A Deadly Compulsion (6 page)

He had not just stunned this one.  He had hit her too hard with the steel rod as an excess of hormonal stimulation added extra force to his pumped-up muscles.  He pulled the tape from her mouth and was relieved to see that she was still breathing, albeit shallow and laboured.  He wanted this one to last.  Had she been dead, he would have just buried her deep under the earth of the barn’s floor, where another fourteen bodies were entombed.  Corpses were no fun.  He needed his ‘mother’ alive and alert to begin with, to appreciate the exquisite pain that he would inflict on her as continued retribution for the trauma and grief she had caused him to suffer.

Cutting the tape from her wrists and ankles, he undressed her, putting all but her skimpy panties into a plastic bin bag to burn later. He crushed the panties to his nose and mouth, savouring the warm dampness and musky odour; noticing the spots of blood and presuming that they were a residue from menstruation.  The only identification that he could find in her handbag was a library card, which he tucked into his jeans pocket, along with the panties.  He then prepared her for later, before leaving again and locking the doors, to walk across to the house to light the fire and burn the clothing and handbag, which would be of no further use to their owner.

Pouring himself a large Scotch, he took it upstairs, where he added the lacy panties to the others in the top drawer of his trophy chest.  Undressed, he went back downstairs, turned on the radio and made himself a stack of ham and cheese and pickle sandwiches.  As usual, the hunt and abduction had given him a voracious appetite.  It was a humid night, and he ate standing in front of the open fridge door, allowing the icy air to drift out and cool his sweat-sheened body.

At first, Shelley thought that she must have fallen and cracked her head.  It took a while for her numbed mind to become aware of the situation that she was in.  Her skull pounded, causing her to grimace and screw her eyelids tightly shut.  By degrees she forced her eyes open.  She was naked, her arms stretched above her, aching.  Her wrists were handcuffed to a large steel ring that was set into a concrete block; the cuffs’ chain through the ring.  She was cold, very scared, and felt sick from the splitting pain at her temple.  Her vision was slightly blurred, but she could read the large writing on the card that lay on the ground in front of her:  COMPLY OR DIE.

This had to be a nightmare.  She must be safe at home in bed, and this horrific scene was no more than a product of her sleeping mind.  Yet it felt so real; a solid, conscious experience.  She concentrated on her last memory.  She had taken a taxi from Darren’s, then begun to walk up the drive to the house...and then...nothing!  It was a total blank from that moment.

He had returned to the barn to stand silently in deep shadow and watch her for a long time.  She was bathed in the ambient glow from the window above, her contours highlighted, picked out in light and shadow; a blue and white vision of loveliness that he was about to defile and make ready for a higher state of being.

Shelley jerked her head sideways, the pain forgotten as the naked man emerged from the gloom and walked toward her.  He was tall, slim, well-muscled.  In one hand he held what appeared to be a large pair of nutcrackers, or some kind of pliers.  In the other, the unmistakable shape of a large knife.  Her bladder rebelled and voided onto the already damp earth beneath her, as a bombshell of sudden realisation burst and overwhelmed her.  Jesus, no! 
It was him,
The Tacker; the killer that the public was being warned about on TV and in the newspapers.

He knelt next to her and fed greedily from the fear in her eyes, before setting to work with the stapler, ensuring that she would not compound her sins by trying to deny her true identity, or demean herself by begging for mercy.

“You got personal mail, boss,” Hugh said, placing a small package on Laura’s desk.

She crushed a half-smoked cigarette out in the ashtray that nestled covertly in the open top drawer, before reaching for the packet, to pick it up and turn it over in her hands to examine.  It was rectangular in shape, approximately five inches long, four wide, two deep and hardly any weight at all.  It was wrapped in brown paper, well sealed with Sellotape.  A York postmark showed that it had been mailed the previous day.  A small white adhesive label was affixed to the top, addressed to Laura.  It was printed in bold type.  On the back, hand-written in blue ballpoint was the sender’s name and address, which read: From Mr M Chapman, 287 Westfield Way, Strensall, York.

Call it sixth sense, but Laura came out in goosebumps.  A cold feeling of dire dread ran through her.  She reached for her paperknife and slid the point under the edge of the tape, slicing carefully around the full package before pulling back the wrapping to disclose a blue cardboard box; the type of which a high street jeweller might employ to place a bracelet or neck chain in.  She flicked the lid back with the knife and studied the wad of cotton wool beneath, again using the blade as a tool to slowly raise the white pad, only to jerk backwards in her chair as if she had suffered an electric shock.

“Oh, Christ!” Laura said, standing up and walking across to the window, hugging herself as though the room temperature had suddenly dipped twenty degrees.

“What?” Hugh said, moving forward to approach the desk.

Laura turned to him.  She could feel herself shaking.  “You’d better take a look for yourself. It’s not pretty.”

