The Murder House

  There’s no way to describe this. One part forbidden, one part intimate, one part sexual, and one part full of possibilities unknown even to him—he’s not sure what he’s going to do yet. There should be a word for how he feels.

  He thinks of how they’d react if they saw him. What they would say. What they would do. The snappy dialogue that would ensue. The flirtation. They’d be attracted to him, wouldn’t they? Of course they would. Maybe a…a threesome? Wow. Maybe.

  Footsteps overhead. Holden shakes out of his fantasy and listens closely. The footsteps are heading…where? Down the hallway toward the staircase?

  No. No, she’s just walking into the master bedroom. He hears the water turn on now.

  He sighs. This is not good enough, not real enough. He thought this was going to be special. This is kind of fun, but not special. He’s too far away from them, too remote. Should he go up the stairs? No, that would be too risky.

  The kitchen, maybe. There will be glasses and dishes they touched. Maybe an article of clothing they left behind? That would help. That would really help.

  He has to take a piss. But he can’t do that. Even if he used the bathroom near the back, and even if he sat down like a girl to cut down on the noise, he’d either have to flush—which they’d hear—or leave evidence behind. He’s not stupid. He’s not stupid at all. Stupid? He’s the opposite of stupid. He’s really smart.

  Oh, maybe he should just leave.

  But tonight I’m Holden.

  Okay. He removes his shoes to minimize his footfalls and drops them in the Fun Bag. He picks it up and pushes through the French doors quietly, into the living room. From there, he walks through the foyer. He stops at the staircase, where he hears them upstairs singing in unison to Justin Timberlake:

  “I’ll let you whip me if I misbehaaaave! / It’s just that no one makes me feel this way…”

  He smiles to himself, feels himself relax. Feeling better, he walks into the dining room, where two empty bottles of champagne, an empty bottle of Evian, a bottle of Tabasco, two plates of discarded lobster tails and oyster shells, and a dish of horseradish rest on the pentagonal table beneath a grand chandelier. Winston Dahlquist used to bring the girls in here. They’d feast on duck and lobster and dates and olives. They’d drink the finest French wines. He probably viewed it as fattening them up before the slaughter.

  He hikes the Fun Bag over his shoulder, carefully picks up one of the empty champagne bottles and one of the plates, and heads into the kitchen.

  He’s never liked the kitchen much because it’s not original. Back when Winston built this place, the kitchen was for servants only, tiny and functional. Winston’s descendants remodeled the kitchen in the seventies, tripling the size, installing cherrywood cabinets, marble countertops, and stainless steel appliances. It just looks like a boring kitchen, no character. But it’s safe, and it will have to do.

  He opens up the Fun Bag just to be safe, just to be sure, just to be prepared. He thinks of the girls having sex upstairs, and then singing “SexyBack,” and it helps him. They’d like him. He’s sure of it. They could share so much.

  He smells the champagne bottle. Nothing special. Then he sees lipstick on it, so he touches it with his lips. Not cherry ChapStick, but red and sticky and sweet. Yes. Good. This is getting better now. This was a good idea—

  And then it happens in an instant, sneaking up on him, how, how it could have happened he isn’t sure, because he’s so cautious and careful, but he hears footsteps bounding down the stairs and suddenly those footsteps are in the dining room, adjacent to the kitchen, where he is. He moves very quietly toward the opening, hoping, praying that nobody heard him, and peeks into the dining room.

  It’s the blonde, the taller one with the short hair. She’s unplugging the stereo resting on the windowsill. She looks good bending over, just wearing a bra and panties. So firm and lean. So…so special.

  Oh, God, if I could just…

  He ducks back, just on the off chance that she might cast a glance in his direction. His heartbeat is drumming so loudly that he can’t hear, he can’t think straight, but he prepares just in case, he’s had it planned out just in case, and he recites it to himself now. I’m the owner. This is my house. Just in case.

  And he reaches into the Fun Bag, also just in case.

  He slowly steps back into the recesses of the kitchen and holds his breath.

