She helped Mrs. Davis to her feet, biting her lip when she realized how much the older woman was leaning on her. Mrs. Davis was old, and this was hard on her. Jessie had known her for six years, every since she had fallen and broken her ankle on her dew-dampened sidewalk one morning and Mandy Hartwell had been assigned to be her home health nurse. On Saturdays, Jessie had always come with her mother to check on the spry little old lady, and the two had taken an immediate liking to each other. Even after she had recuperated, Jessie had got into the habit of visiting her once or twice each week.
When her mother had died, Mrs. Davis had insisted that Jessie move in with her. Eventually, she said, they would locate Jessie’s aunt and then Jessie might want to stay with her. But until then she had this huge house with all these rooms and she lived by herself, and it certainly wouldn’t be a financial burden. Jessie could finish out her first year of college without having to worry, and they’d think about next year when it got here. She’d appreciate some company, and it would be good for Jessie to stay with someone that she knew.
It had worked out well for Jessie, but it didn’t seem to be working quite as well for Mrs. Davis. She’d dropped at least five pounds in the last three months, and she seemed to Jessie to be shrinking even further in the last week or two. And since she barely topped one hundred pounds, any weight that she lost was weight that she couldn’t afford to lose. She certainly was having a lot more trouble getting around these days. Mrs. Davis was becoming more fragile by the day, and Jessie was afraid that she was making herself ill taking care of her.
Jessie had started doing the shopping and all the cleaning at the house, just to take the burden off her, though the old woman protested. She owed Mrs. Davis a lot. For someone who hadn’t been around many young people for thirty years, she was surprisingly tolerant, and Jessie loved her, besides.
She didn’t mind that Jessie dressed up on the weekends; the older woman actually seemed to enjoy Jessie’s theatrical makeup and costumes. Sometimes she’d give her suggestions on what to wear, even. Jessie had a black and red patterned scarf at home that Mrs. Davis had given her. She’d said that it had been just hanging around in her closet for years and it certainly went well with Jessie’s black vinyl bustier and short red skirt, so she might as well keep it. Jessie wore it all the time and it made her feel good that Mrs. Davis knew that you couldn’t tell what a person was like by looking at the clothes and the makeup that they wore. Not everybody was like that. Jessie came across it a lot –people thought she was a freak or a drug addict all the time.
Sergeant John Bennett looked sternly at Jessie, and she guessed that was his most frequent expression, because his forehead fell immediately into little furrows. She also guessed that he was not quite as liberal Mrs. Davis was. He looked at her sitting there in her black clothing, wearing the silver studded dog collar bracelet, and he didn’t sneer, exactly, but Jessie thought that he wanted to.
“When did you last see Kira Matthews?” he asked, after establishing that the two girls had known one another since they were very young, attended the same college, and frequently spent time together.
“On Friday, at school,” Jessie said. “I told you that, already.”
Sergeant Bennett turned a page in the notebook, read something, and frowned more deeply. He leaned on his elbows on the desk and stared intently at her.
“I understand that your mother, Amanda Hartwell, was killed a few months ago.”
Jessie heard Mrs. Davis suck in a breath, probably because his tone was so sharp. Or maybe it was because she knew Jessie hated even the mention of her mother’s murder.
“Yes,” was all she said. She trembled inside but refused to let him see it. I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to talk about it!
“That crime hasn’t been solved,” he said. “I read the whole file, Jessie. Your mother’s car wouldn’t start, so she told her coworkers that she was going to take the bus home. They offered her a ride, but they had dinner reservations and she knew it, so she refused. They saw her walk down to the bus stop and sit on the bench and they drove off. Two fishermen found her body three days later in a canal.” He consulted the notebook on his desk again. “You have an aunt somewhere, but she’s traveling in Europe and no one had been able to contact her so far. No other close relatives in the area, is that right?”
”That’s right,” was all that Jessie answered, though more words trembled on her lips. She didn’t mention that when she called her father, he hung up on her and that her grandfather did the same thing.