Using the tips of his index finger and thumb, Hugh eased the cotton wool back and stared at the blood-smeared ear that had been pinned – like a moth or beetle – to the royal-blue velvet covered display board beneath it.

Laura rummaged in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet and found a box of cellophane gloves.  “Here, wear these,” she said, handing a pair to Hugh.  “I doubt that there are any worthwhile latents, but we’d better not taint the evidence.”

The ear was a bluish-white.  It looked unreal, more like a spare part for a waxwork head.  A gold stud gleamed in the pierced lobe; the simple adornment making the severed organ appear even more grotesque.

Laura lifted the velvet cushion without touching the ear, and underneath it was a folded sheet of paper and a cut-down Polaroid photograph.  Hugh and Laura gazed transfixed at the image of the naked girl.  Her mouth appeared to be stapled shut, but her bulging eyes intimated a bridled scream.  The corneas were bright red, spotted by the flash from the camera, but Laura knew that they would be blue, just like the others.  The girl’s blonde hair was soaked crimson at the right side, where the ear had been cut from, and a dark stain pooling between her legs illustrated the terror she was enduring…if she was still alive.

With trembling fingers, Laura unfolded the single sheet of Basildon Bond writing paper.  It read:

Laura...Laura...Laura. You
really
pissed me off with the offensive

remarks that you levelled at me on that slut’s news programme.  I

found your outburst very unprofessional, but then realised that you

were just attempting to goad me...upset me.

Well, sweetlips, it worked.  Please find enclosed one ear, complete with a yellow-metal stud; this item having had only one previous but less than careful owner.  I removed the organ with a very sharp knife.  But as you can see from the photo, Miss. Stroud was, to say the least, rather traumatised by the procedure.

She is still alive, but alas, not for too much longer.  You will be in receipt of the rest of her within a few days.

This one is for YOU, Laura.  I was going to ease up for a month or two and take a summer break, but your insults prompted me to give you something to feel rightfully guilty about.

DO NOT BADMOUTH ME AGAIN, YOU FUCKING WHORE!!

Shelley is going to suffer so much because of YOU.

Sleep well,

MARK

Laura felt as though hot lead had cooled and set in her veins.  She had only felt this stupefied and sick at heart once before, and had not thought that she was capable of feeling so bad ever again.  She had got it wrong, screwed-up big time and triggered a response that she had not foreseen.  Shelley Stroud had been missing for four days.  And it was almost certain that when next seen, she would be a mutilated corpse.

“Get it to the lab,” Laura whispered to Hugh, reaching for a cigarette as she wondered how she would cope with the knowledge that she had been, in part, responsible for the abduction, mutilation, and imminent murder of a young woman.

ONCE
he had broken through the long-standing mental barrier and made the decision to at least look at the paperwork, the floodgates were opened to a torrent of long suppressed patterns of thought that he had developed as a profiler.  Jim was at once engrossed and lost in morbid fascination, back in the groove, journeying through a hellish labyrinth as he searched for clues and absorbed himself in the puzzle that was before him.

It was a little after eight a.m. when he rose, unable to ignore his full, pounding bladder any longer.  He took a leak, showered, then brewed coffee and sat out on the balcony for awhile, letting what he had read settle and separate out in his mind before going back inside to open a new file on his laptop, pausing for a second before punching in a title: Tacker-1.  He then listed the victims’ names, ages, height, hair and eye colour; every physical detail, however small.  Next, the injuries that they had sustained, and the method adopted and materials used to both bind and torture them with, followed by the locations and positions they were found in.  After a further two hours of contemplation, Jim began to assemble a preliminary outline of the murderer.  Every single serial killer he’d profiled had had an agenda, however warped.  They were incited and driven by deep-rooted trauma that was in almost every case born out of childhood mistreatment or neglect.  Some of their ilk ticked away like time-bombs until they detonated later in life, usually in their late teens or early twenties.  It was a fact that the vast majority of pattern murderers had a blueprint in their damaged minds, and would keep repeating their acts, continually striving – even if unconsciously – to mete out a punishment on whomever had originally maltreated them.  The usual cause for their condition was long-term abuse; mental, physical or a combination of both.  They would continue to kill until they were caught, or took their own lives.  And not many in his experience had offed themselves. It wasn’t in their nature.

After two days, Jim had a feasible picture of the killer.  Profiling was not as big a deal as the books and movies made out.  Nine tenths of it was just commonsense police work, with studious attention to detail in minutia, sifting through what others might overlook or consider as trivial or irrelevant.  His method was to put all information that was known to appertain to the same offender under a logical mental microscope and attempt to focus in and flush out the dross; to see more clearly any ambiguous patterns and connections.  It was always a jigsaw with a piece missing, that would, when found, complete the picture; a cryptic code that could be broken and made sense of.  What had put Jim in a class of his own in this field had been his uncanny ability to understand what motivated a particular killer; to almost be in his head and be able to enter his sick world of fantasy and depravity.

