Insatiable (34 page)

Liam pulled up next to Aurora's car, the turnoff was being blocked off by a police car, and he saw Mari standing outside, pacing around frantically. Even though the night was cold, it didn’t seem to bother her at all, worry had taken over and she felt nothing but that. He felt a coil of irritation sink into his gut when a uniformed officer told him that he needed to stay away. "Officer, I need to get inside. Look, I have a relationship with the woman who is being held inside, now kindly let me through." He kept his voice low and controlled, trying to suppress the anger that was boiling inside of him.

"Sorry sir, no can do. Now if you don’t back away from the line I'll have you forcibly removed."

"You and what army?" Liam stepped up and asked.

Mari had to coax him away and finally after several minutes of trying to stare one another down, Liam threw his hands up in surrender and walked Mari back to the car.

Benjamin had to slap her one more time to wake her up. He realized that he must have hit her over the head harder than he'd anticipated. "Come on now, stay awake." He cupped her face in his hands.

"SWAT is on the way." Sheriff Rafferty cleared his throat and averted Nick's glare in such a way that told him, he was feeling regretful. Deena Coombs had told Rafferty that Benjamin was responsible for the murders of Ken Holmes and Ronnie Carr and that he felt no remorse, they were simply a means to an end. Although he didn’t want to come out and admit it, the sheriff felt bad, more than bad that Aurora was in danger; she was in danger because of him and his pigheadedness.

But, he wasn’t going to tell anybody that and he sure as hell wasn’t about to admit that he'd been wrong. He'd been wrong all along and if this guy got away, he'd go right on killing. He, along with several officers had crept along the exterior of the house, and they were trying to assess if there was any movement inside. When an officer heard the muffled sound of Benjamin's voice, he reported back to the sheriff. "Sounds like there's just one guy sheriff, but I can't get a good look inside, windows are covered up," the young officer whispered.

Sheriff Rafferty motioned to his men to fall back. He didn’t want to spook Benjamin and cause him to do something hasty. He was waiting on a report about Benjamin; he needed to know his motives. What was making him feel like there was no other way out, and he'd hoped that by looking into his past, it would reveal something, hell, anything, about the guy. It was eerily quiet, and that worried Rafferty. A quiet offender was an antagonistic offender. A negotiator was on the way along with the SWAT team and sooner, rather than later, he hoped that this night mare would be over.

Aurora could feel the intensity of the fire coming out of the fireplace, she noted that besides a couple of kerosene lamps scattered around, the light from the fireplace was the only thing illuminating the place. "I said pay attention." Benjamin nudged the side of her face with his fist. "What do you want with me?" Her voice shook and she was scared. But there was no way she was going to let him know that. She stretched and tried to shake loose the rope that was wrapped around her neck. "Sick bastard, "she murmured.

Benjamin had begun to stare at her, stare at her in such a way that it made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. She could feel the adrenaline pump wildly through her constricted veins.
Concentrate Aurora, pull yourself together. You heard voices outside, people are here to help. Just keep him talking, keep him occupied. And whatever you do, don’t panic.

He sat across from her now, he was leaned over, his elbows resting on his knees, eight inch bowie knife in his hand.

"Now it won't do you any good to scream Aurora, but something tells me that you're not much of a screamer. The cops are outside already, but they won't be coming in, not for a while yet. I made sure of that. I let your new friend Deena go, and I have no doubt that she's out there right now telling them everything that I told her. She thinks that I let her go on a whim, but it was just good old fashioned smart thinking on my part. All you women are the same, you all think that you're so smart. You think that if your life doesn’t go the way that you planned that everybody owes you something. Well you're all fuckin wrong, no body owes you shit. You women think that if one of your kids acts out, or gets into trouble that you can just ship them off somewhere and forget about them? Huh? Is that what you think?" She could see the sweat beading on his brow, but not one muscle of his face seemed to budge.

"I don’t understand," she said in a whisper. It was all that she could muster. She blinked feverishly, needed to focus. Everything around her was still blurry, it was as if she were looking through a dirty, camera lens.

