Kiss the Girls

CHAPTER 36.

A TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD Los Angeles Times reporter named Beth Lieberman stared at the tiny, blurred green letters on her computer terminal. She watched with tired eyes as one of the biggest stories at the Times in years continued to unfold. This was definitely the most important story of her career, but she almost didn't care anymore.

“This is so crazy and sick ... feet. Jesus Christ,” Beth Lieberman groaned softly under her breath. “Feet.” The sixth “diary” installment sent to her by the Gentleman Caller had arrived at her West Los Angeles apartment early that morning. As had been the case with the previous diary entries, the killer supplied the precise location of a murdered woman's body before starting into his obsessive, pyschopathic message for her.

Beth Lieberman had immediately called the FBI from her home, and then she drove quickly to the offices of the Times on South Spring Street.

By the time she arrived, the Federal Bureau had verified the latest murder.

The Gentleman had left his signature: fresh flowers.

The body of a fourteen-year-old Japanese girl had been found in Pasadena. As was the case with the five other women, Sunny Ozawa had disappeared without a trace two nights ago. It was as if she'd been sucked up into the damp, muggy smog.

To date, Sunny Ozawa was the Gentleman's youngest reported victim. He'd arranged pink and white peonies on her lower torso. Flowers, of course, remind me of a woman's labia, he'd written in one of the diary entries. The isomorphism is obvious, no?

At quarter to seven in the morning, the Times offices were deserted and eerie. Nobody should be up this early except head-bangers who haven't been to bed yet, Lieberman thought. The low hum from the central air conditioning, mingling with the faint roar of traffic outside, was annoying to her.

“Why feet?” the reporter muttered.

She sat before her computer, almost comatose, and wished she had never written an article about mail-order pornography in California. That was how the Gentleman claimed he had “discovered” her; how he had chosen her to be his “liaison with the other citizens of the City of Angels.” He proclaimed that they were on the same “wavelength.” Following endless administrative meetings at the highest levels, the Los Angezes Times had decided to publish the killer's diary entries.

There was no doubt that they had actually been written by the Gentleman Caller.

He knew where the murder victims' bodies were before the police did. He also threatened “special bonus kills” if his diary wasn't published for everyone in Los Angeles to read over breakfast. “I am the latest, and I'm by far the greatest,” the Gentleman had written in one diary entry.

Who could argue with that? Beth wondered. Richard Ramirez? Caryl Chessman? Charles Manson?

Beth Lieberman's job right now was to be his contact. She also got to make the first edit of the Gentleman's words. There was no way the intense, graphic diary entries could run intact. They were filled with obscene pornography and the most brutally violent descriptions of the murders he had committed.

Lieberman could almost hear the madman's voice as she typed the latest entry on her word processor. The Gentleman Caller was speaking to her again, or through her: Let me tell you about Sunny, as much as I know about Sunny, anyway.

Listen to me, dear reader. Be there with me. She had small, delicate, clever feet. That's what I remember best; that's what I will always remember about my beautiful Sunny night.

Beth Lieberman had to shut her eyes. She didn't want to listen to this shit. One thing was certain: the Gentleman Caller had definitely given Beth Lieberman her first break at the Times. Her byline appeared on each of the widely read frontpage features. The murderer had made her a star, too.

Listen to me. Be there with me.

Think about fetishism, and all its amazing possibilities to liberate the psyche. Don't be a snob. Open up your mind. Open your mind right now! Fetishism holds a fascinating array of diverse pleasures that you may be missing out on.

Let us not become too sentimental about “young” Sunny. Sunny Ozawa was into the games of the night. She told me that, in confidence of course. I had picked her up at the Monkey Bar. We'd gone to my place, my hideaway, where we began to experiment, to play the night away.

She asked me if I'd ever done it with a Japanese woman before. I told her that I hadn't, but I'd always wanted to. Sunny told me that I was “quite the gentleman.” I was honored.

This night, it seemed to me that nothing was so libertine as to focus on a woman's feet, to caress them as I made love to Sunny. I'm talking about sun browned feet covered in luxurious nylon and semi pricey high-heeled pumps from Saks. I'm talking about clever little feet.

Very sophisticated communicators.

Listen. To really appreciate the very erotic mime show of a beautiful woman's feet, the woman should be on her back while the man stands.

That's how it was with Sunny and me earlier tonight.

I lifted up her slender legs and watched closely where they joined together in such a way that the vulva puckered from her buttocks. I kissed the top of her stockings repeatedly. I fixated on her well-formed ankle, the lovely lines leading to her shiny black pump.

I concentrated all my attention on that flirtatious pump as our fevered action set her foot into rapid motion. Her little feet were talking to me now. An absolutely manic excitement rose in my chest. It felt as if there were live birds tweeting and twittering in there.

Beth Lieberman stopped typing and closed her eyes again. Fight! She had to stop the images that were flashing out at her. He had murdered the young girl that he was talking about so blithely.

Soon the FBI and the Los Angeles police would come storming into the relatively sedate offices of the Times. They would ask the usual battery of questions. They had no answers yet themselves. No significant leads so far. They said that the Gentleman committed “perfect crimes.” The FBI agents would want to talk for hours about the gruesome details of the murder scene. The feet! The Gentleman had cut off Sunny Ozawa's feet with some kind of razor-sharp knife. Both her feet were missing from the crime scene in Pasadena.

Brutality was his trademark, but that was the only consistent pattern so far. He had mutilated genitalia in the past. He had sodomized one victim, then cauterized her. He had cut open a woman investment banker's chest and removed her heart. Was he experimenting? He was no gentleman once he selected his victim. He was ajekyll and Hyde in the 1990s.

Beth Lieberman finally opened her eyes and saw a tall, slender man standing very close to her in the newsroom. She sighed loudly and she held back a frown.

It was Kyle Craig, the special investigator from the FBI.

Kyle Craig knew something that she desperately needed to know, but he wouldn't tell her what. He knew why the deputy director of the FBI had flown to Los Angeles the previous week. He knew secrets that she needed to know.

“Hello, Ms. Lieberman. What do you have for me?” he asked.