It had been stop-go work.  After a positive start, his brain had started to rebel against the sickening input; kept trying to shut off from the loathsome details.  For a while he had thought that he may have lost the ability to make the jumps and feel his way into a case.  It had been impersonal at the outset, just printed words and images of total strangers.  And then he had started to see beyond the evidence, extrapolate and enter the psychopath’s mind, to think his way into the maniac’s way of reasoning.

Tossing a holdall into the rear and placing his briefcase on the passenger seat of his Jeep Cherokee, Jim set off. He had not let Laura know that he had studied the faxes she had sent, or forewarned her of his intention to just turn up on her doorstep.  He felt exactly as he had done at fourteen; the memory of his first real date popping out of the mists of time as he remembered taking Cindy Lopez to the movies on a sultry summer evening in Glendale, back in Arizona.  He had spent over an hour plucking up the courage to put his arm around her shoulders, and followed up that triumph by kissing her lightly on the lips, just once and only minutes before the show ended and they were once more back outside, where further inroads could not be made.  The sensation of the thousand gossamer butterfly wings that had fluttered around his stomach in that dark movie theatre was with him now as he envisioned being face to face with Laura again.  He had cleared his appointments for four days.  If anything crucial came up, then his secretary, Diane, could reach him on his mobile.

He drove the few minutes north from Windsor to the M4, then headed east to pick up the M25.  It was six a.m., and the traffic was relatively light as he left what Chris Rea had christened
The Road to Hell
, to join the M1.  Keeping up a steady seventy, he anticipated being in York a little after nine o’clock.

As he sped north, Jim reflected on the night, now so long ago, that in part had changed his life.  It had been as leader of an armed assault team that he had entered a brownstone house in Georgetown to take down Gary Meeker, who to their knowledge had ritually murdered at least ten young men, and probably twice that number.

Meeker had preyed on the homosexual community, frequenting many of the gay clubs and bars in and around Washington D.C.  His victims had all been young males aged between eighteen and twenty-five.  His killing spree had lasted for over two years, up until they got a lead, due to his last intended target surviving.

Meeker used Rohypnol, a strong sedative that in the right dosage produced a compliant, almost hypnotic state in those who it was administered to.  This was one of the many drugs used by date rapists, though in Gary’s case it went beyond that, and was date murder.

Gary Meeker was a slim, good looking thirty-five year old with an engaging personality and the clothes, money and top of the range Porsche that could not fail to impress.  He would select a lone punter and strike up a conversation, buying drinks and making it blatantly apparent that he was not only interested in, but was happy to pay handsomely for discreet sex.  At a point later in the evening, usually having settled in a booth or at a secluded table, he would introduce the sedative to the mark’s drink, and as it began to take effect, would suggest going back to his house, stroking the guy’s thigh and crotch under the table as he made the invitation.  Once in the safety of his home – and the sacrificial temple that was his bedroom – he sated his craving, and then in disgust at his weakness, bludgeoned to death the living tool he had needed and employed for gratification.

On what would prove to be the last occasion he would ever attempt to ensnare an unsuspecting potential victim, Gary was rising to leave the Shangri-La Bar on Massachusetts Avenue with his chosen and suitably doped-up prey when two things happened that were to bring about his downfall.  A work colleague of the now spaced-out young man came over to them and struck up a conversation, and the intended mark, unsteady from the effects of three screwdrivers and the drug, fell on his ass, hitting his head on the corner of the table, which resulted in a deep gash to his forehead that bled profusely.

A small crowd gathered around the trio, and Gary slipped through their ranks and left the bar.  Later, in ER, Kenny Tighe’s wound was found to be superficial, requiring just four sutures.  But the symptoms of the powerful hypnotic sedative prompted a call to the DCPD.  Subsequent results of his blood works showed that he had ingested a formidable amount of Rohypnol, a drug flagged with the police department and FBI as being that which the killer who had been tagged the Hypnotist habitually used on his victims.  This had been the breakthrough that they’d needed.

Kenny had been a veritable gold mine of information.  Once sufficiently compos mentis, he had given agents a comprehensive description of the man who had solicited and then drugged him.

“He told me his name was Gary,” Kenny said, “and that he had a brownstone in Georgetown, and drove a red Porsche.”

To have freely given Kenny those facts in conversation was a sign of arrogance and overconfidence.  Meeker had assumed that Kenny would not survive the evening to repeat anything he was told.  The printout from the Department of Motor Vehicles listed all red Porsches in the District of Columbia, and only one was registered to an owner with the Christian name Gary.  The address was in Georgetown, and the fax of the drivers licence photograph was shown to Kenny, who immediately and with no doubt or hesitation identified it as being of the man who had accosted him in the bar.

