Blood Indulgence: a serial killer thriller (Phineas and Liam Book 3) Read online

  “Uh huh,” she whispered.

  “What do you taste?”

  “Fries?” she said.

  “Come on, Lyla,” he urged, kissing her neck. “You can do better than that.”

  “Salt,” she said finally. “Oil. And the potato… it’s all fluffy and white and starchy.” Her voice fell into a groan as he continued to kiss her neck.

  Dawson wriggled. Her pants were too tight. She didn’t like this at all.

  “Good,” breathed Slater. “Eat some more.”

  Lyla let out a little breath, and then she picked up a few more fries.

  “Get ketchup,” he told her, and one of his hands went to one of her breasts.

  She did.

  He caressed her through her shirt.

  She let out a breathy moan.

  Dawson’s body was tight all over.

  Slater kissed Lyla, who chewed and moaned and writhed against him as he fondled her. He kissed her jaw and her cheek and the place where her shoulder met her neck. “I’m going to fuck you, Lyla,” he whispered.

  “I…” Her eyes opened. She swallowed the fries. “You said you just wanted to watch me eat.”

  “I lied,” said Slater. “Do you mind?”

  “Well…” She turned to look at him.

  He stroked her breast. “I’ll make it good for you. Come on. I want you.”

  “O-okay,” she said. “But the rate… if it’s more than another hour, it costs—”

  “Yeah, I’m good for it, I promise.” His voice was scratchy, and Dawson was watching the hand that was on Lyla’s breasts, how he was dancing his fingers back and forth, rubbing her nipples, which were peaking through the shirt. Dawson wasn’t even looking at his other hand.

  So when Lyla’s eyes went wide, Dawson jumped.

  Because there was just suddenly a knife in Lyla’s neck, and she was just suddenly motionless, and there was suddenly blood—but not much, just a little bit—too red somehow, too red to be real.

  And Slater was making this noise, this moaning, satisfied noise, and—

  Dawson shut the fucking thing off.

  With shaking hands, she minimized the window.

  Now, the message she’d composed to send to Destiny Worth stared at her, the cursor blinking where she’d left off typing.

  She sank her hands into her hair and grasped handfuls of it and pulled.

  When would this end?

  She put her hand on her mouse, moved it up the screen, and hit send.

  DAWSON got home and the door to her apartment was locked tight, just as she’d left it, but she felt nervous, as if something was off. She let herself in and drew her gun. She stalked through the living room and into the bathroom.

  She’d taken to leaving the shower curtain open—always open—so she would know if anyone had messed with it, so she would be able to see if anyone was inside. She switched on the light, and the shower curtain was open and the bathtub was empty.

  She backed out of the room and then started up the ladder to the loft.

  He’d been in the loft once.

  He’d jumped down on her and tackled her, right there on the floor, and then he’d made her eat chicken nuggets, and he’d talked to her in that voice of his—the same voice he’d used on his victim. Dawson thought of the woman’s last moments, of how she’d had no idea that she was even in danger.

  Did that make it better?

  Maybe she hadn’t suffered.

  She’d been dead when Slater had raped her body, something that Dawson had watched.

  She didn’t know why she’d watched it.

  She’d skipped bits, here and there, not watching every moment of Slater’s pistoning hips in every single one of the woman’s orifices, but she’d felt that she’d committed to the damned thing and now she had to see it through to the end.

  There was no one in the loft.

  She sat down on the bed and got out her cell phone and dialed.

  “Switchboard, Southeast Correctional Institution, how may I direct your call?”

  “Cell Block B-5.” Her voice was shaking.

  “One moment.”

  Hold music came up.

  “B-5, this is Reyes.”

  “Hi, Reyes, it’s, um, it’s Detective Dawson?”

  “He’s still here, detective.”

  She swallowed. “Can you, um, can you go and check?”

  “I’m doing a round in fifteen minutes, okay? I will look then, and if he’s not there, you will be my first call.”

  She swallowed again.

  His voice was gentle. “That all right?”

  “Yeah,” she said quietly. “Thanks.” She let out a little laugh. “I’m sorry for…”

  “It’s all right,” said Reyes. “It’s honestly been a long time since you called.”

  “Yeah.” She clutched the phone. “I’m doing better.” She lay back on her bed, holding her phone to her ear and her gun to her chest.

  That was when she noticed that there was a piece of paper taped to the ceiling. It was oriented so that Dawson would be able to read it if she was laying her head on the pillow in the bed. She twisted around to look at it.

  It was carefully lettered in black sharpie.

  It was an address.

  She hadn’t put it there.

  “Dawson?” said Reyes on the other end of the phone. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “I’m going to have to hang up,” she breathed.

  “Have a good night, detective. Take care of yourself.”

  She hung up the phone and called into the CCPD station, saying she needed someone to send a car over to the address on her ceiling, that she’d meet them there as soon as she could.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DAWSON hurried up the sidewalk towards the address that had been left on her ceiling.

