He pulled on his socks and shoes and walked slowly out of the bedroom as the breathless television news report concluded, “Authorities are urging anyone with information regarding this or any of the other murders to call local law enforcement immediately. If you have seen or heard anything you believe might be of value, please come forward and help bring this string of gruesome attacks to a close.”
Walter watched Lorraine closely as he entered the living room. She was staring unblinkingly at the television; he wondered if she even noticed he had joined her. Her face was pale and her lips ghostly white. His wife had become fixated on the ghastly killing spree, convinced she and Walter were going to be the unknown assailant’s next victims. The murders were all she could talk about.
Over and over he had tried to reassure her that the two of them did not fit the pattern the killer had established: all of the victims thus far had been men, all had been discovered alone inside otherwise empty, locked houses, their bodies mutilated, skin shredded off their bones in long bloody strips. Not one woman had been found murdered yet, but Lorraine would not listen to reason and Walter was starting to believe that his wife would soon suffer some sort of debilitating breakdown caused by obsessing over the tragedies.
He sat next to her on the couch and placed a hand gently on her knee. She jumped and flinched. Terror blossomed in her eyes.
“Watching all of this overly sensational news coverage is not healthy for you, Lorraine,” he said quietly, stating the obvious.
She moaned. “But how could someone do these awful things, and how are they getting into the houses of the victims, and how can we be sure we won’t be next?”
Walter placed a finger on her lips to quiet her. “I was thinking, perhaps this would be a good time for you to go visit your mother for a few days. You know, get out of the city and forget about all this for a while.”
“Just me? But… what about you?”
“I’ll be fine. I certainly won’t be opening up the front door and inviting some crazed maniac inside so he can butcher me in my own home…” A gasp of terror escaped Lorraine’s lips and Walter stopped speaking. “Sorry, dear,” he said, and he knew he had her.
As he cruised the red light district, Walter wondered what it was, exactly, that so terrified Lorraine regarding the ongoing mystery in the city. Sure, people were getting killed and at an alarming rate, but the metropolitan area was enormous, with hundreds of thousands of residents. Statistically, the odds of ending up dead at the hands of the person—or perhaps the thing—stalking the city were miniscule. As far as he was concerned, the whole issue wasn’t even worth wasting his time worrying about.
With Lorraine shipped off to her dried-up old hag of a mother’s house for the next week or so, Walter felt he could finally begin to relax and breathe again. It was not easy constantly walking on eggshells around his wife, worrying that with her deteriorating mental condition she might at any moment burst into tears or start ranting and raving about protecting themselves from brutal murderers, fearing every shadow in every corner and cringing in terror at every creak in the night as their old house settled on its foundation.
He had herded her onto the train this morning with the promise that he would check in by telephone every couple of days with any new information about the strange situation in the city as it became available. It stuck in his craw that he had to make this concession, but, really, he knew it was the only way Lorraine would agree to leave. And he knew she absolutely had to leave, for his sanity if not for her own.
Now, rolling slowly through the grimy streets of the red light district in his grimy little car, gazing with undisguised lust through his grimy little eyes at the streetwalkers who seemed to populate every corner, Walter felt he owed it to himself to cut loose a little. After all, he had been forced to deal with Lorraine’s paranoid delusions for far too long; it was time to enjoy a little relaxation.
Butterflies fluttered in his stomach. Even though he had made a habit of visiting the “other” side of the tracks every now and then over the three decades of his marriage, he had never gotten so jaded that he didn’t still experience that nervous clenching feeling in his belly as he examined the merchandise, trying to decide which hooker of the many he ran his hungry eyes over he was going to bring home this time.
He turned the corner onto Washington Street and spied a petite, long-legged beauty with shaggy tawny hair gliding along the sidewalk, seemingly oblivious to her surroundings. She was encased in a tight, form-fitting black leather bodysuit and moved with an almost feline grace, languid and sensual, apparently unaware of the double-takes she was causing and of the lingering stares of men and women alike.
Walter pulled to the curb, ignoring the honking horns of the angry drivers he had cut off, watching the young woman, spellbound. She walked directly to his car—were his intentions that obvious?—and he was again reminded of the graceful movements of a cat, a panther perhaps, slinking smoothly and quietly through the jungle as it stalked its’ prey.
“Hey there, big boy” she purred, her voice husky and smoky, and Walter knew that she was the one.
He reached across the passenger’s seat and opened the door, and the girl slid into his car with an economy of motion that was breathtaking. Slowly he pulled away from the curb, barely able to concentrate on the relatively simple task of merging into the sluggish flow of traffic.
“I’m Kat,” she said.
Walter held the front door for Kat as they entered the house, and then followed her into the living area. His eyes were glued to her body as she walked ahead of him, her every curve accentuated by the bodysuit swish-swishing in time with her graceful steps. Something about her beautiful head of hair caught his attention as she moved down the hallway. It seemed longer, thicker than it had been when he spotted her on the sidewalk as he drove slowly past, but of course that was impossible. It had only been a few minutes.
Seeming to sense his eyes tracking her, she turned with a hint of a smile on her face. Her wide green eyes wore a look of amusement, tinged perhaps with barely concealed contempt. “Where’s the missus?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your wife, Walter; where is she?”
“How did you know—I mean… uh… what makes you think I’m married?”
“You mean, besides the clearly defined strip of white skin on the third finger of your left hand?”
Without thinking, Walter self-consciously covered his left hand with his right. “Oh, yeah, right. Uh, she’s away for a few days,” he mumbled, knowing he should not feel embarrassed or self-conscious in front of a hooker but discovering he did.
“Don’t worry, honey, I don’t care about your personal situation,” she drawled softly, tossing her purse onto the living room table and managing to sound superior and dismissive at the same time. “It’s completely irrelevant to what is going to happen here tonight.” She swiveled her head and peered at Walter with eyes that seemed to glow softly in the dimming early-evening light.
A sudden, visceral feeling of dread wormed its way through Walter’s bowels. Her words should have ignited his desire—after all, that was the whole point of cruising the red light district and selecting Kat, wasn’t it?—but the utter lack of inflection in her voice chilled him. She sounded almost dead; like she was saying only what she knew was expected of her. And those eyes! Obviously the glow in them was a trick of the light, of course it was, but for a second there…