They surrounded Meeker’s house.  Armed agents covered the front and rear, while an assault team wearing body armour and led by Jim broke in the front door and swept the premises with the aid of flashlights, due to the power having been cut by Meeker, who had removed the fuses from the box in the basement.

In the master bedroom, Special Agent Ed Shelton, followed closely by Jim, checked the recesses and then stooped to look under the bed.  Nothing.  Ed walked over to the built-in closet that ran the length of the wall and slid open a mirrored door.

The knife blade was driven into Ed’s throat, twisted, and withdrawn in an instant.  Ed dropped both his handgun and flashlight as his legs buckled.  He collapsed onto the floor with blood jetting from his left carotid artery, appearing as black as tar in the low light.

Not immediately sure of what had happened, Jim searched for a target.  The stainless steel Colt Python suddenly weighed heavy in his sweating palm.  It was cocked, the six-inch barrel following the beam of his flashlight.  In the darkness to his left, a more solid, Delphic form overshadowed the gloom and flew at him, emitting a cry of rage that sounded guttural and less than human.  Jim swung the pistol, fired, and the blinding muzzle-flash burned into his retinas as a stinging sensation lanced his throat.  He staggered backwards, lost his balance and fell, coming to rest with his back up against the foot of the bed.

A break in the night cloud cover allowed a pale shaft of moonlight to pierce the window and reflect off the raised knife’s blade, giving Jim a target.  He fired again, once...twice, and heard a wet, gurgling moan, just before a body thudded to the floor over his outstretched legs.

Cones of light danced around the bedroom as assistance arrived.  One beam found and steadied upon the upper body of Gary Meeker.  He was dressed in black, his eyes staring unblinking into the brightness.  He was now no longer a dangerous killer, just a harmless corpse, whose death had saved the countless tax dollars which would have been wasted, first on a show trial, then on keeping him caged for years while he undoubtedly lodged appeals from a cell on death row.  Not allowing the police to take him alive was a bonus to the authorities.

The blade had opened Jim’s throat from just below his left ear to his larynx.  He had instinctively pulled back from certain death, escaping with a sewn up neck, tetanus and antibiotic shots, and the promise of a permanent scar to remind him of that night’s work.  He had fared far better than his fellow agent and good friend, Ed Shelton, though, who was now reposing in a mortuary drawer.

That episode in itself had not been the last straw.  The last of the bundle that would break him had come three months later, when the world turned completely pear-shaped and lost much of its meaning.  He had got too close to another psycho, who had a predilection for disembowelling hookers and dumping them in the Potomac River.  The killer was also a police informant, who knew of Jim’s reputation, and of his involvement in the case, and decided to take him out of the picture.

Jim and his then fiancée, Pamela, had just left a concert at the Kennedy Center and were driving over the river to Arlington, planning on more than just a nightcap at her apartment...when it happened.

The dark Plymouth followed them across the bridge, tyres churning through the silvered puddles of rainwater that the storm overhead had released on the city for the past hour.  Veins of lightning snaked through the dark flesh of the sky, and thunder rolled and cracked with the sound of cannon-fire across a battlefield.

The wipers thrashed across the windscreen, and the rain drummed on the Honda’s roof and hood.  Pamela was laughing at Jim’s obvious relief to be out and away from the concert, which he had been unable to feign any measure of pleasure in attending.

“Call me a pleb,” Jim said, grinning back at her.  “But my idea of a concert is Willie Nelson or maybe Eric Clapton, not Bach’s Mass in B minor, although the broad playing the penny whistle had a nice pair of jugs.”

“That was a flute, you moron,” Pamela said through a fresh snort of laughter at his comments.  “And she was old enough to be your mother.”

Jim leant his head back, smiling, happy to be with Pamela, looking forward to opening a bottle of Californian red when they reached her place, then maybe showering together before making love, and...

…The front side window imploded, resulting in a shower of glass cubes peppering Jim’s face and neck.  He turned, squinted out into the night and saw the Plymouth; a grinning face at the open window, and the flash of another bullet leaving the muzzle of a gun that was aimed at him.

Pamela had spun the wheel and braked hard, over-steering, losing control, causing the car to leave the concrete roadway and smash into the wall of a furniture store.  The Honda stalled, and only the insistent pattering of raindrops on metal broke the otherwise sudden silence.

Jim saw the spray of water at either side of the assailant’s car as it accelerated away from them; the Plymouth’s speeding, whitewall tyres parting the dark pools as it raced off into the night.

Pamela had slid down as far as her seat belt would allow. She was slumped forward with her head resting on the steering wheel.  The second slug had also missed its intended mark, but had found Pamela, entering her temple, to blow bone, brains and blood out of a fist-sized exit wound.