I would have to
get a pass to enter the island. “Ms. Chang.” I hoped I could disguise the shock and offense in my voice. She must have been crazy with grief. “I have worked for my entire adult life to stop the people who inflict this kind of pain on others. It’s no secret your husband and I had a toxic history. Yes, I disliked Jacob. But he didn’t deserve what happened to him. And you and your children don’t deserve the misery you’re feeling now. If it helps at all, we have capital punishment in Georgia. And the Atlanta Police Department won’t stop until this bastard is on death row.”

A red-tailed hawk was circling above the wax myrtle and white oleander on each side of the two-lane, surveying the marsh and mud flats for prey. I didn’t think I could have hated Dobbs any more than I had while he was alive. But I was wrong.

“I had to know.” It was a broken whisper. I think she was crying. The line went dead.

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Your Online Adult Edge Fetish & Knife Play Community blogs > beyond the EDGE, a fantasy by BladeDriver blog title > Crash Test Dummy

Hello friends and fans and thank you for your comments. I am so glad you are enjoying my dark fantasies. I love reading yours too. Perhaps we can play together one day, compare techniques.

Have you been reading the newspapers? They are listing the names of all my old partners. This has made me a bit nostalgic, I admit, remembering the early days when I was still sharpening my skills, the days before I could point my phone and take their sweet memory home with me. I want so to have these memories recorded and to share them with you.

Her name was Anne and we were both young, she younger and greener than I. She had a sour expression when she opened the door that day, said something about me being late. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. Everyone was at class. She was so needy and so desperate, always wanting time when she could be the focus of my world. She wanted sex too. Neither one of us was in love with sex with the other. It was just what she did, how she filled up that
black hole of need she carried around. It never stopped. She always wanted it, wanted something,
want, want, want, me, me, me
. And when she wasn’t painting her pictures or fucking, she was smoking pot or drinking or eating. Anne always wanted something going into her. Her requirements seemed endless, just vacuous, bottomless need. My mother behaved just like this with my father. I watched her suck the life out of him and everything else around her.

We won’t have as much time now, Anne told me that day, maybe just an hour. That’s plenty, I said, and she pressed her body against me. This was going to be easy. Let her feel my full attention. Let her be my sole focus. I was in the mood that day. I’d come prepared. She had said she wanted to explore with me. I deeply wanted to explore every inch of her with the point of my blade.

Oh no, she said. That wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. It was too much. It hurt.
Poor baby
. Shut the fuck up, I told her. Just shut the fuck up. She started to cry. Her face was red and she was bleeding lightly. I had barely run the sharp edge over her right breast just to see what kind of touch it would take to make a shallow wound. But she had to get all whiny and red-faced. I was just getting started. I had planned this. I wasn’t going to stop. It had been eight long years since that first time when I was only sixteen. It was so hurried back then, and I was so scared and so angry. I had not been able to savor it. That day in Anne’s room, I needed it.

I kissed her and reassured her and when she turned her beautiful back to me, I slammed the base of her own table lamp into the back of her head and the bitch crumpled like a piece of aluminum foil. I checked the clock. Forty-five minutes to explore Anne. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. It was the first time I had worked any kind of restraint on a human, the first time I had used wire. But it was fantastic—ankles and wrists and neck wired to the chair. Her eyes got wide and the veins were popping out everywhere. The wire was twisted too tight. I had tied a scarf tight around her head to hold a washcloth in her mouth. She was gagging and crying. The wire cut into her each time she moved and each time she moaned. I closed my eyes and listened. Pleasure or pain—I couldn’t tell from her sounds. It was fascinating. Really it was. I was so in love with her at that moment. For all her need, she was giving back at last.

She nearly tipped herself over in the chair when I took off her nipples. Big mess, urine on the floor, lots of drama. I should have waited. I have learned now what to do first and what to save for later, but that day I was so new. When I fucked her with the blade, she gave up. She just copped out, passed
out, left me alone, so I whacked the fuck out of her again with that lamp and let my knife do whatever it wanted. It was like stabbing grapefruit. The point paused briefly, met some resistance, and then plunged inside. I did it until she had paid me back everything that she and women like her take from us.
Everything
. I did it until I got good at it. And then I sank my teeth into her warm flesh and I came so hard. So hard. I’ll never forget her, my crash test dummy.

K
atherine Chambers had entered midlife plump and silver-haired. They had not wanted children, she told me, but at thirty-seven she became pregnant and everything changed.

“It’s not that I don’t consider myself a feminist, I do,” she said with no accent whatsoever. I couldn’t have guessed what part of the country she’d come from. She filled cups with flavored coffee from a glass coffee press. The scent of vanilla and hazelnut wafted through the room. We pulled out chairs at a round pine table. I could see the water beyond her kitchen window and the sand, golden brown and packed against the earth from last night’s rain.

“It’s just that I have this question about when life begins.” Katherine said it casually, as if we were discussing last evening’s storm. “No one seems to know. Not the scientists or the theologians. That put abortion way out of the realm of possibility for me.” She took a sip of coffee; a rueful smile played on her lips as she returned her mug to the table. “We thought about adoption, but as time went by Martin and I became terribly excited about having a child.… I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but you never expect to outlive your children. It’s something that comes as a complete surprise. Although I don’t suppose you could plan for something like that anyway.”

