‘That was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be,’ she breathed, ‘must write Stephen King a thank you letter.’
He felt her weight shift, and his head was jerked forward as she tore off his blindfold. She was obviously pleased with herself, grinning like a seven year old shot up with caffeine. Then her expression changed to one of exaggerated puzzlement.
‘Hang on…that was in the big screen adaptation. In the original, she chops his foot off with an ax. Oh well, at least no one could accuse me of plagiarism should I ever decide to memorialise this on paper.’
She climbed out of the tub and knelt down on the floor beside it. The puzzled expression was gone. Now she looked positively contrite.
‘That hurt me more than it hurt you, but I can’t have you escaping.’
He was forced to review his previous assessment of her character.
‘I need you to understand the real motivation behind this. I’ve studied you. I know you better than you know yourself. That’s why I knew you needed my help.’
She stroked his swollen cheek and stood up.
‘You rushed it with Moira Daniels. Your other victims, they looked like they’d just surfaced from Hell, but Moira Daniels looked like she’d been boiled in oil and dumped on a trawler for pirates to play with. The others said she must’ve done something to piss you off but I knew it was something else.’
Others?
She went back to the sink, and all he could do as he watched her run her fingers over his tools was contemplate who these mysterious contemporaries might be. True crime geeks? Fellow killer groupies? That was where she got her intel, but how did any of them know about the condition of the bodies? The cops didn’t go public with that information, and the only other way anyone could access it would be from photos. The only people who would be privy to those, and be able to make such astute deductions about them would be cops and killers. He doubted she was a cop – as far as he knew, the strict admission guidelines created and adhered to by the L.A.P.D existed to keep crazies out. That left one possibility. One awful, utterly plausible possibility.
She was a suspect.
ns 18.68.41.175da2