  It’ll be okay, he thinks. This will be better. It will enhance the whole experience, make it more real, more vivid.

  That’s what he’s telling himself when the blond girl walks into the kitchen.

  34

  THE BLOND girl doesn’t see him at first. Her head is down and she’s balancing the remnants of the meal—the champagne and water bottles, the plates of food and the Tabasco—and turns toward the counter in the center of the kitchen to plop it all down before she even realizes she’s not alone.

  She recoils in an instant, her breath whisked away in surprise, her hands rising up defensively, everything she’d been holding crashing to the tile floor. Glass shatters everywhere. The sound only amplifies her shock.

  Be indignant. This is your house. She’s the intruder. Say that. Say that!

  “I’m the…owner,” he manages. He raises a hand in peace.

  The girl is too stunned for a moment, but Holden planned this out well. The words did the trick. She doesn’t turn and run, not immediately.

  “Oh—oh. I—you’re the own—”

  “Dede? Is everything okay?” It’s the other girl. “Dede?”

  The blonde looks back toward the living room, then back at Holden.

  “How…many of you are…here?” he asks. Excellent! Just what an indignant owner would say.

  “Just two of—oh. Oh.” Her eyes dart downward just as Holden feels the warm stain spreading across his crotch. He just pissed himself. He looks down, and then back up at her.

  “We’ll leave right now, mister. I’m really sorry.”

  She spins on her heels to leave. Holden closes the distance between them in an instant. She senses his approach and starts to run and is nearly out the door when he reaches her, stabbing the Taser into the back of her neck. She goes down hard, her body suddenly limp and unable to break her fall, her face smacking against the kitchen wall and landing hard on the ceramic tile.

  “Dede?” comes the voice from upstairs.

  Holden drags the blond girl—Dede—into the kitchen, away from the view of the dining room, a trail of blood smearing in her wake. Is she…dead? The fall was nasty. She’s bleeding from the nose and forehead.

  What has he done? What’s he going to do? He’s thinking fast, but the adrenaline is catching up with him now and he can’t let it paralyze him, he’s got to think-think-think—

  Hearing the urgent footfalls in the living room, Holden grabs a frying pan from the overhead rack and raises it above his head. The brunette gasps before she’s even entered—seeing the bloodstain first, no doubt—and when she rushes in, her eyes are already cast downward at her lover. She lets out a horrific scream as she looks up to meet Holden’s eyes, but by then the frying pan is already crashing down on the crown of her skull.

  The pan almost bounces out of Holden’s hand from the harsh impact. He’s never hit anything so hard. The brunette is stunned, reaching for support but unable to find any. She sinks to her knees, still upright but precariously so, and before she falls like a tower tumbling over, Holden raises the pan and cracks it against her skull a second time. When she crumples to the floor, she is lifeless, like a balloon figurine that the air has been let out of. Her eyes are open but still.

  Is she dead?

  Holden bounces on his toes, looking at each of them. The blonde is still breathing. The brunette is not.

  “It was a…accident,” he says. “I didn’t…I just wanted…”

  What does he do now? Panic sweeps over him. Run, he thinks, but No, too many clues left behind. The blonde knows what he looks like.


  She moans. Her shoulders move. She’s trying to turn over.

  Holden watches her. Watches her struggle. Watches her suffer.

  But this is their fault. They shouldn’t have surprised him. They made him do this.

  “No…no…” The blonde is making noise on the floor. He taps her with his foot. She groans in response. He bends down and rolls her over on her back. Turns her bloodied face to the left, so she can see her girlfriend.

  “Look at her,” he says. “Look.”

  Her eyes widen in horror. She manages a low, guttural, garbled wail.

  It’s the most beautiful sound he’s ever heard.

  35

  HOLDEN PUTS a hand on his stomach. It causes a physical pain, a rumble in his stomach like hunger for food, a growl that resembles the angry hum of the motorcycle on which he’s riding at the moment.