"If you stop interrupting and let me finish my story, you'll understand soon enough," he advised her and moved the knife in such a way that it caught what little light there was in the room.

"Anymore interruptions and I'll be forced to use this." He motioned towards the knife.

"Before he met you, my brother was happy. I know he was because he and I use to keep in touch. Imagine that, after my parents sent me away, my older brother found a way to keep in touch. You see, my brother and I were close, always were. We weren’t twins or anything like that, but we were like two peas in a pod. He was my big brother, I looked up to him, and we were inseparable." He let out a soft chuckle.

"We were, that is, until my parents decided to send me away. You see, me and my brother, along with a few of the neighborhood kids were out in the woods.  We were just messing around like we usually did, playing tag, building forts, things like that. Well, while we were out there digging around I found the carcass of a dead animal. I mean this thing was so badly decayed that none of us could figure out what it was, but I was the only one that was brave enough to go near it. I remember it like it was yesterday." Aurora watched as the expression changed on his face. He looked almost lethargic, as if he were recounting a happy childhood memory, not a sadistic, tale of torture. She could tell where he was leading, but thought it best if she not interrupt.

"I picked up a stick and as I moved closer, our so –called friends took off leaving just my brother and I.  He kept telling me to stop, to leave the thing alone but I was amazed,  I mean I'd seen my share of dead animals on the side of the road and what not, but not like this. I was curious, okay, I was more than curious, I was intrigued but my brother didn’t seem to share in my enthusiasm so he takes off running back home. Now it’s just me and this dead animal, so I'm poking and prodding at this lifeless thing and I swear it felt like it appreciated me. It wanted me to do those things," he chuckled maniacally.

"Hell if that thing had a hole, my stick went into it, and just when I was about to get even closer to it, my old man comes charging up behind me. He grabs me by my waist and swings me towards him. "You like playing with dead animals do you?" He was yelling and cursing. He called me a crazy sick-o and told me that I was a disgrace to the family. That I was making them look bad, that everyone in the neighborhood was scared of me. And when he asked me why I did it, I just shrugged my shoulders and told him that I liked it, that I liked looking at and touching dead things. That he wasn’t ever going to stop me from doing it, and then I must have looked at him in such a way that it made him shiver. Because he was still holding me and I felt him shiver, I mean here was this big, intimidating, former quarter back, and I made him shiver.

Well by the time we'd gotten back home, my mother had put in a call to an aunt who lived in Washington State, and four days later, I was on a plane with my daddy. We got to the airport, he rented a car, and two hours later we were standing at the doorstep of my great aunt Ada's house. Daddy simply handed her an envelope, told her that if she needed more to call and then went on his way. No goodbye or nothing, as a matter of fact, he didn’t even look at me. I suppose he couldn't, the guilt would have been too much. You listening to me?" He sat back in his chair and his eyes were clear now, clear and distant.

"Yes I'm listening. Please, go on." She hoped that by feigning interest, she'd give the police time enough to mobilize. She hoped that they would bust through the door shoot first and ask questions later.

"Aurora!" He shouted and slapped her hard. "I said pay attention!"

Liam's heart jolted when he saw the officer move the barricade to allow the SWAT truck to drive through. "Jesus," he whispered and tried to sneak through the barricade once again."

"Not going to happen buddy!" The officer shouted at him this time and quickly replaced the barricades. "Step back sir!"

Mari rested a hand on his shoulder. "She's going to be alright Liam. Just hold on, this will all be over soon, losing control is not going to help Aurora."

"Go to hell," he barked, then thought about what she said. "Shit, you're right Mari, I'm sorry. I can't think straight!" He'd never been in a situation like this, but he knew that jumping the gun and getting all crazy was not going to help Aurora, not one bit.

Mari leaned against the car and watched as Liam struggled to gain control.

When the SWAT team arrived, Nick breathed out a sigh of relief. At least now, things would go somewhere, they'd been sitting around waiting for what seemed like hours and he had no idea what the hell was going on inside the house. When a psychiatric report about Benjamin came in over the wire, it said that he'd been sent away by his family and was forced to stay with a distant relative. Apparently his great aunt was old and senile, and she couldn’t take care of him so he had to take care of himself.  When she passed away in her sleep, he chose not to notify authorities. It wasn’t until neighbors began complaining of the foul smell coming from the house that they'd decided to investigate.