Neither of them even came to the funeral, and they sure never bothered to find out if I was okay, Jessie thought. Mom always said that we had each other but now she’s dead. I’m sure this asshole cop knows all that. At least he left that part out, but I don’t like him any better for it. He’s playing with me, so let him work for it, I’m not going to help him torment me. If he’s got something to say, let him say it.
But she still wasn’t ready when he went in for the kill.
“What would you say if I told you that your friend Kira was killed in exactly the same manner as your mother was? She was stabbed and beaten. There are more than fifty stab marks on her body; she was slashed to bits. Most of her blood drained out during the killing. It was savage. Brutal. Maybe it’s even intended to send a message.”
Sergeant Bennett stared at her suddenly white face and ignored a twinge of conscience.
“Some of Kira’s friends told me that she was into some pretty interesting stuff, and they said that you are, too. Was Kira doing drugs? How about your mother? Because I’ve got to tell you that it seems very likely that this is connected to the drug traffic that runs up and down the Florida coast.” He leaned back in his chair. “Especially considering that they both had methamphetamines in their system. It seems awfully funny to me that two people so close to you have died in exactly the same manner. Almost makes me think you might know more about this than you’re saying. Are you involved, Jessie? Maybe your mother had a boyfriend in the drug business. Maybe you’re in the drug business. Maybe Kira was. I don’t know. All I know is that I think that you should speak up now with anything that you know before more of your friends and family are butchered.” He indicated the gaping Mrs. Davis with a wave of his hand. “Maybe even this nice lady, here.”
“How dare you?” Mrs. Davis said quietly while Jessie shook in her chair. “She belongs to a college theater club, and they dress in costumes on the weekends to promote their productions. Even if she didn’t belong to this club, her dress is appropriate for her age. How dare you say such a thing to this innocent young girl? She is still in mourning, and then this terrible incident happens and you dare to imply that she is involved? That she is somehow peripherally responsible for the deaths of both her mother and her friend, that because she chooses to dress in a way that you don’t approve of, she must be on drugs? You cannot make accurate judgments of others based on their manner of dress, sir, and you should know that by now. You should be ashamed of yourself. I plan to make a formal complaint against you, young man.”
“I’m here to do my job, not win a popularity contest,” the big man said, but his face reddened with the criticism. “It’s my job to ask these things, ma’am. You must admit…”
“Do it some other way,” Mrs. Davis said crisply, interrupting him. She pulled Jessie to her feet. “That was the end of cooperation from both of us. There will be no more questions and no more answers. We are leaving, and I can only hope that you have enough human feeling left in you to make you sleep badly tonight. God knows that this poor girl probably will. Good day. Come, Jessie.”
He jumped at the sudden swap when she slapped her handbag down onto his desk, right in the midst of his papers. Mrs. Davis smiled grimly and swept regally out the door, pulling Jessie with her. Jessie noticed that the little old woman showed no signs of weakness now. Anger had burnt it all away.
***
Ten blocks away, Dan Jackson was lying on hi
s lumpy bed thinking about the night before. He smiled dreamily and licked his lips. It just kept getting better and better, but he had to figure out some way to speed up the process of getting to know these poor dumb kids. Some of them took weeks to lure in, and that was too long. His master needed them sooner.
Who knew that drinking blood could be so much fun?
Ironically, Dan inspired trust in all who saw him. As a child, his was the face of the kid brother on television shows, the too-cute kid who could never do anything wrong. His cheeks were plump and scattered with freckles, he had a snub nose, and his hair was always cut too short on top, making it stick up endearingly. His small mouth smiled a lot, and his eyes crinkled merrily when he did so. He looked kind and guileless and you wouldn’t hesitate to invite him right on into your house if he showed up on your doorstep. He was every-man; average height, average weight, average looks. He was the man who held doors open for little old ladies, the kind of guy who would stop to help you change your tire even if he was late for work, the one who handed back the extra twenty at the bank when they gave him too much change.