  He needs it again. He needs the thrill of the chase, the anticipation, the climax itself. It’s been over a year since Dede and Annie, and he can’t decide what was most invigorating: the initial approach, sneaking into the mansion; the physical act; the pain and suffering…

  …so much to choose from. It’s kind of like deciding what you like best about pizza, the cheese or the sauce or the toppings; they are inseparable ingredients of a delicious experience. But if he had to choose, it was none of those things. No, it was the aftermath, what’s happened every day since, the feeling of invincibility that comes with knowing he got away with it, that he can do whatever he pleases and nobody can catch him, nobody can stop him.

  Oh, there was an investigation. Apparently the girls, Dede Paris and Annie Church, hadn’t told anyone where they were spending the summer. They had told their friends one lie, their parents another, but nobody the truth. It was only through cell phone records that authorities were able to place them in the Hamptons at all. But it was over two weeks after he’d killed them that a search even began, and it wasn’t much of a search. Nobody had any idea where the girls were staying in the Hamptons. They never even focused on Bridgehampton, much less the house at 7 Ocean Drive. The best guess was that the girls were staying in Montauk, because that was where they found Annie’s car, in a tow yard after it had been parked illegally in a church parking lot, stripped of its license plates. (Yes, Holden has congratulated himself for moving her car.) It was when the authorities found the car that they officially determined…drumroll, please…that “foul play” was involved.

  Ta-da! They don’t have a clue. The lesson: You can do whatever you want. If you’re smart. If you’re disciplined. If you take care in choosing your victims. If you don’t get greedy.

  He drives by the nightclub again, passing the alley where they congregate in the shadows, waiting for any car that might pull over. He slows his motorcycle to an idle and looks to his right, directly where he knows they are. Several of them step out from the shadows into the light of the streetlamp in their skintight dresses, hiked up to show plenty of leg, their hair teased up, their boobs pushed out, hoping to make eye contact with potential customers. There are a half dozen of them, a nice variety of busty and petite, white and black and Hispanic. A smorgasbord of potential victims.

  Victims. It’s fun to think of them that way. Not women but prey.

  He immediately crosses the tall, leggy blonde off the list, because she is too much like Dede—though Dede ended up being great fun in the end. Still, variety is the spice of life, and, more to the point, an intelligent man like Holden realizes that he cannot leave a pattern of any kind in his wake.

  He quickly narrows it down to a busty black woman and a petite blonde.

  The blond one it is! Smaller, probably no more than a hundred pounds, and therefore easier to subdue, should any difficulty arise.

  But why should any difficulty arise? He has his Fun Bag back at the motel. And unlike last time, when Dede and Annie surprised him, this time he’ll have the chance to show off his charm, to gain her trust, lure her in.

  She’ll have no idea what’s coming. She’ll probably think the corkscrew is for a bottle of champagne. She’ll think the handcuffs are just a kinky sex thing.

  She might wonder about the handheld kitchen torch, though.

  It’s past midnight and there is a healthy stream of people coming and going from the club nearby. Witnesses, potentially—a careful man like Holden thinks of such things—but most are drunk and, in the end, what could they say about him? He’s wearing a helmet with a tinted face shield, and he’s removed the license plate. All anyone could possibly describe is a guy in a leather jacket wearing a helmet on a black motorcycle.

  Anyway, if it was entirely risk-free, it wouldn’t be any fun.

  Yet he feels a pang of doubt, even as he nods toward the petite blonde. Can he go through with it? He’s rusty; it’s been over a year. As much as he’s been romanticizing it since then, he now remembers how scared he was at the time. Exhilarated, yes, but scared, too.

  On his nod, the blonde saunters up to him, wearing a black outfit that covers little more than a bikini would. Her belly is flat, with a piercing through her navel. She has the body of a twenty-year-old, the face of someone older, more seasoned, more worked over. Her heels make her two inches taller, but she’s a little thing.

  “Hi, handsome. You want some company?”

  “I want…all night,” he says, keeping his helmet on, the face shield down.

  “I’m by the hour, hon.”

