Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
The first time he slipped the red sequinned garter onto his right leg it only made it as far as his knee. The bathroom door was closed, but that didn’t mean anything in this place. The other residents had a habit of thoughtlessly barging in without knocking or bothering to even consider someone else might be in the middle of a shit or, in his case, exploring how he felt about the memento from last night’s kill.
It wasn’t meant to be a kill. That’s just how it turned out. It was meant to be a date of sorts. He’d had her picked out for a while. She was always the last act at Jerry’s, and boy was she worth waiting for. He had looked forward to the moment for weeks, sitting up back where the lights were low, thinking about being alone with her. He knew she’d want to be with him, once she met him properly. Just a half an hour, maybe an hour, of talking about his life, his plans, and how she figured in them would be enough to win her over. He wouldn’t even touch her on their first date.
But when he’d stepped out of the shadows near her beaten up old Fiesta she’d jumped about a mile high and that was it. There was no talking to her. When she’d turned to run her ankle had twisted badly. Was she really planning to drive in those shoes anyway? She’d fallen, hit her head, and there was some blood. He figured it would only have been about a small cup worth. But there it was. There she was. Lying there on the sharp gravel of the car park and he had to do something because someone would come along at any minute.
A change in course was required, and he had heaved her up into the Fiesta’s back seat so at least it didn’t look like something bad was going on. And climbed in on top of her, just to see if she was still breathing. She wasn’t.
But then, she had looked kind of sexy just lying there. The intimacy was somehow more honest than being up close with other women he’d been with. Her eyelashes still had glitter on them. Her woollen coat was open, just a bit. Next minute, before he realised he was doing it, he’d taken a peek underneath. It wasn’t like that. He already knew what she looked like naked, he’d memorised it from the dozen or so shows he’d been to. But then he saw the garter and decided to slip it off and put it in his pocket, before carefully closing the car door and walking casually, as inconspicuously as possible, back to the nearby bus stop.
He guessed they’d find her in a day or two. Some kids doing that stupid parkour crap would be running through the car park and one would say to the other “What’s that smell?” And the friend would reply “is that a person in the back seat of the car? And he’d be like “Let me check.” And that would be that. They’d find her and she would be sans garter, not that they would know, because it was in his pocket and he hadn’t taken it out until now and started to think about her.
It was a pity really, because they would have been friends. Good friends, if she hadn’t been so damn panicky. Women were so hard to approach these days.
Now that he thought about it, he felt pretty sorry for himself. Every time he reckoned he found the right one, something problematic had intervened and he would have to start all over again. Maybe he really was the fuckup his mother had called him for years now. If he could find the right girl, she’d get off his back and be proud of him for a change.
…
About the same time a murderous psychopath was trying on the clothes of his victims, Claire Walton was wracking her brains about how she could stop him. No, catch him. There would be no stopping until this crazy bastard was in custody, and she was determined she was the detective to do it. Not only because the women in this city need to be safe, but also because she needed a big kill like this on her resume if she was going to make Senior-Sargeant by 30.