“A game?”
“Just lie back and put your hands behind your head.”
“Oh, my.” She smiled and she lay back against the pillow, her naked body stretched out before him, her breasts rising up like offerings. “Whatever lights your fire.”
He did not smile. He did not say anything. Just that enameled black glare.
He draped the stocking across her right foot and slowly dragged it to the other, then up her right shin and knee and across her thigh and belly and breasts. Then he drew the stocking teasingly back down to her feet again and up the other leg and across the small trimmed tuft of hair and her belly to her neck. He continued this for a while, not saying a word, but studying her with a strange intensity. She decided that this was some odd foreplay to turn himself on, so she settled into it, allowing the anticipation to mount.
He knew what he was doing, because little electrical eddies flared across her skin. She closed her eyes and spread her legs to let the stocking drift across the tender flesh of her inner thighs and across her pubis and up to her breasts. As he continued she became aroused and began to groan and raised her body against the tingling passes as if responding to a phantom lover. “Where did you learn this?” she whispered.
“I had a good teacher.”
In a short time she was panting, amazed at how he had worked her up by the fairy lickings of a nylon stocking.
After several more moments, she felt herself become wet and arched her hips to catch the length of material, imagining that it were his fingers, his lips, his tongue. But it eluded her and crawled up her belly to taunt her breasts. And the more he continued, the more she wished he would stop and give her the real thing—himself, his weight across her body, his thickness moving inside of her. God! She did all she could not to touch herself. Her mouth felt parched and she licked her lips. She didn’t think she could stand it much longer. “Please.” She grabbed for his leg.
But he pulled back again. His face was a mask of intensity. But he wasn’t even erect. She had thought this was for him, but his pants were flat. Yet his eyes were black with heat. She raised herself and held out her hand. “You’re driving me crazy.”
“Good.”
The stocking snaked across her shoulders ever so slowly, then down her front.
“I want you,” she whispered.
“Soon.”
Another long maddening moment passed until she thought she would explode. “Please.”
“Close your eyes,” he said softly.
She did and heard him say, “Yes.”
In a lightning move, he wrapped the stocking around her neck and pulled with all his might.
The scream caught in her windpipe and came out as a single audible catch.
It happened so fast that shock had set in before she could comprehend what he was doing. This was not a little sex game. The stocking dug into her neck like a garrote, choking off the flow of blood and air.
God Almighty! she thought. This isn’t happening. Why is he doing this?
By reflex she tried to get her fingers under the material before she passed out, but instantly he was upon her, straddling her hips and pressing his full weight on her upper body while keeping the strangling hold. With her eyes she pleaded, but his face was a blank.
She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t move as all strength rapidly seeped from her arms and legs, abandoning her in the last moments to the realization that this was her death.
His eyes locked on hers, huge black stones filling her tunneling vision. This wasn’t supposed to be. Not her. Not when things were just beginning again.
“Dirty girl,” he whispered.
And the world went black.
2
Lieutenant Detective Steve Markarian was deep asleep that Sunday morning when the call came in on his landline. It was a little after nine and his day off, but his supervisor called to say that a Jamaica Plain woman had been found dead of suspicious causes in her apartment. Captain Charlie Reardon wanted him to take the lead because all the other detectives were busy with other cases, including a double homicide in Dorchester the previous night.
The address was 123 Payson Road, a pleasant tree-lined road off Center Street, a neighborhood of modest one- and two-family Victorian homes that once held Irish immigrants who had clawed their way into the middle class in the early decades of the twentieth century. Today the homes were pricey condos for young professional gentry with Beemers and Peg Perego baby strollers.
By the time he arrived, the street had been sealed off and three patrol cars were blocking the road. In front of the house a few uniforms stood behind stretches of yellow tape. In spite of the cool drizzle, several onlookers had gathered. At the curb a white medical examiner’s van waited with a body collector inside talking to a patrol officer through the window. The rear doors were open. Steve flashed his badge, and one of the patrols said, “Second floor. They’re waiting to bring her down.”
“Who’s the detective?”
“Sergeant French.”
Steve’s partner. He headed into the building and up to the apartment. Standing in the middle of the living room was Neil French with Tim Callahan, the superintendent of the J.P.P.D., Bobby Mangini from the M.E.’s office, and a crime scene technician. They were talking about the historic triple play from the sixth inning of last night’s Red Sox–Yankee game that Neil had taken his daughter to. In the dining room forensics personnel were getting ready to leave.
Neil glanced at his watch. “What took you so long?”
Steve shrugged off the question. “I was supposed to be off. Why are you here?”
“Hogan’s kid has a basketball tournament, we did a switch.”
“So what do we have?”
“Looks like autoerotica gone bad.”
Neil was monochromatic in a navy blazer and navy shirt and jeans. The dark colors emphasized his florid face and nearly transparent hair. In his mouth was a red plastic stirrer that he worked with his back teeth. It was what he did instead of smoking cigarettes. Half the pens and pencils on his office desk were chewed. Neil was a bundle of nervous energy that could make him impatient and ornery, especially when maxed out on overtime. And he was maxed out.
“No sign of forced entry. No scratches on the lock. No evidence of a struggle. Nothing that anybody else was here.” The red stirrer jiggled up and down as he talked like one of those pens that record seismic activity.
“We’re waiting for you to take a look before we take her,” Mangini said.
“Who found her?” Steve’s eyes fell on three framed photos on the fireplace mantel.
“Patrol came on an alarm call about seven thirty after her girlfriend found her. She got concerned, when she got no response by phone, so she came up and tried the door, and when she couldn’t get in she contacted the landlady in the apartment below. They found her. They’re both downstairs with the responding officer.”
“Any estimate how long she’s been dead?’
“Hard to tell. Based on lividity and rigor, maybe fifteen, twenty hours.”
The apartment had the familiar Victorian layout—living room, dining room, kitchen in a line, a hall with two bedrooms off the dining area. Steve followed Neil through the dining room where a closed Dell laptop sat under a chair. In the kitchen were technicians he knew from crime scene services. “We’re ready to take her when you are,” Mangini said.
Steve nodded. The kitchen looked as if it had just been tidied up. The only thing suggesting activity was a single wineglass on the counter, and near it an open bottle of Taittinger, two-thirds full. Fingerprint dust showed latents on it and the single glass. The sink was empty. When Steve glanced at Neil, he saw something in his expression that didn’t look right. “You okay?”