Even the people he had helped to murder couldn’t believe it until the very second that he struck home the knife. Not Dan. Not good old Danny boy.
He was twenty-four, but he looked younger. He still lived with his grandmother in the shabby apartment that had been his home since the age of twelve. That was the year his parents had died in a car accident coming back from Fort Myers Beach after a long day of fun and sun. Dan had only received minor injuries.
In the months to come, he’d often wished that he’d died with them. His embittered grandmother talked incessantly of all the bad things that had happened in her life, not the least of which was having a puny little crybaby foisted off on her. That son of hers had been bad enough, the ungrateful bastard, running off like that with that slut and leaving her to struggle all alone. But his kid…if she didn’t have such a strong sense of duty, why, she’d have just put him in foster care. But the good Lord knew that she never shirked her responsibilities. She’d make a man out of him, and he could never forget how much he owed her. No, he owed all he would become to dear old Granny.
Ten days after his thirteenth birthday he went to juvenile detention center for the first of ten times, and those were only the times that they caught him. He went away most often for burglary and vandalism, and violence was always mixed in there somewhere, always a part of the crime. His rage always bubbled to the top.
At twenty-one, he spent six months in a psychiatric facility after police caught him masturbating outside the window of the teenage girl he’d been stalking. That was his wake-up call.
Not that he’d stopped, you understand. He just stopped getting caught. He never wanted to go back to jail again.
Yeah, he owed it all to dear, old Granny.
But stalking wasn’t enough for him anymore since he’d met his master. Just watching those people in their perfect homes with their perfect parents and fantasizing about being part of their perfect lives was not nearly enough. Now he wanted their blood, too. He wanted to watch them die shrieking in pain. He wanted to lick their blood from his lips as they screamed in agony, and he wanted to lick it from the lips of the others.
The first time that he’d killed someone had been hard for him, and he didn’t like it much. In fact, he’d retched for hours afterwards, and the image of the dead woman had tormented him for days.
But it grew on him, murder did.
The meth helped, and Dan took a lot of it. Now he craved it, both the drugs and the murder, wanted to do it more and more and more. He smiled mistily to himself. Mere months ago, he’d felt so bored and lonely that he’d wanted to die. Now, he felt like a god at an eternal party.
And the party was just getting started.
***
“I can’t believe it,” Shannon wailed. “I just can’t believe it.”
Jessie had called her friend with the hope that talking to her would make her feel better but so far, it wasn’t working.
“I forgot to tell that cop, that Bennett guy, because he freaked me out so bad, but Kira called and asked me to go to a party with her Friday night. She said it was going to be very theatrical, and everyone was going to dress up, and she knows I like that kind of stuff. I felt kind of sick after lunch, though, so I told her no. I was afraid I’d get feeling bad again and she’d have to take me home. I didn’t want to spoil her fun. She said you were going with her. Do you know anything about a party?”
There was a pause, then Shannon wailed again. Jessie winced and held the phone away from her ear.
“I told her no! Ohmygod, if I’d said yes and went with her, maybe she’d still be alive. That just sent a shiver down my spine. If you hadn’t been sick and I’d gone, we could both be dead, too.”
Shannon sobbed on the other end of the phone, and Jessie felt tears rise in her own eyes.
“I just keep thinking that if I did say yes, maybe Kira wouldn’t have…”
“We can’t think like that. We can’t think if only, if only. That’s not going to bring her back. We just have to go on from where we are and do what we can.”
Jessie gripped the receiver so hard that her knuckles hurt. “I know,” she said softly. “That’s why I want to ask around and see what I can find out about this party she went to.”
“NO!” Shannon’s voice was panicked. “That’s too dangerous. You don’t know what you’d be getting into.”
“I have to,” Jessie said stubbornly. “I’m just going to see what I can learn about the party and the people who went to it. I know a lot of people at school who go to these dress-up parties, and they’re like you and me and Kira. We just like to dress up and look different, ‘cause we think the ‘normal’ people are crazier than we are but I’ve been hearing bout these guys who are into some really strange shit. Kira and I went to a whole bunch of these parties together, and once she told me that she’d heard something about this big group of people.”
