THREE TIMES A LADY (24 page)

Dinah’s eyes misted up.  Ever since her and Tyler’s only child had died of leukemia three years earlier, she’d worked tirelessly to help find a cure.  Still, she never quite felt like she did enough.  There was always
more
she could do.  More money she could give.  More charity events she could attend.

Derrick shifted back into friend-mode, putting aside his agent role for the moment.  ‘We all miss, Marilyn, Dinah,’ he said softly.  ‘She was an angel.’

Dinah wiped at her eyes with the back of her left hand.  Between the tears in her eyes and the waterworks coming from the heavens it was almost impossible to see anything on the road in front of her. 

‘Yes, she
was
an angel, Derrick,’ Dinah said, sighing softly.  ‘She was an absolute angel sent from God.   And I know she’s watching over me.  As a matter of fact, she’s watching over me right now.  I swear to God, sometimes I can
feel
her.’

Dinah paused and swallowed away the lump that had formed in her throat.  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s a crazy goddamn mess out here so I need to let you go.  I need to concentrate on driving.’

‘How far away from home are you?’ Derrick asked.

Dinah squinted again through the windshield.  Almost as if on cue, a flash of lighting exploded overhead, allowing her to catch a quick glimpse of a green exit sign on the side of the highway. 
Maverick Road.
  ‘About five miles now,’ Dinah said.  ‘Should only take me about twenty more years to get home at this rate.’

Derrick clucked his tongue.  ‘That sucks, girl.  Anyway, be careful out there.  I’d hate for anything to happen to my favourite client.’

‘Don’t you mean your
only
client?

Derrick laughed.  ‘Yeah, that’s what I said.  Anyway, I’ll call you in the morning.  I’ve got some ideas I want to run by you.  Some really big stuff in the works.’

Dinah switched off with Derrick and sighed.  No doubt he was cooking up even more crazy schemes designed to get her even more publicity – as if
publicity
was something she needed any more of.  She already had more publicity now than she knew what to do with.  Enough to choke a horse. 

Dinah shook her head in exasperation.  When she’d agreed to do the reality television show six months earlier she’d known that the media scrutiny would be intense, but she’d had no idea just
how
intense it would be.  Last week, she’d actually caught a photographer snooping through her
garbage
.  Lord only knew what he’d been looking for – or what he’d found.

Chasing away the unpleasant thought with another quick shake of her head, Dinah’s heart nearly stopped dead in her chest when her tires suddenly hydroplaned on the slick pavement of the highway.  She sucked in a sharp breath over her teeth that sent a sharp stab of pain shooting through her lungs and slammed down her foot on the brake pedal – the exact
opposite
of what all the experts told you to do in situations like this. 

The car fishtailed wildly out of control, then took a sharp left-hand turn and headed directly toward the concrete divider in the middle of the highway.  Dinah squeezed shut her eyes and gripped the steering wheel with all her might, bracing for bone-crushing impact.

But it never came.

Opening up her eyes again when the car finally came to a gentle stop five seconds later, Dinah gasped.  The concrete divider was staring her dead in the face from no more than three feet away.

Before she knew it, she was laughing and crying at the same time.  Against all odds, she was still
alive
.

And she knew
exactly
who to thank for that.

Lifting her stare to the heavens, Dinah breathed out a grateful sigh of relief.  ‘Thank you, Marilyn,’ she said.  You’ve always been mama’s little angel, haven’t you?’

Nicholas switched off the flashing lights and wildly blaring sirens of the ambulance before swinging it around the southwest side of Dinah Leach’s guesthouse ten minutes later.  Purchased at auction for fifteen thousand dollars a year earlier with proceeds from Timmy’s television work and outfitted with all the latest bells and whistles, the ambulance was a Trojan horse to ensure he crossed off the first name on his list without drawing any undue attention to himself.  After all, more was more sometimes, especially for a girl like him.  His mother’s idea, of course. 

