He didn’t usually target women he knew. He often had no idea what any of the women looked like when he first chose them. At the time he selected them, they were only names on paper. Due to the luck of the draw, some of them turned out to be whole lot better looking than others. In fact, one had been a real dog. In Serena’s case he had created the opportunity rather than waiting for it to pres itself. It had worked like a charm. Not only that, other than Rochelle, Serena Grijalva had been best looking of the bunch.
Laying Serena’s underwear aside, he picked u the next pair. Jockey, the label said. Whoever heard of Jockey for women? What a queer idea! And then he giggled because the thought itself was so funny. It figured. These had belonged to Constance Fredericks, and she was queer all right—as a three-doll bill. He had suspected her of being a lesbian just from the paperwork, and of course she was. When he followed her to ground down in Miami, Florid she and her partying friends had verified all worst suspicions. It didn’t bother him that Constance liked women. What she liked or didn’t like had no bearing on him. As a matter of fact, he ha enjoyed watching the way Constance and the others carried on. They did things to one another that, up to that time, he’d only read about in books, things that his uptight mother never would have believed possible.
He put down the jockeys and picked up the next pair. Black lace. Control top. These had belonged Maddy Piper, an aging showgirl-turned-stripper from Las Vegas whose figure was starting to go to seed. She would have been far better off if she hadn’t ended up getting into a big fight with her agent, an ex-middleweight boxer.
Next came the pink satin bikini briefs with the Frederick’s of Hollywood label. They had belonged to Lois Hart, a barmaid at the Lucky Strike bowling alley in Stockton, California. Lois had sold drinks during the day and dealt in other kinds of chemical mood enhancers by night. When she was found bludgeoned to death and tied to a snag on the banks of the Sacramento River, nobody had gone out their way looking for her killer. The cops had written Lois off as a drug deal gone bad and let it go that.
That brought him to the bright red pair at the very bottom of the box, the ones that had once belonged to Rochelle Newton. Lovely, tall, and slender Rochelle from Tacoma, Washington. Years earlier, when he was up in Seattle, training to be an eager-beaver CPA, Rochelle had been the not-too-savvy hooker who had laughed at him when couldn’t perform. She had been his very first victim —an accident almost. He hadn’t really intended to kill her. It had just happened. But once he started hitting her, he had found he couldn’t stop himself. Afterward, when he knew she was dead and after he had carefully disposed of her body, he took the key to her apartment on Pacific Highway South, let himself in, and helped himself to a single pair of panties from her dresser drawer.
At that point, all he had wanted was a token—something that belonged to her, something to remember her by. The moment he had found the red parities in a drawer, a tradition was born.
Over the years, he had figured out how stupid he had been. It was a miracle nobody had seen him going to or coming from Rochelle’s apartment. Now he either took the panties at the time of killing—if he thought he could take them without investigators seeing it as a signature M.O.—or did without.
For years after killing Rochelle, he had lived terror—waiting for the knock on the door that would mean the cops had finally caught up wit him. The knock never came. And then one day Rochelle’s name had turned up on the list of missing persons who were thought to be the possible victims of one of the Northwest’s most notorious serial killers. The very night Rochelle’s killer read her name in the paper, he went to bed safe in the knowledge that the and slept like a baby, safe in the knowledge that the cops were no long looking for him. They were looking for someone else, someone they called a serial killer.
He had quit his father’s firm the next day and gone off on his own, working at two-bit jobs, but savoring the freedom. And knowing that his mother would always slip him a little something he got caught short.
Once on the road, he realized there was a world of difference between serial killers and recreational ones. The first kind kill because some evil compulsion forces them to. The second ones do it for the fun of it—because they want to.
Breathing deeply, he fondled the swatch of bright red silk. Rochelle. She was the one who had shown him the rules and taught him how to play the tne. Once he knew how simple it was to fake the cops out and trick them into looking the other way, everything else was easy.
All six pairs of panties were out on the table now, laying there in full view. Allowing himself to become excited again, he studied them under the glow of the candle’s flickering light, stroking each one in turn. One at a time, he held five of the six up to his face once more, trying to make up his mind.
As he did so, his heartbeat quickened. Which would it be tonight? Which one should he choose? Other than Rochelle, he had never raped his victims, not at the time. He knew better than that. DNA tests were far too reliable these days, and some cops were a whole lot smarter than they looked. Besides, he didn’t want to pick up some kind of sexually transmitted disease. One way or another, all women were whores. When it came to that, he believed in the old adage, Better safe than sorry.
At the time he was doing it, he enjoyed killing them. That was satisfying in a way, but he took his real pleasure from them later on, over and over, in the privacy of his own home. There—with the doors carefully closed and locked, with the blinds pulled, and with a scented candle burning on the table—they offered him the relief he craved. No questions asked.
By then his breath was coming in short, sharp gasps. His pants were bulging so badly that it hurt. He breathed a sigh of relief when he finally opened the zipper and allowed the caged prisoner to roam free. A moment later his other hand settled on newest prize in his collection—Serena Grijalva’s thin white cotton briefs.
It didn’t take long. He grasped himself and masturbated into the soft material, groaning with pleasure when he came. Afterward, he hurried to bathroom and washed out the panties with soap and water before hanging them on the towel bar to dry. Then he went back to the kitchen table, turned on the overhead light, and blew out the candle.
Sitting down once more, he picked up a single piece of paper that had slipped out of sight temporarily under Maddy Piper’s black lace panties. The paper was a fragment hastily torn from the corner of a yellow legal pad. A few words had been noted on it in painstakingly careful printing. “Rhonda Weaver Norton,” it said. “Fourteen twenty-five Apache Boulevard, number six, Tempe, Arizona.”
Using a strip of tape, he fastened the piece of paper to the bottom of the box and then sat there for a moment, admiring his handiwork.
“Rhonda,” the man whispered aloud. “Rhonda, Rhonda, Rhonda. You’d better watch out, little girl. The big bad wolf is coming to get you.”
CHAPTER TWO
Joanna Brady zipped the last suitcase shut and then sat down on the edge of the bed. “Off you go,” she said to her daughter, who was sprawled crosswise on the bed, thumbing through a stack of family photos.
“I like this one best,” Jenny said, plucking one out of the stack and handing it to her mother. The picture had been taken by Joanna’s father, Big Hank Lathrop, with his Brownie Hawkeye camera. The irregularly sized, old-fashioned, black-and‑white snapshot showed an eight-year-old Joanna Lathrop, dressed in her Brownie uniform. She stood at attention in front of her mother’s old Maverick. In the foreground cartons of Girl Scout cookies were stacked into a Radio Flyer wagon.