  It was the address of a vacation rental—a page out of Slater’s playbook.

  There were two squad cars parked out front, lights blinking, reflecting against the night sky. The front door was wide open.

  She stepped inside.

  “This is a crime scene!” rang out a voice.

  “I’m the one who called you in,” she said. “I’m Detective Dawson.”

  “In here,” said the voice.

  She was in a kitchen—which was shadowed and clean. All she could see was an expanse of granite countertops and the gleam of scrubbed appliances. She walked through it to the doorway. Light was coming from the doorway.

  She stepped into a living room, and she smelled the blood before she saw it.

  It was spattered all over the ceiling and the carpet and the couch.

  The woman was naked on the couch, and her entire throat was missing.

  “We called it in,” someone was saying. “Coroner’s on the way, so is the crime scene photographer. We’re asking for someone to call in blood spatter analysis too, from Richmond.”

  Dawson ignored the voice, stepping into the room to look at the wall behind the couch, where something was written in smeared blood. It had dried—a reddish brown against the painted wood paneling.

  Guess I’m your jurisdiction now.

  A horrible shiver went through her.

  THE house hadn’t been rented out.

  It was only a few blocks away from Dawson’s house.

  Had Worth broken into Dawson’s apartment and left the address before or after the murder?

  The dead woman was another Jane Doe. Her DNA wasn’t in the federal database, but Dawson was already checking her against a binder of Missing Persons she’d made—all people who’d last been seen at a MadCad convention.

  MadCad was the abbreviation made for Maddox/Cade, a romantic slashfic pairing from the YA novel Dusk. It was so popular that it had spanned its own subculture, and this was where Worth operated, in and amongst these people. She preyed upon them, and she found them through the fandom.

  Dawson identified the Jane Doe immediately.

  Her name was Clara Hughes, and s
he’d gone missing from a MadCad convention in 2017. No one had heard from her in years.

  If Dawson had to speculate, she would guess that Clara had been one of Worth’s followers. Dawson knew that part of the weird indoctrination that these people went through had to do with sacrifice. So, Clara had probably offered herself up for this job. It was an honor to be killed for Destiny Worth, after all.

  The highest form of love is sacrifice.

  But Dawson didn’t have time to think about all that now. She had other things to think about. Clara’s next of kin would have to be notified. Dawson would have to fill out a lot of paperwork. She’d have to order a number of tests on the body. She’d have to go through the crime scene again, looking for any evidence that hadn’t been picked up in the first sweep.

  That would all occupy her for now, and she would be glad of it because she would wish to hide from her own guilt.

  This is my fault, would be the thought that surfaced in her brain again and again. I taunted her.

  Worse, some of part of her was glad she’d done it, because she needed the evidence. They’d never had a crime scene from Destiny Worth. They’d only ever found the bodies after the fact, transferred away from the place where they’d been killed. So this could mean a treasure trove of valuable evidence.

  She’d made Worth angry, and Worth had retaliated. Maybe Worth was angry enough that she’d made a mistake.

  Dawson had to hope so.

  It wouldn’t make all this worth it, of course. Nothing was worth the loss of a human life.

  But if she could stop Worth, lock her up, if she could close this case…

  Well, she wanted that more than anything on earth.

  DAYS passed, and Dawson waited as the evidence was analyzed. She was anxious, but she wouldn’t have any information for a bit now.

  The autopsy had confirmed that the cause of death to Clara was a slash to the throat, but that had been fairly obvious. The murder weapon was not present at the scene. This was bad news because they could have possibly found useful evidence on it. On the other hand, it could be good news later, if they could find the murder weapon in the possession of Worth.

  She spoke on the phone to Clara’s sister, who said that Clara had become obsessed with trying to make a living doing fanart for the MadCad fandom, and had gone around attempting to get friends and family members to give her loans so that she could buy supplies to begin creating this art.

  To some degree, Clara had been successful, but her sister said Clara was no artist, and that the product wasn’t good. When Clara went to her first convention to sell her art, her sister expected her to come home dejected and angry for not making back her investment, but she never came back at all.

  Dawson didn’t know how to explain it all to Clara’s sister, because she didn’t understand it herself.

  How did Worth get inside these people’s heads and convince them to do what they did? What was her secret? And the biggest question, the most important one, of course, was where was she?

  Worth and her family owned a great deal of property all over the east coast, so much that it was prohibitive to search it all. However, as the months had dragged on, Dawson had spear-headed that movement, sending people out to look at properties all over the place. She called in favors with other departments, and she traveled.

  And for all her trouble, she got nowhere.

  Now, Dawson had to hope she was finally going to make some kind of progress.

  She waited for Worth to contact her again, but the message written in blood seemed to be Worth’s final word on the subject.

  Until one evening, the night before the DNA results were due back, when Dawson was checking her email one last time before she decided to go home.

  And there was a message in her inbox.

  She opened it, and there was an attachment. It was a video file.

  There were no words in the message.

  Dawson sighed.