Nicholas switched off the engine and studied the guesthouse.  The reality star’s overflow housing looked impressive in its own right.  Twice the size of a normal person’s house and a hundred times nicer.  Sitting about thirty yards away from the main dwelling, it provided the perfect cover he’d need to get away with what he already knew would be his
exceedingly
perfect crime.

Stretching his neck six inches to the right, Nicholas lifted his left wrist to check his
Mickey Mouse
watch.  With any luck at all, the two ladies he was waiting for would arrive at just about the same time.  The sky had reached its darkest point of the night now and the howling wind seemed more insistent, more
intense
, transforming the spitting rain from earlier into a thunderous downpour that danced a gleeful jig on the ambulance’s metal roof.  From the look of things, hurricane Allison would be here at any minute now.  Good.  But where in the hell was Dinah Leach?  Impending hurricane or not, the nightclub was just seven short miles away. 

As if on cue, that’s when Dinah Leach finally wheeled her silver BMW up the long, winding driveway of her palatial pad, the vehicle’s headlights bouncing up and down in perfect time with the shocks and piercing the foreboding night like sharp silver knives stabbing hard through a huge black sheet. 

Nicholas breathed out a deep sigh of relief as his eyes drank in the delicious sight of his target once more. 
All systems go.

From the driver’s side of the ambulance he watched Dinah Leach exit her car and fumble with her key to the front door.  His heartbeat ramped up another fifty levels in his chest.  Obviously, she was in a great big hurry to get out of the rain, but as Nicholas had noted earlier, you could never
really
beat the storm.  Not in any meaningful sense, at least.  It was just too powerful.  Too relentless.  Too goddamn
heartless
.  Throwing open the ambulance door, the howling wind immediately slammed him in the face as he covered the thirty yards between them in a flash. 

Torrential rain soaked into his clothing and the booming thunder masked the sound of his pounding footfalls as he went.  All five of his senses tingled violently, as though he’d stuck his finger directly into a live electrical socket featuring an exposed-wiring problem.  Slipping up behind the woman twenty seconds later, Nicholas stabbed the sleep drug deep into her neck, rendering her completely unconscious almost at once.  Much as had been the case with Claire Bishop in the butcher’s shop back in Chicago all those years ago, Dinah Leach’s body went as limp as a rag doll in his arms as the drug took effect.

Removing the house keys from the slut’s left hand, Nicholas slid the correct one into the lock, at the same time balancing the woman’s body in one arm before stepping inside the house and taking a look around. 

Nice joint.

Fifteen thousand square feet at a bare minimum, the faux Tudor mansion featured thirty-foot-high arched ceilings and expensive Italian marble tile on the floors.  African art and sculptures were scattered throughout.  Nicholas breathed in deeply, enjoying the scent.  The entire place smelled of
money
.

Pretty soon, though, it would smell of something entirely different.  Something coppery.

Gathering Dinah Leach into both of his arms now, Nicholas ascended the spiral staircase edged with a gold-leaf design that sat just off the elaborate foyer.  In the master bedroom upstairs, he laid the TV star’s unconscious body across the massive king-sized bed and leaned over, putting his ear to her mouth and listening for the sounds of breathing.  Faint, but still there, tickling the tiny hairs of his left cheek.

Just then, a brilliant flash of lightning suddenly flared up outside the second-floor bedroom windows of the woman’s eight-million-dollar dwelling, followed immediately by another crash of thunder, giving Nicholas’s heart a terrible start, and then bringing a delighted smile to his lips.  Blissfully, Hurricane Allison had arrived just in time for the festivities to begin. 

Humming softly to himself beneath his breath, Nicholas removed Dinah Leach’s Jimmy Choo shoes and unbuttoned her tailoured DKNY jeans before sliding the fancy denim down her ankles.  Another powerful wave of anticipation flooded through his chest at the sight of the bright-pink Victoria’s Secret thong stared back at him.  Only the finest in lingerie for Atlanta’s queen of the boob tube, right?

