"No problem here, honey-love. Do your thing."
I move to the doorway and stand there for a moment, listening with my mind's ear. After a second, I hear it: chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug-a. I feel the coldness moving over me and the distance around me widen to a windless, open field. I can hear the dark train, and I'm ready to see it. Now I just need to find it again. Trace how it rode through this place. I step inside. The condo isn't elegant, but it is simple and clean. It has the feel of someone who used to try too hard but had decided to drop the pretense. A faint, sad feeling. Disappointment wasn't a way of life yet, but that day was coming.
That day had arrived, I think.
The smell of death permeates the place. It is a veneer of decay that's settled like neglect on the condo. No perfume here. The odor of murder, raw and real. If souls had a scent, this is how Jack Jr.'s would smell. I look to the right of the living room and see the kitchen. A sliding glass door leads out onto the backyard patio and a cool night. I walk over and examine the latch. It's standard, cheap. But unbroken. "You just knocked again, didn't you?" I murmur to myself. "You and your buddy. Did he hide to one side while you stood in front? Ready to rush her when she least expected it?"
It occurs to me that their choice of timing with Annie, 7:00 P.M., might have been based on more than just bravado. It is a time when people are either coming home or have just arrived home, or are settling in from having arrived not long before. When they are in flux and don't want to know about the world outside.
"Is that what you did here too? Did you just stroll up in the early evening, all smiles, and knock on the door? Did one of you have your hands in your pockets, not a care in the world?"
Because this is something I sense about them. It's a strong feeling. Chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug-a.
Their arrogance.
It's early evening, and they park right in front of the whore's house. Why not?
Nothing strange about parking at the curb, after all. They get out of the car, look around. Things are quiet without being silent, empty without being still. It's dusk in the suburbs, and you can feel life and motion, hidden behind the walls of the other homes. Ants in their hills.
They walk up to her door. They know she's home. They know everything about her. One glance around to ensure no one is outside and watching, and he knocks. A moment passes, and she opens the door . . . Then what? I look around in the entryway. I see no dropped mail here, no signs of a struggle. But I can feel it again, that arrogance. They did the simplest thing they could do--they walked inside, pushing her backward, and closed the door. They knew she wouldn't stop them. It isn't in most of us to push back as a first response. Instead, we look for reasons, try to under- stand why something is happening. And in that moment of hesitation and won- der, the hunter seizes the initiative.
Perhaps she was fast, though. Perhaps she opened her mouth to scream even as the door closed. But they would have been prepared for that. With what? A knife. No. No child to hold hostage this time. They'd need a more imminent threat. A gun? Yes. Nothing like the dark tunnel of a gun barrel to keep you quiet.
"Shut up or you die," one of them had said. His voice would have been calm, factual. This would have made it even scarier. More believable. She'd have sensed that here was someone who could shoot you and yawn about it. I move toward the bedroom. The stench is stronger here. I recognize this place from the video. The motif is pink and soft and tasteful. It speaks of youth. Careless happiness.
In the middle of this softness, the hardest thing there is. Her. Dead and already decaying, still tied to her bed. She died with her eyes open. Her legs are spread. They left her that way on purpose, I know. To brag to us; I had her, they are saying, and she's no one. A worthless whore. She was OURS.
I see the bags arrayed next to the bed. While her body is a scene of violence, chaos, and depravity, the bags are a diametric contrast. They appear to have been placed next to each other in a nearly exact straight line. Neat and tidy. They are bragging to us here too. See how neat and skillful we are, it seems to say. Or perhaps they are speaking a language only they understand, writing in bloody pictographs we can't decipher. It screams of careful ritual. This is what Jack the Ripper would have done, they think, and so this is what they do. I'm intrigued as well by the intensity of focus here. They were interested in her, and only her. Nothing else in the room has been touched or damaged. Their need to own did not extend to her environment. She was enough. I move into the room and look around. Lots of books. They are dogeared and haphazard in arrangement. Not just filling space--she was a reader. I lean forward to glance at the titles and am hit with a mixed pang of sorrow, irony, and bitter humor. True-crime novels, many focusing on serial killers.
"Helter Skelter," I murmur.
I turn to the bed. My eyes narrow as I notice her clothing in a pile on the floor. I walk over and bend down, examining without touching. Her bra strap is torn, as are her panties. She had not taken these off herself. They had been removed by force.
I stand up and look down at her dead face, caught in an eternal scream. "Did you fight them, Charlotte?" I ask her. "When they told you to take off your bra and panties, did you tell them to get stuffed?"
She is standing next to her bed, wearing only her underthings, shivering with the adrenaline of fear.
One of them points the gun. "All of it," he says. "Take it all off, now."
She looks at him, and the other one. Unlike Annie, she understands before they have tied her down.
Those empty eyes.
She knows.
"FUCK YOU!" she screams, and runs toward him, flailing and kicking.
"HELP! HELP!"
I look down at her body again. I see bruising on her face, around her eyes. Caused after she was tied to the bed, or before? I'll never know for sure. I decide it was before. It doesn't really matter if it's true or not. But it makes me feel better to look at it that way.
He's enraged that this sow has put her whore hands on him. And he is afraid, for just a moment. The screaming has to stop. He punches her in the stomach, driving her breath out of her lungs and making her bend over.
"Hold her arms behind her back," he says to the other one, voice taut with rage.
She is gagging and gasping as the other grabs her arms by the elbows, pinning them back.
"You need to learn to obey, whore," the one with the gun says. His hand loops up, open palmed, cracking into the side of her face. Once. Twice. Again. Snapping her head back and forth. He reaches over and tears the bra from her with the kind of brutal strength only the insane have. Follows this by ripping her panties from her thighs. She tries to scream again, but he punches her solar plexus and follows it up with a few more devastating backhands to her face. She is naked, dazed, her eyes tearing and her ears ringing, and her head in a red haze. Her knees buckle as she tries to stay balanced.
Easy to control again.
This calms him.
He would have gagged her at that point. I look at her hands and feet, note the handcuffs. Her left hand catches my eye. I move to the head of the bed and lean forward. Charlotte had fake nails. But the nail on her right index finger is gone. I take a quick look at her other fingers. All the other nails are there. I bite my lip, thinking.