The Death Dealer Read online

Page 20

 

  Enough.

  He bent and kissed her. At first she was surprised. Then his mouth softened over hers, and she responded, rising on her toes, pressing against his body. Each cell in his body seemed to feel her slightest touch. Her mouth parted beneath his, wide, wet, deliciously decadent. She kissed with her tongue, erotic and sweet, the kind of thing that made a man forget everything in the world except her kiss. And she was still holding his hand against her breast. He kept kissing her, tasting her lips, playing with her tongue, seductive, suggestive….

  He picked her up. She was tall for a woman, but small against his size. He knew the layout of her apartment and carried her to her bedroom, where he simply placed her on the bed, before lying down beside her.

  There was no neat, leisurely discarding of their clothing. The buttons of her blouse simply gave way to the ministration of his fingers as they slipped beneath the hem, stroking over the tautness of her abdomen to the fullness of her breast. Her bra was an annoyance that somehow went away as soon as he found the hook. And then his face was buried between her breasts, ministering to them with hot, wet kisses, tender and hungry, subtle and raw. And then her jeans disappeared. The snap first, then the zipper lowering, his hand sliding down to cradle her hip, dislodging the denim, then caressing her skin as it moved lower, until the jeans, along with the little string panties beneath them, were gone.

  His shirt hung open, and his own pants lay on the floor, tangled with hers, though he had no idea how they’d gotten there. His black briefs hit the floor, as well, and then she was crushed against him, the tip of her tongue sliding over his flesh. He groaned, his erection suddenly painful, but then he was lost in the sensation of her fingers on his flesh. Suddenly the two of them were a tangle of lips and tongues and teeth, and they were touching, touching….

  He’d always thought that he would be so tender, so careful, if the thought of making love to her that had teased his imagination had ever come to fruition.

  Her kidnapper had been impotent and cruel, and she had survived by playing to the man’s ego. Because of that, he should have been slow. Careful. Tender.

  But she was like a lava flow in his arms, radiant, electrifyingly hot, her touch boldly erotic. She was a writhing cascade of carnal beauty and desire in his arms, and he couldn’t be gentle, couldn’t take the time for tender, as his senses sent him spiraling out of control. Later he would remember straddling her, kissing her lips and looking into her eyes, those dark pools of half-lidded blue, and then his mouth was caressing her breasts, and his fingers were sliding between her thighs, his body adjusting to her exquisite length as he slid against her. Then his lips were moving lower over her abdomen, to the concave mystery between her thighs. When she cried out and arched against him, he moved again, driving himself into her, so aroused that he felt as if he was about to crawl out of his own skin. The world came down to nothing but the two of them, their naked, hot, wet flesh, their hunger and need, and then, cataclysmically, a combustion of muscle, sinew and flesh as he felt her climax, then followed her as if rockets had flared in the night.

  And then…

  He felt guilty. Torn.

  But then she touched his face. Touched it so tenderly, as he slipped down by her side, cradling her against him.

  “Joe,” she said softly. And then, “Thank you. Thank you for being so…normal. ”

  God, he didn’t want to lose his heart so quickly. He may have lost his mind, but the world was still real, and they were who were they were, and normal or not, they were both still damaged.

  “Normal?” he teased softly. “Normal? Do you know how to flatter a guy, or what? How about, ‘Oh, Joe, you were incredible’?”

  She laughed then, snuggling more tightly against him, and said, “Oh, Joe. You were incredible. ”

  “Except I had to coach you to say so,” he said.

  They lay together for a while, just breathing, just being…And then her delicate hands with their talented fingers were on him again and she whispered, “If you’re just as good a second time, I promise you won’t have to tell me what to say. ”

  It was enough.

  They made love again then, heedless of everything dangerous that might be lurking in the night.

  He couldn’t help it; he had to ask.

  “If you’re so psychic, how come you didn’t see this coming, huh?”

  The girl hadn’t been part of his original plan, but she hadn’t given him any choice. She’d wanted her moment in the public eye, her fifteen minutes of fame.

  Well, now her name would be blazoned across dozens of headlines. She would make the news again, this time in a spectacular way. She should really be thanking him.

  She hadn’t been the one slated to die this way. He’d intended to go after someone else. Someone not only young and beautiful, but with a name and face so easily recognizable that the city would be in an absolute uproar.

  “You will go down in history, my dear,” he told her. She had been such an easy mark, her desire for fame and fortune blinding her to any possible danger.

