Chosen Prey

18

THE KILLING OF the unnamed hooker at Randy Whitcomb's brought a temporary semblance of peace to Qatar's soul. He mentally replayed the scene every few minutes, especially the last part, when he hung over her and she began to quiver…

It's the killing, stupid.

He'd always thought it was the sex, that the killing was punishment for the sexual disappointments the woman had inflicted upon him. He knew better now. Any sexual practice he'd ever remotely considered he'd now tried with Barstad. He'd found it, ultimately, to be boring. It was the killing, he thought, and it felt fine -fine-to have that clarified.

He searched for a metaphor. His realization of the exact nature of the beast was, he decided, the psychological equivalent of the first taste of a great French white wine, properly cool, properly tart; a bit of an intellectual tangle, perhaps, but there was a wonderfully clear, clean response at the sensual level.

He wanted another one.

Barstad.

They were meeting twice a week and the sex had gone past strenuous, lurching off into the weeds of intricate variation. He was not so much entertained as amazed, he thought. The last time they met, he'd spanked her with the Ping-Pong paddles until her ass was fiery red, yet she seemed to feel that he'd done an inadequate job. The pain, she said, had been on the very periphery of her pleasure, rather than at the center, where it should have been. She sounded, he thought, like a French literary theorist writing on sex.

Today, he thought, things would be different. He had the starter rope in his back pocket when he arrived at her apartment, and a duffle bag and spade in the backseat of the car. He would bury her so far out in the countryside that she would never be found. If the police wanted to attribute her disappearance to the gravedigger, he thought, let them do it.

He no longer cared. The power was in him. He even enjoyed his new media appellation: "the gravedigger." All right. He whistled as the elevator took him up to Barstad's.

SHE WAS NUDE when she met him at the door: propped it open with one arm and posed, her eyelids drooping. "James," she said. "I've already started."

"I see that," he said. "And I've got a new movie," she said. "A DVD. I pushed the couch back so we could put the futon in front of the