Prodigal Son

CHAPTER 59

Jenna Parker, twenty-five, lived for parties. She seemed to be invited to one every night.

This evening, she obviously had taken a few pre-party toots of something, getting primed for a late-night bash, for she was buzzed when she came out of her apartment, singing tunelessly.

With or without drugs, Jenna was perpetually happy, walking on sunshine even when the day offered only rain.

On this rainless night, she seemed to float a quarter inch off the floor as she tried to lock her door. The proper relationship of a key to a keyhole seemed to elude her, and she giggled when, three times in a row, she failed the simple insertion test.

Maybe she wasn't merely buzzed but fully stung.

She succeeded on the fourth try, and the dead-bolt snapped shut with a solid clack.

"Sheryl Crowe," Jonathan Harker said from the doorway of his apartment, across the hall from hers.

She turned, saw him for the first time, and broke into a sunny grin. "Johnny!"

"You sound like Sheryl Crowe when you sing."

"Do I really?"

"Would I lie?"

"Depends on what you want," she said coyly.

"Now, Jen, have I ever come on to you?"

"No. But you will."

"When will I?"

"Later. Sooner. Maybe now."

She'd been to his apartment a couple times for pasta dinners, and he'd been to her place for takeout, since she didn't cook even pasta. These had been strictly neighborly occasions.

He didn't want sex from Jenna Parker. He wanted to learn from her the secret of happiness.

"I told you-it's just you remind me of my sister."

"Sister. Yeah, right."

"Anyway, I'm almost old enough to be your father."

"When has that ever mattered to a man?"

"We aren't all swine," he said.

"Oh. Sorry, Johnny. Jeez, I didn't mean to sound… mean. I'm just floatin' so high inside that I'm not always down there where the words come out."

"I noticed. Why do you ever use drugs, anyway? You're happy when you're sober. You're always happy."

She grinned, came to him, and pinched his cheek affectionately. "You're right. I love life. I'm always happy. But it's no crime to want to be even happier now and then."

"Actually" he said, "if I were in Vice instead of Homicide, maybe I'd have to consider it a crime."

"You'd never arrest me, Johnny. Probably not even if I killed someone."

"Probably not," he agreed, and squirted her in the mouth and nostrils with chloroform solution.

Her gasp of surprise did what a blow across the backs of her knees would have done: dropped her to the floor. She sputtered, wheezed, and passed out.

He had taken the squeeze bottle from Roy Pribeaux's apartment. It was one of three he had found there.

Later he would leave it with her dead body. Her remains wouldn't be found for months, so their condition wouldn't enable CSI to date her death after Pribeaux's. The bottle would be one of several pieces of evidence identifying her as his final victim.

Now Jonathan lifted her effortlessly, carried her into his apartment, and kicked the door shut behind them.

Of the four apartments here on the fourth floor, one stood vacant. Paul Miller, in 4-C, was away at a sales conference in Dallas. Only Jonathan and Jenna were in residence. No one could have witnessed the assault and abduction.

Jenna wouldn't be missed for a day or two. By then, he would have opened her top to bottom, would have found the special something that she had and that he was missing, and would have disposed of her remains.

He was taking all these precautions not because he feared going to prison but because he feared that Father would identify him as the renegade.

In his bedroom, Jonathan had pushed the bed into a corner. He had stacked the other furniture atop it to create sufficient space for the makeshift autopsy table that he had prepared for her.

Plastic sheeting covered the floor. At the head and foot of the table stood lamps that were bright enough to reveal the source of her happiness whether it was nestled in a tangle of guts or embedded in the cerebellum.

Putting her on the table, he noticed that she was bleeding from one nostril. She'd cracked her nose against the floor when she had fallen. The bleeding wasn't serious. The nose injury wasn't what would kill her.

Jonathan checked her pulse. Steady.

He was relieved. He'd been concerned that she had inhaled too much chloroform, that maybe she'd suffered chemical suffocation or anaphylactic shock.

He wanted her to be alive through this procedure. For some of it, he needed her to be awake and responsive.