  “I want…all night.” That’s Holden being smart. If she’s leaving for the night, nobody will expect her back in an hour. Nobody will think to look for her at least until tomorrow. Assuming anybody looks for her, period.

  “The whole night? That’s two thousand.” She runs her hand over his arm, the leather of his jacket. “It’s worth it.”

  “No,” he says. See, that’s Holden being smart again—make her think this is a real negotiation, that he actually plans on paying her something. “Five hundred.”

  “Five hundred for this?” she says, running her hands over the outline of her body, moving to the music coming from the nightclub. “C’mon, lover, fifteen hundred. For a night you’ll never forget.”

  He doesn’t know what a streetwalker makes in a night, but it can’t be anywhere near that. “A…thousand,” he says.

  “Awww, baby. Hang on.” The girl walks back to her friends and says something. See, you were right—she’s telling them she’s done for the night, not to expect her back. Smart, Holden.

  “Do I need a helmet?” she asks when she hops on the bike.

  He turns back to her as she wraps her arms around his waist.

  “No,” he says. “You’re safe with me.”

  36

  HOLDEN AND the blond hooker drive to a motel off Sunrise Highway. He rented the room two days ago, paying in cash and asking for a room in the back away from traffic. He parks within ten feet of the door and brings the girl inside. The room isn’t much to look at. The carpet is torn up, the wallpaper is peeling, the lighting is dim, and the mattress is about as thick as a slice of cheese. But it’s clean and it doesn’t smell. He’s seen worse. And he’s certain she has, too.

  He sets his helmet on the small table where the television sits. He spots the Fun Bag in the corner, just where he left it. He looks in the mirror and fixes his hair.

  “We need to take care of business first.”

  He turns and gets his first look at her in normal lighting. She has a round face, her eyes set slightly too far apart, with a crooked smile that is probably supposed to be sexy. Her dirty-blond hair is teased up in some kind of bun on top of her head. She is very slender, and her skin is pale and freckly. Her breasts are small and her butt is tiny and round.

  “Okay.” He has a thousand in cash. He peels it out and hands it to her. She stuffs it in her purse. Is that her idea of safekeeping? It must be. Though it’s not that safe. She’s in a room with a stranger, after all. It’s not safe at all. She’s not safe at all. But that’s an occupational hazard. Everything she does is full
of risk. That must be hard, having to make a living by meeting strange men and—

  Stop it. Stop thinking like that.

  “I’m gonna freshen up,” she says, and then she spins on her heels and heads to the bathroom, her red purse slung over her shoulder.

  He looks at himself in the mirror. Don’t start thinking about her life. Think about what you want. Think about what you’re going to do. Think about the handcuffs and the corkscrew and the torch. Don’t fuck this up. You’ve been waiting a year for this—

  She returns looking a little more chipper, her eyes glassy.

  She’s high. She took something in the bathroom.

  He looks over her arms. No signs of needle marks. Cocaine, probably. That’s probably how she gets through this job, high as a kite.

  Stop it. You don’t give a shit about her or how she copes with life.

  You don’t care.

  “So what’s your pleasure, guy?” Her tone is less flirtatious than it was on the street. More businesslike.

  “My…?”

  “What do you want me to do?” Her eyes bug out, like she’s impatient.

  “I just…can we…can we just…talk?”

  He’s trembling. She looks at his hands. She sees it, too.

  “Okay, we can talk.” She sits down on the bed and looks up at him. “What do you wanna talk about?”

  “I…” He swallows hard. What the hell is wrong with you? “What’s your name?”

  She shrugs. “What do you want it to be?”

  He shakes his head. “No…no.”

  “Okay, my name’s Barbie.”

  Her name isn’t Barbie. That’s her street name.

  “Do you…wanna know…my name?”

  “Sure, mister. Lots of guys don’t want to tell me their name. It’s your money.”

  He stares at her, unsure of himself.

  “Okay, what’s your name, guy?”

  She’s so hardened. Deadened. Drugged out. She’ll spread her legs for him or suck him off, she’ll twist and turn her body however he asks, but she won’t really be here. This isn’t real.