When authorities arrived, Benjamin was nowhere to be found. The rotten odor of decay permeated throughout the house, and when they opened her bedroom door, they found the body of 94 year old, Betsy Armand.  Besides being badly decayed, the coroner found several puncture wounds all over her body. When authorities finally caught up to Benjamin and asked him about the wounds, he'd said that he was curious and used a fire poker on his great aunt. He was twelve years old at the time and was deemed emotionally unstable, and was subsequently locked up in the children's ward at Western State Hospital because of it.

On his eighteenth birthday he was released back into society, he was no longer a patient, he was a consumer who could now be in charge of his own mental health. There'd been no disputes from the state, so Benjamin Parker was set free. He kept a low profile and had managed to make his way into British Columbia where he lived for seven years by himself. "Hearing about the suicide of his brother must have caused him to come out of hiding," Sheriff Rafferty told Nick.

"Ya think?" Nick snickered and made his way over to the SWAT commander.

While she sat listening to him talk, Aurora began to see, too well, the bitterness that had been planted in him as a child. One son was cared for and loved while the other, shipped off and forced to live with a senile old woman. Benjamin went on to tell her that he'd grown up by himself and that after his aunt died, he'd kept her in the house. It soothed him knowing that someone was still in the house.

"I'm sorry," she whispered to him. But he didn’t believe her.

"No you’re not!" He slammed his fist on her face. Blood oozed out of her nose and mouth, and she fought hard to maintain control.

"Now where was I? Oh yes, back to my brother. Anyway, throughout all the turmoil my brother and I managed to keep in touch. Weeks after my arrival in Washington, I started getting letters from him. My parents had inadvertently left the address of our aunt's place out in the open, and when he found it, he started writing. Every week he wrote to me, but he told me not to write back because he didn’t wasn’t to risk our parents finding out. And when my aunt died, and the state came to take her away, they contacted my parents and told them that I needed to be committed. 

They told them that a shrink had diagnosed me with bi-polar disease and mild schizophrenia, and all that I needed was to be put away. My parents let me become a ward of the state, and they didn’t even bat an eyelash when it happened.  They just brushed it under the rug, out of sight, out of mind. They'd gotten rid of the bad son and had the good son that was all that mattered. So I had no choice but to stay in that godforsaken place, day after day, night after night. The only thing that kept me going was letters from my brother. He'd gotten out of the house and was living on his own. But he couldn’t afford to come and see me, and to be honest, I didn’t want him to.

I didn’t want him to see his baby brother locked up in an insane asylum like some animal. But he managed to keep up with the letters and by and by, the years went on until one day I get a letter from him telling me that he'd met the girl of his dreams and that he thinks she's the one. Well of course, that girl was you Aurora; only, I knew that you weren’t the one. I wanted to tell him to wait, that I was going to be getting out soon, and that me, and him could take off somewhere, maybe travel around the world, go exploring. But I didn’t, I congratulated him and counted on the letters coming less and less. And I was right, by the time I was released, he'd stopped writing all together. You're the reason my brother deserted me, you bitch!" He shouted. Just then a loud voice came booming from outside the house. "Benjamin Parker, this is Sergeant Caine of the Rhode Island State Police. I need to know what's going on inside the house and if Miss Collins is alright. We've placed a phone at your front door so that you can communicate with us. Please Mr. Parker; grab the phone so that we can talk."

"I was wondering when they'd show up," Benjamin smirked and held a firm grip on his knife.

"Now I'm going to untie your hands so that you can go out there and get the phone, you try anything stupid Aurora, and I'll run this knife up and down your back, nice and slow so that you feel everything. You got that? Might as well appease them," he leered. As good as gutting Aurora sounded, that was not what he had planned. She was going to hang, she needed to hang, but he needed more time, wanted her to hear the whole story.
There's nothing worse than dying without knowing why,
he thought to himself.