I get that prickly chill feeling again.
“I don’t want to be a captive,” I whimper.
“I know, baby. But you will get used to it. You’ll live a life of luxury and comfort. You’ll spend every single moment being looked after. You’ll never have to provide for yourself, and I will ensure that your family is well looked after as well.”
He’s speaking to me with a gentle kind of understanding, but there’s a hard steel underneath it. This is what he intends to do, and I have no choice in it. I’ve gotten myself mixed up in a world where there’s no hope of freedom.
That’s what they all want me to believe anyway. I don’t believe that’s how the world works. I know I can get free. I know I can make my own way in the world.
I sit and I think about this while he brings me breakfast.
The way he’s speaking is just so odd. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t even really sound like him. I know he is a man of many faces, but I don’t think he’s this… pathetic?
“I’m not buying it,” I say.
“Not buying what, baby?” He gives me a curious look. I can see something glittering in his eyes. Not quite disbelief. Something else. Something like it. Excitement, maybe. He likes it when I surprise him. He loves it when I defy him. That means he gets to punish me. Underneath everything between us is a current of pure filth and kink that is never really all that far away. Scratch the most kindly conversation and you’ll find sex spilling out between us.
“I’m not buying the notion that you would let some federal agents force you to hold me captive. You called yourself an asset. There’s no way you see yourself that way. You are the master of your own domain. Of everyone’s domain.”
He smiles. A little at first, and then it broadens more and more until he is outright grinning at me with a Cheshire cat expression.
“You are starting to get to know me a little too well,” he says.
At that moment, his phone rings.
He listens for a moment, then hangs up.
“I have to go,” he says. “I’ve been called away to a gym.”
“Why do they need a world-renowned psychologist in a gym?”
“They just do,” he says, flicking a wink. He seems to have completely forgotten his concern of earlier. Or maybe it wasnever really concern at all, just a warning to keep me where he wants me.
I was abducted. There’s no doubt about that. Well, a little doubt because I don’t really remember it, but I have the feeling something bad happened, and the vehement expression in his eye makes me think he wasn’t lying about that part. The best lies have a kernel of kidnapping in them, after all.
Sam
There are a lot of police at the twenty-four-hour gym on the nice side of town. I’m sure they’re putting the regular clientele very much off leg day and every other kind of day, much to the manager’s chagrin. The crime scene tape across the door is going to remain in minds for quite some time, I imagine.
“Gentlemen,” I say as I bow under the tape, lifted for me by an obliging officer.
They’ve called in the Feds because small city cops don’t know what to do when a head is found perched at the front of a treadmill. Run of the mill shooting and stabbing and general carry-on they’ll deal with easily, but this has an element of ritual to it that puts them automatically ill at ease.
The Feds have called me in, because I am an expert in violent crime. Funny how that all works.
The head is still where I, I mean, the responsible party left it. It is quite firmly affixed to the treadmill, a fact they will discover when they try to remove it later on. For the moment, I feigna small amount of shock and disgust. Not too much, of course. These people expect me to have seen all this before, and indeed I have—not seven hours ago.
“Victim is law enforcement,” the detective in charge briefs me. His name is Victor Wider, and he’s the sort of man who is completely unreadable, even to me. I like him. I respect him. He’s good at his job, and if I were sending someone to catch me, he is precisely who I would have chosen for the job.
“The man’s head was found on the treadmill in his wife’s gym.”
“That’s terrible,” I say calmly.
“Yes,” he says. “It is. And if we were to uncover evidence as to who were responsible for that atrocity…”
My heart does not so much as skip a beat. Sometimes I envy those who experience fear. It must be thrilling to go through the world constantly on edge, living in a state of low-grade horror at the smallest of things. One of my clients is afraid of pressing the buzzer at an intersection. I wish my body would respond with such ardor to such little things, but I require much greater conquests to make my blood run.
“They would be facing the death penalty, I imagine,” I say. “Which makes it all the more interesting that the killer has chosen to make this a very public display. This person is brazen, practiced, and supremely confident in his or her ability to get away with the most heinous of crimes.”