She paused and put her head down on the phone table, feeling suddenly queasy.
“They have this blood obsession. They cut each other’s wrists and drink their blood, and they’re heavy into meth. It scared both of us, but not enough to stop going out. We didn’t know anybody like that. Maybe she stumbled into the wrong party and one of them drugged her or something. Because that cop, that Bennett guy, he said something about Shannon testing positive for methamphetamines.”
“You’re being foolish,” Shannon said in a brittle voice. “I think you should tell that cop and let him figure it out. You don’t need to get into this.”
“She wasn’t just killed, Shannon. She was high on crank, and you know she wasn’t into that. She drank and she smoked a little weed occasionally, but she never, ever did anything heavy. She told us about a million times that she was never going to end up like her brother Tom, who’s in rehab like every other month. And that’s not all, either. Somebody mutilated her, did something terrible to her. Like they did to my Mom.”
“Oh, Jessie, is that what this is all about?” Shannon asked softly. “Your Mom? That is just one more reason to leave this whole thing alone. You always idolized your mother way too much, and you’ve made her up into some kind of Supreme Being in your mind now that she’s dead. She wasn’t perfect. She could be rude and shallow and stupid just like everybody else. Get over it – you’re way too old be to a mama’s girl. Your mother took drugs and then somebody killed her; it happens every day. Kira just changed her mind, she was probably in the middle of a party situation and she made a bad call. While she was high, she hooked up with some crazy who hacked her to pieces. You can’t go around trying to find out who the crazy was. He’s probably long gone by now, anyway. Let the cops deal with it. Let it alone, you’re being idiotic. Don’t let your issues with your mother’s death make you do something this stupid.”
“I can’t let it go,” Jessie said. She kept her voice steady with an effort. “I know that my mother wasn
’t perfect, Shannon. I know exactly what she was like. I could always see her clearly, and she was never the kind of person who could sit on a pedestal. She was way too real for that, but she didn’t mess with crank and she didn’t deserve to die, and neither did Kira. I don’t deserve to be talked to this way, either.”
“You’re right, and I’m sorry,” Shannon said. “You know I loved your Mom, too, but I think you’re going over the edge, and you don’t need to get involved with this. This is scary shit. I’m begging you, Jessie. Don’t do this.”
“I want you to ask around, Shannon,” Jessie said resolutely. “I figure somebody who was at that party will have to know something about the maniac who likes to kill people and mangle their bodies. I’ve got to find out. Ask your friends if they’ve heard anything. Come on, we’ve been friends a long time,” she said as Shannon hesitated. “Do it for me, even if you think I’m being crazy.”
“All right,” Shannon said reluctantly. “I’ll ask a few people if they heard anything. But that’s all. And you’ve got to promise me that you won’t do anything stupid, okay? If you find something out, take it to the cops.”
“All right,” Jessie said. “I’ll go to the cops if we find out anything.”
She lied to Shannon without a thought. She wasn’t going to tell the cops anything because she didn’t trust them. That Bennett guy was just typical of the breed. They didn’t care, as long as they had somebody to pin it on, and if they could pin it on a bunch of freaks, so much the better. Didn’t matter to them if it was the right person they put away or not, but it did to her. Jessie was going to find out who it was and they were going to pay for taking Kira away.
They were all going to pay.
***
Rae Ann Davis began to realize soon after she left the bar with him that she had made a big, big mistake.
She’d agreed to come with him because he was so normal, usually so nice and friendly when she saw him in the bar where she worked. It wasn’t like he was a stranger. He had been coming in two, three nights a week for the last year or so, and she’d always spent a little time flirting with him. All the servers did. He was good-looking, for one thing; he was the blond beach-boy type that she went for, and he was nice, and he tipped big. All three of those things were hard to find in the same package. Rae Ann knew, because she’d been out there looking.