  She didn’t look at all grateful for the favor he was doing her, though.

  Her eyes were bulging, and she kept making little mewling noises behind the gag. He was actually a little bit sorry, but not sorry enough to stop.

  He had an agenda, and he couldn’t let her get in the way of it any more than she already had. Now it was time. Time to finish her off.

  She kept struggling, but he’d been careful. No one would ever find any of his DNA under her fingernails, nor would they find his fingerprints, even if they could actually lift them off skin these days. Every killer left something behind or took something away, they said.

  Not him.

  He knew how to be careful.

  Still…poison was much better. And so easy. You simply slipped it into the bastard’s wine, he drank it and then he died.

  Strangulation, on the other hand…

  He’d never figured it would be so hard. Everything leading up to it had been easy. She’d fallen for the idea that they needed to keep their meeting secret. She’d been willing to slip into the dark with him, go wherever he wanted to go. Even getting on his boat and going out on the water…

  Such a sap. Such a fool.

  She’s jumped at the offer when he’d suggested the champagne to seal their deal, but she hadn’t gotten as drunk as he had thought she was. She wanted to live. He had her bound and gagged, but she was still struggling, and…

  Those eyes!

  He thought he might see her awful, bulging eyes forever.

  And then, at last, they closed.

  She stopped struggling, and the rest was easy. Distasteful, but easy. He hadn’t done so well the last time, hadn’t been able to carry out his literary parallel to the full extent he would have liked to. In this day and age, walling up old Thorne wouldn’t have been easy.

  He couldn’t really use Poe as his road map. Not without chancing being caught.

  So he would just do his best to follow the master’s model.

  In this case, Genevieve O’Brien would have made a much more appropriate victim. She was far lovelier than the original cigar girl, Mary Rogers, not to mention Lori Star. But Lori had been too nosy, and though he didn’t believe in psychics, someone else might, so she had had to become his Marie Roget.

  Finally he was done, and he sent to her body to a watery grave. Of course, she would be discovered. It was, in fact, absolutely necessary that she be found.

  As he headed back to the hustle and flow of life in New York, he contemplated the fact that he hadn’t done a bad job. In fact, he was feeling quite satisfied with his efforts, even gleeful.

  This was going to be fun.

  Then he paused, arrested by a flash in his mind’s eye. Those bulging eyes.

  But for a minute, they hadn’t belonged to the whore, the would-be psychic, Lori Star. They had been
her eyes. The eyes of the beauty he had originally intended to take the victim’s part in his reenactment of Poe’s brilliant original. They had been the eyes of Genevieve O’Brien. Beautiful and blue.

  Watching him.

  Seeing him.

  Knowing him for who—and what—he was.

  Genevieve!

  She was at his side, Joe told himself. There in her bed.

  Sleeping.

  He, too, had been asleep. No, it hadn’t been a dream, it had been a nightmare, a look into the hellish pit of his imagination.

  He had seen her face, and she’d been looking at him with those brilliantly blue eyes of hers.

  Looking at him…in accusation.

  And then those perfectly blue eyes had begun to bulge, her face growing red as it was suffused with blood, her throat darkening with the deep black and blue of bruises.

  She was choking. Being choked. By the hands he could see around her throat. Powerful hands, squeezing, tightening, stealing her breath…stealing her life.

  It had only been a dream, he told himself again. They were still in her bed, and she was next to him.

  But she wasn’t sleeping. She sat up suddenly, staring ahead blankly into the shadows of the room.

  “Gen?” He was bathed in sweat, but already the Technicolor horror of the dream was fading.

  She didn’t hear him at first.

  “Gen?” he said again.

  She blinked, then shuddered and turned to him. Tousled hair framed the delicate features of her face, and she smiled. “Hey,” she said softly.

  “Hey,” he said back.

  She lay down beside him again, as if nothing were wrong in the world.

  Was anything wrong?

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Fine,” she said, but she sounded hesitant as she added, “How about you?” He realized instantly that she was referring to what had transpired between them, that her question had nothing to do with what had been his nightmare. After all, people didn’t share their dreams, their nightmares, not even if they had been intimate.

  He shook off the dream. It was just a result of stress, he told himself. Just like thinking he’d heard the dead speak. No matter how embarrassing it was, he was going to have to go see a shrink. How many cases had he worked on in his life? How many corpses had he seen? So why now?