“No, ma’am. I don’t suppose you could.”

She fell silent, looked out the window at the row of live oaks.

The ocean was full today, rolling dark green and acting up a little. Hurricane season wasn’t over yet. So far this year the winds had all moved too far out to sea to make the Georgia coast. But there were reports of one not far off. Edward had formed near Jamaica, pummeled Cuba, ripped through the Keys, then moved back out to sea, where he was now patiently churning, regaining strength for another run at the coast. Watches were posted from West Palm to Jacksonville, Jekyll, St. Simons, Savannah, Hilton Head, Charleston, and the Outer Banks. I wondered how this would affect my departure on the little two-lane strip that winds around the island. I could hear Rauser saying, “It’s not all about you, Keye.” But I knew the truth. Of course it was.

“Is it true that the person who killed my daughter is responsible for all these other murders?” Mrs. Chambers asked.

“The evidence points to that, yes.”

“I read those awful letters to the police in the paper. They were very difficult to read.”

“I can’t imagine what that would feel like,” I told her. “I’m so sorry.”

Her eyes touched the ocean again, then came back to mine. “How can I help you, Miss Street?”

She led me into her living room. There was an oil painting over the fireplace, Jekyll Island’s lighthouse rising up above city skyscrapers, and below it, shadowy, gray-flanneled figures with briefcases, bent against the winter wind, heads down. Yellow cabs lined narrow streets.

“We moved here from Manhattan when Anne was sixteen,” Katherine Chambers explained. “I think she missed the city very much. She painted this then.”

“Talented,” I said as if I had a clue.

Two boxes sat in front of a coffee table, Anne’s possessions from her college dorm, Mrs. Chambers told me. I looked through everything as delicately as possible. She sat watching me, her face a little pale.

“May I borrow the yearbooks and the journal? I have yearbooks from the university but I’d like to see Anne’s.”

“Because they have messages inside from classmates and friends.” It wasn’t a question. “You think it was someone she knew.”

“Is that what you think?”

Katherine shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know. Anne was so secretive about her private life. Tallahassee might have been three thousand miles away for all we knew about our daughter’s life there.”

Secretive
was the word her roommates had used too.

“So you don’t know if she was seeing anyone at school?”

“There were times when she didn’t call for a while. I told Martin that I thought she was having some sort of romance. You know how it is when you’re young and exploring. You don’t think you need anyone else when you’re involved. I had the feeling she was going from one relationship to another very quickly.”

I slid a picture of Charlie Ramsey across the table. “Have you ever seen this man?”

“No.”

“How about friends here on the island? Anyone who would have kept in touch with her while she was at school?”

“She was only here for one year and she wasn’t very happy. Anne couldn’t seem to connect with the kids here. There was Old Emma, though. My daughter seemed fascinated with her, but then half the island finds Emma fascinating. Anne walked down there in the mornings sometimes with breakfast for her and a thermos full of coffee. Barefoot.” She hesitated. Her smile flickered. “After dinner, she always gathered the leftovers and put them in the refrigerator until morning for Emma’s cats. Now we do it.”

“So Emma still lives here?”

“Oh yes. I think she’s been here her whole life, her and about a hundred and fifty cats. The road washed out some time ago, though. You’ll have to walk if you want to see her.” She handed Charlie’s photo back to me. “You’re not anything like they made you out to be on television. I’m sorry to bring that up, but I recognized you. We get all the Atlanta stations down here, you know.”

“Thank you for saying that. It’s not who I am now, but I was a functioning addict for years.”

“I’ve been sober since we found out I was pregnant with Anne. Thirty-five years. That pregnancy was a blessing to us in so many ways.”

I nodded and smiled. “Thank you, Mrs. Chambers. I’ll make sure Anne’s things get back to you safely.… I’m sorry about Anne. I’m sorry
to come here and stir all this up again. If there’s ever anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to call.” I handed her my card. She took it, and then, to my surprise, her fingers closed painfully around mine.

“Find this monster,” she urged me. “
That’s
what you can do for me, Miss Street.”

I followed the beach a quarter mile until it narrowed at a cluster of moss-draped oaks and a sandy path strewn with driftwood. As I walked, I imagined sixteen-year-old Anne Chambers coming here in the mornings, bare feet sinking into the sand, a foil-wrapped breakfast and a coffee thermos in her hands.

Emma knew I was there before I realized she was watching me. I was fascinated by her home—part folk art gallery, part salvage yard. Sinks and car seats, bumpers, bicycles, old windows, doors, high chairs—anything you can think of that might have once been abandoned—were piled, hung, or welded into elaborate sculptures in Emma’s little patch of sandy front yard.

It was beautiful … and hideous, and must have taken thirty years to collect and construct. From every cool, flat surface, languid cats lounged and stretched and watched me steadily with cautious feral eyes. The air was warm and sticky and the mosquitoes clearly had not been given their breakfast. The house was decades past due for a paint job. Salt air and time had stripped it down to raw wood. When I reached out to knock on the screen door, something moved just on the other side.