Spider - Michael Morley [80]
‘So this guy could be a serial killer and a necrophile. A kind of hybrid?’
‘That’s what I’m thinking,’ said Howie ‘A double-trouble psycho. Maybe he started killing for a non-sexual reason.’
‘Revenge, accident, opportunity?’ suggested Fernandez.
‘Something like that. Then when he was faced with a dead body, he suddenly got turned on by it.’
‘You got any case studies in there that I can read up on?’ she asked.
Howie hit a search function. ‘Yeah, here you go. Man, there’s one hell of a list coming up: Carl Tanzler, Richard Chase, Winston Moseley, our old pals Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy – those last three seem to be pretty much in every classification there is.’
‘Lazy research,’ said Fernandez, scribbling down their names. ‘If everything that was written about Bundy was true, he’d have had to have lived three lifetimes.’
‘This is interesting,’ said Howie, ignoring her pet rant about Bundy. ‘There’s a bullet-point summary. It says necrophiles are usually fearful of rejection by women they sexually desire. Can you imagine what a necrophile would do in the kind of situation where he feels rejected?’
Fernandez was in step with his thoughts. ‘You mean he’d kill her to keep her?’
‘Exactly!’
Fernandez mused on it. ‘Maybe BRK got badly jilted once, and he just couldn’t bear the idea of anyone else walking out on him.’
‘Once bitten twice shy,’ said Howie.
‘He couldn’t face the idea of being on his own? Maybe he was just shit-scared of the whole thought of being lonely. A kind of lonelyphobia?’
‘I think that’s it,’ said Howie. ‘Death is the way he ensures that they never jilt him, that they stay with him, devoted to him, for ever.’
‘Hmm,’ said Fernandez. ‘I’ll remember that next time I give some Brad Pitt lookalike my number in a bar.’
50
Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York
It has been more than fifty hours since any food or liquid has passed the parched and blistered lips of Ludmila Zagalsky.
As she slips in and out of delirium, her mind is constantly tormented by the knowledge that she is involved in a unique act of self-cannibalism. As well as the awful stinging in her eyes, a new agony has surfaced, a raw and wretched stabbing pain in her kidneys. Lu doesn’t know enough anatomy to be able to even name the organ that’s hurting, let alone diagnose that she’s rapidly heading towards permanent renal damage. But she knows one thing for sure; something important inside her is screaming for water and without it she is going to die.
Once upon a time, back in the real world where people weren’t kidnapped, stripped naked and tortured to death, she’d been eating pizza with an old boyfriend; they’d watched Scream, or was it Scream 2 or 3? Anyway, they’d jokingly discussed what would be the worst way to be killed – the bullet, the blade, drowning or maybe fire. Her friend had said he’d hate to be burned alive at the stake, like they used to do in France with chicks such as Joan of Arc. Lu had confessed she couldn’t swim, had never been in the sea or a swimming pool in her life and was shit-scared of drowning. As they’d finished off the deep pan and thought about making out, neither of them had considered that probably the worst way to die was to be deliberately starved to death.
Right now, Lu reckons drowning might not be such a bad way to go after all. A girl she used to work a corner of the Beach with once told her that she should drink about half a gallon of water every day to stay healthy. Half a gallon a day! She’d nearly wet herself laughing. The kid had said she’d been balling some kind of health freak, a gym monster who had muscles like the Incredible Hulk, and he’d told her that more than eighty per cent of blood is made up of water so you’ve got to keep topping up the fluid level. It had sounded like bullshit. Until now. For the first time in her life, she understood every word of it.
In the last hour or so, she’s noticed that her mouth isn’t only painfully dry, her tongue has started to taste bitter and almost poisonous. Were