Devoted in Death (In Death #41)(59)

“Downtown,” Roarke added.

“Probability’s high. Peabody, put the sector on screen.”

While they ate, while they worked, Jayla Campbell struggled to rise above the pain. Going under it was a kind of escape, but they always brought her back, gave more.

She’d stopped trying to understand it. It simply was.

How long she couldn’t tell, not any longer. Hours, days, weeks. There was only pain and fear, and the certainty there would be more.

They’d had sex on the floor, against the wall, sometimes blessedly out of sight. Though she could hear them grunting or wailing, laughing.

They liked when she tried to scream, when she cried and begged. So she tried not to, but sometimes she couldn’t stop. Just couldn’t stop.

They looked so ordinary. Monsters shouldn’t look so ordinary, so much like ordinary people. The woman was pretty, in a hard, slutty sort of way, and the man – good-looking, sort of gangly and… stupid, she thought now.

He went along with anything the woman said.

Cut here, she’d say – and he would.

They were eating now, and the smell of the Chinese takeaway made her want to gag. She hadn’t eaten since the party. Sometimes they dribbled water in her mouth, but they never gave her food. Sometimes the water was laced with salt, and they laughed and laughed when she choked.

Monsters shouldn’t look like ordinary people.

They’d taken her clothes, but she’d gotten over the worst of that. Neither of them touched her in a sexual way – as if she cared about that now. They saved the sex for each other.

They were naked, too, as they ate, and sometimes they smeared sauce on each other and licked it off.

That, too, made her want to gag. At least she could close her eyes or turn her head. When they were involved in each other, she barely existed for them.

She wished she would stop existing for them.

They talked eagerly, avidly.

He said they were star-crossed lovers. The woman – Ella-Loo – loved when he quoted Shakespeare or talked about how they were lovers like Bonnie and Clyde.

She didn’t know who Bonnie and Clyde were, but the woman did; and she’d laugh and strike poses that made the man – Darryl – moan or lick his lips.

She listened to them when she could, to every word. If she lived – and she didn’t believe she would, but if – she would remember everything. She would tell the police everything. And she would hope with every cell in her pain-filled body, the police killed them in the bloodiest, most brutal, most horrible way possible.

She wanted to kill them with her own hands.

She wanted her mother. She wanted Kari. Sometimes when she floated away, she wanted Luke, and his shy smile.

She wanted anything and anyone who wasn’t this. Anything that wasn’t strapped to a table under bright lights with something round and hard between her teeth, something where she couldn’t feel her own blood oozing out of her body, or the jagged pain of bones broken and rubbing viciously together if she moved even an inch to try to find comfort.

There was no comfort.

“It’s something different, and daring,” the woman was saying. “We don’t want to get bored, right, honey?”

“Are you bored, Ella-Loo?”

“Not with you, baby. Never! You’re my hero. But just think how exciting. If we did two, at one time. If we kept them going longer. Oh, it makes me wet just thinking of it.”

“I like you wet.”

He stuck his hand between the woman’s legs. Jayla closed her eyes.

“I’d be wetter, hotter with two. You can pick this time. Oh, yes! Get down there, baby, and get to work.”

She yelped, she laughed, she groaned. “Fuck me hard, baby, hard! Then let’s go get another one. Let’s get a man. Maybe we can make them f*ck each other. Let’s make him rape her while we watch. Oh, oh, Darryl!”

“Anything you want. Anything. I love you, Ella-Loo.”

“Make me scream, Darryl. Make me scream. Then let’s go get another.”

And she smiled, feral and fierce, turning her head to look at Jayla as Darryl drove and drove and drove into her until sweat dripped off his face.

She smiled her monster smile as she came.

In the office, Roarke listened as the room of cops worked theories, ran searches. He listened while Eve spoke to Morris on the ’link, while she consulted with Mira.

His mind worked back to the first – the one they believed was the first.

A businessman killed on the side of the road. No vehicles left behind. Battered – fought back – smashed skull.

Nothing like the others, he thought. No torture, no sense of time taken. But he trusted his wife’s instincts.

The first, perhaps an accident, or a matter of impulse. The spark, possible, for all that came after.

“Someone towed it off.”

Distracted, a little annoyed, Eve glanced around. “What?”

“You’ve two options on your first – on this Jansen. They had a second vehicle, and drove off separately, or they left a vehicle behind.”

“No vehicle was recovered or reported on scene.”

“And you’ve never heard of auto theft I’m supposing. Driving off in two, it’s not impossible, of course, but then they’d have to dispose of one, and they’d not be together after the kill – when the blood would be high.”