  If this was going to be a video of the murder of Clara Hughes, she was going to turn the damned thing off and watch it in the daytime, in the light, because she couldn’t handle that right now.

  In fact, maybe she should simply wait to watch it anyway.

  She wanted to go home.

  She was exhausted.

  But it would bother her if she didn’t look at it.

  Grimacing, she downloaded the attachment. She thought ruefully that maybe it would just contain some virus that would destroy the CCPD network. Maybe this was some kind of technological warfare on Worth’s part.

  But when she clicked on the file, it was a video after all.

  The frame settled on a single bed. It looked institutional, like something in a hospital or, no, a college dorm room. Yeah, this was a college dorm all right.

  A girl sat down on the bed, giggling. “If we’re doing this, you guys are both getting naked first.” There was something vaguely familiar about the girl. She was young, and the video was old. Her hairstyle and clothing made Dawson think the video might originate around the early 2000s.

  When Slater and Liam were in college.

  What the hell was this?

  Sure enough, Slater sauntered into the frame, undoing the zipper of his jeans. He was young, baby-faced, grinning at the girl in much the same way that he sometimes grinned at Dawson, and Dawson felt a tremor go through her.

  Maybe I won’t watch this. She hovered the mouse over the little X in the corner.

  But then someone else appeared in frame. Liam.

  She let her hand drop, and her lips parted. Liam was baby-faced too, impossibly attractive at that age, and she gaped at him, at his youth and his shoulders and the way he was rubbing his thumb over his lower lip. He had a sort of… smolder. He still had it now, but he’d been… wow, he’d been hot in his twenties.

  Liam closed the distance between himself and Slater and pulled the other man against him, and their lips met.

  A jolt went through Dawson.

  When she’d been a trans man, it had been easy for her to believe that she was gay, because there was something about two men together that always made her feel a little out of control. She loved the juxtaposition of soft and hard, the brute strength coupled with kisses and caresses.

  She bit down on her lip.

  Okay, I really need to shut this off, she thought.

  She was reacting really improperly to it.

  The girl in the video was clapping, gasping, and saying something about how great that was.

  Dawson felt heat coming to her face. She felt exposed. She felt embarrassed.

  She didn’t turn off the video.

  It was progressing, and she was watching.

  Slater was kissing the girl. Liam was kissing Slater—not his mouth, but his neck, and his shoulder, and Liam was easing Slater’s pants down, and then Liam was on his knees, and he had his mouth on Slater’s—

  Turn it off, she urged herself.

  Slater’s hand was caressing Liam’s face, almost absently, and Liam’s eyes were closed, and they were so beautiful. God, they were gorgeous together, weren’t they?

  She snatched up her mouse and clicked the X.

  The video disappeared.

  She let out a breath.

  Okay, I’m going home now, she said to herself. I don’t ever have to watch that shit. I don’t have to tell anyone about it. It can be like I never even received it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LIAM was watching TV on his laptop, sprawled out on the bed in his bedroom. He kept considering the possibility of getting a television, something to mount on the wall so that he could watch things on a big screen instead of on his laptop or tablet, but he had so many screens in his house already, he was having a hard time justifying it.

  He had two large computer screens attached to a desktop in his living room, which he used for video editing and his job.

  He had his laptop, which he could also use for work, but he mostly used for entertainment.

  And then he had his t
ablet, which he’d ostensibly gotten for traveling, but which he used lots of the time for other things too.

  There was a knock on his door.

  It was late evening.

  He wasn’t expecting anyone.

  Warily, he shut off the laptop and went to the door.

  Dawson was there.

  He opened the door wider to let her in. “What happened? Did he escape?”

  “No,” she said, coming inside. She stopped short, gaping at his living room. “You… it’s clean.”

  He shifted on his feet, feeling self-conscious. “Uh, well, I don’t know why I was eating all that fast food when it just reminded me of him, you know?” His living room used to be covered in bags from fast food restaurants.

  She let out a harsh laugh which might have been a sob.

  “Are you okay?” He shut the door behind her.

  She rounded on him. “I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that you still had bottles of half-drunk bourbon all over your apartment or something. That I could just drop in on you and you’d be so screwed up it would make me feel better about how screwed up I am?”

  “Haysle, what’s going on?”

  “Do you have a bed now?” she said. “Or is it still a mattress on the floor?”

  “You angling to see my bedroom?”

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  She regarded him for a minute, shoving her hands into her pockets.

  “Right this way,” he said, making an exaggerated gesture.

  She turned in the direction he was gesturing. “I know where it is. I woke you up the night he escaped.” She walked down his hallway, which was pretty short.

  He went after her.

  She was standing in the middle of his bedroom. He did have a bed frame these days, and a full-sized bed instead of the twin mattress he used to sleep on. He even put his clothes away these days. Having order in his space was calming.

  Before, everything had been chaos, but now Liam was doing better. He wasn’t thinking about Finn all the time, and he wasn’t drinking, and he was happy.

  “You going to tell me what you’re doing here?” he said.