Climbing up onto the bed with her, Nicholas straddled Dinah Leach’s body and positioned his palms just beneath her belly button.  Then he began to push gently.  Urine leaked out of her bladder and spread across the crotch of her expensive pink panties.

Feeling dizzy, he pulled off the soiled undergarments and slid the panties over her mouth and nose like a blindfold, wanting her to breathe in her own waste.  To taste her own sin.  Just like
he
’d been forced to do all those years ago.

Swinging his feet back down onto the floor, Nicholas then grabbed Dinah Leach roughly by her ankles and pulled her body over to the edge of the bed before taking off her shirt and unsnapping her matching Victoria’s Secret bra.  Tossing both pieces of clothing to one side, he then removed an eight-inch-long butcher’s knife from his waistband.  

Biting down softly into his lower lip, he was the picture of concentration as he dug the sharp steel into the new-money socialite’s firm left breast. 

Dinah Leach’s bright green eyes flew open at once in shock and terror, the knife overriding the sleep-drug’s effects.  A bloodcurdling scream exploded from her mouth. 

A well-placed punch to her face shut her up again.

‘Just go to sleep, princess,’ Nicholas whispered, stroking the woman’s hair softly.  ‘It’ll be so much easier on you that way.’

Working the knife on her breast in a circular, sawing fashion, Nicholas winced at the slight popping noise it made as it separated completely from her torso.  He balanced the gelatinous blob in his right hand, savouring its surprising weight in his palm, enjoying its heft.  Five minutes later, the woman’s right breast and labia came off in similar fashion.

Finally finished the with the grisly deed of de-sexing the woman, Nicholas tossed Dinah Leach’s sexual organs to the floor in a bloody pile as yet another deafening explosion of thunder rocked the mansion to its foundation.  He wiped a thin line of perspiration from his forehead and glanced down at his watch.  Time for him to get the fuck out of here.  Tyler Leach would be home any minute now following his basketball squad’s 110-99 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers earlier in the night, and any way you looked at it, tangling with a six-foot-nine professional athlete who sported an afro roughly the size of a mushroom cloud was
never
a good idea. 

Gathering Dinah Leach’s unconscious body into his arms again, he cradled her as gently as a newborn baby as he left the bedroom and descended the staircase before exiting the house.  Out in the heart of the storm, the howling wind and torrential rain immediately buffeted his body from all directions, slamming him squarely in the chest and threatening to push him off balance as he struggled down the long driveway.  Luckily, the added weight in his arms steadied him somewhat against the gale-force gusts.  Thank God for small favours.  Or thank Hurricane Allison.  Either one would do at this point, really.

Fifty feet away from the ambulance, the sharp edge of an airborne street sign whistled through the air and caught Nicholas just above his left eyebrow, opening up a wicked red gash that instantly started gushing bright red blood.  Stumbling forward, he nearly dropped Dinah Leach’s body to the ground.  Still, Nicholas wasn’t in the least bit concerned about the possibility of leaving any of his DNA behind.  No worries here.  The rain was his friend.  Hell,
all
of nature was his friend tonight.  The rain would wash away his blood.

But never – not in a million fucking years – would it ever wash
Dinah Leach
’s blood away.

Finally reaching the ambulance forty-five seconds later, Nicholas dumped Dinah Leach’s unconscious body onto the ground like a sack of drenched potatoes and fought with the powerful wind to open up the back doors to the ambulance.  Ten seconds after
that
, in she went.

Nicholas stepped into the back of the vehicle after her before placing her inside an unzipped body bag he’d positioned on a waiting stretcher.  He paused for a moment and took a look around.  Nowhere near as comfortable as the fancy limousines she was used to riding in, of course, but
almost
dead people couldn’t be choosers, now could they?

Of course they couldn’t.

Especially not on a night like this.