Career of Evil

46 Subhuman

Alone with his trophies, he felt himself entirely whole. They were proof of his superiority, his astonishing ability to glide through the ape-like police and the sheep-like masses, taking whatever he wanted, like a demigod.

Of course, they gave him something else too.

He never seemed to get hard when he was actually killing. Thinking about it beforehand, yes: sometimes he could drive himself into an onanistic frenzy with ideas of what he was going to do, refining and restaging the possibilities in his mind. Afterwards — now, for instance, holding in his hand the chilly, rubbery, shrunken breast he had hacked from Kelsey’s torso, already turning slightly leathery with its repeated exposure to the air outside the fridge — then he had no problem at all. He was like a flagpole now.

He had the new one’s fingers in the icebox. He took one out, pressed it against his lips then bit down on it, hard. He imagined her still connected to it, screaming in agony. He chewed deeper, relishing the feeling of the cold flesh splitting, his teeth pressing hard into the bone. One hand fumbled with the string of his tracksuit bottoms...

Afterwards he put it all back in the fridge, closed the door and gave it a little pat, grinning to himself. There’d be a lot more than that in there, soon. The Secretary wasn’t small: five foot seven or eight by his reckoning.

One minor problem... he didn’t know where she was. He’d lost the trail. She hadn’t been to the office this morning. He’d gone to the LSE, where he’d spotted the platinum bitch, but seen no sign of The Secretary. He’d looked in the Court; he’d even checked the Tottenham. This was a temporary setback, though. He’d sniff her out. He’d pick her up again tomorrow morning at West Ealing station, if he had to.

He made himself a coffee and poured a slug of whisky into it from a bottle he’d had here for months. There was hardly anything else in the dirty hidey-hole where he hid his treasures, in his secret sanctuary: a kettle, a few chipped mugs, the fridge — the altar of his profession — an old mattress to sleep on and a docking port for him to place his iPod on. That was important. It had become part of his ritual.

He had thought they were shit when he’d first heard them, but as his obsession with bringing down Strike had grown, so had his liking for their music. He liked to listen to it through earphones while he was stalking The Secretary, while he was cleaning his knives. It was sacred music to him now. Some of their lyrics stayed with him like fragments of a religious service. The more he listened, the more he felt they understood.

Women were reduced to the elemental when they were facing the knife. They became cleansed by their terror. There was a kind of purity to them as they begged and pleaded for their lives. The Cult (as he privately called them) seemed to understand. They got it.

He put his iPod into the dock and selected one of his favorite tracks, “Dr. Music.” Then he headed to the sink and the cracked shaving mirror he kept there, razor and scissors at the ready: all the tools a man needed to totally transform himself.

From the single speaker of the dock, Eric Bloom sang: