The 7th Victim - Alan Jacobson [169]
“We?” Vail clenched her jaw, trying to will away the pain, trying to put it all together. Come on, Vail, think! An accomplice. There had been many serial killers who had a friend or spouse as their partner in crime. Then: “Where is he? Is he afraid, too scared to come out?”
The whip snapped again, this time striking the flesh over Vail’s low back and buttocks. Tears squeezed from her clenched eyes.
“I’d hoped to make you work for it, but I see you’re too stupid to get it. And I’m not interested in playing twenty questions.”
The offender moved in front of Vail, the light beating down on the pantyhose-covered head. Vail squinted at the figure before her, bracing for what might come next. Pain was a state of mind now, coming from nowhere . . . and everywhere. Her abdominal muscles, which seemed to be stretched beyond their limits by the weight of her lower extremities, were cramping. She needed to lift her legs somehow, to lessen the strain on her stomach.
But suspended as she was, there was little she could do to defend herself. Instead of harming her, however, the offender merely reached up and pulled off his nylon veil.
And in that instant, the profiler in her vanished. All thoughts, all emotions, all words left her mind. Seconds passed before the shock wore thin enough to speak. And even then, she was only able to whisper one sentence: “Oh, my god.”
eighty-three
How could this be?
The lighting was poor, her vision blurred by pain. But from what she was able to see, the offender’s hair was short, the face hard, the brow prominent, and the mouth drawn down into a scowl.
Vail finally summoned the strength to speak. “Who are you?” But the name was unimportant, Vail realized. The physical appearance, the hair color, the face, the eyes. . . . There was no need to ask who it was. The answer was obvious. Vail hesitated a moment, then said: “I . . . I’m a twin? I have a twin sister?”
“I’m not who you think I am,” the Dead Eyes killer said.
“You have to be,” Vail insisted. It was all coming together. The nightmares . . . could it be possible they weren’t merely dreams, but some kind of “psychic connection,” the kind documented between twins? She’d always doubted such phenomena, but now she wasn’t so sure.
Of course. “Nellie took me and left you with our father.”
Another snap of the whip, this time across the legs. “Does it hurt? Do you feel the pain? It’s just like the pain you caused. You. You’re the one responsible. You and that dead queen bitch. The lying Eleanor Linwood. Or should I call her Nellie Irwin?”
The bare bulb cast a harsh light on Dead Eyes’s head, causing deep shadows to fall across the remainder of her face.
“I can help you,” Vail said.
A laugh. A deep, guttural laugh. But no response. The killer moved out of the penumbra holding a Tupperware container. “Do you know what this is?”
Vail strained her eyes downward.
The killer removed the top and held the container up to Vail’s face. Inside was a left hand. A man’s hand.
Vail immediately recognized the thick scar across the knuckles. “Deacon—”
“An ugly SOB, if you don’t mind me saying. And mean—man, I tell you, it was a totally different experience. All those bitches were soft-talking sitting ducks. But your Deacon, he was a bit more challenging. I thought it would be fun to go to his house, make him think I was you. At first, it worked. He thought you’d come to fight, and he got nasty with me. Reminded me of father. So I gave him what he deserved.” Dead Eyes looked down at the hand and shrugged. “I took a little souvenir. A trophy, I think you called it in your profile.” She looked down at the container, tilted it in the dim light. “It turned out to be more satisfying than I thought it would be.”
Vail stared at the hand, embarrassed by her momentary relief over the discovery of Deacon’s death. She pushed the thought aside, realizing she needed to find a way out of this, for she had no desire to join him. “The eyes,” Vail said. “Did you stab the eyes because