Ransom X

  Chapter 24 Bat Of An Eye

  Legacy shut the door to his office and popped videotape into the player mounted on the wall below a LED projector. As the bulb warmed up, the images of the day’s events began to fill the far wall. Laura was almost life-sized on the screen that dropped with an annoyed tug from Legacy. The worst part of his day was beginning.

  He stood in the room. Champagne splashed off of Laura’s almost naked body, soaking the floor in a radial pattern outward, making the carpet hold the pattern of his footsteps as he toured the room. Legacy approached Laura before the sex acts started; her eyes were fixed wide looking at some point in the distance. It was like she could exit the room leaving no tracks at all.

  The other forms in the room began to move. Laura spoke when the controller gave her words to say, turned and twisted with his desires. Legacy watched the long curving black lines across her forehead. It was like war paint, she went to battle giving them everything they wanted and nothing more.

  Legacy paced around the Vinyl Men, he had worked out a personality sketch for each based on their “work.” They displayed a consistency that was tightly controlled.

  They acted like a pack – a social structure built around a leader who supplies individual members of the group with very specific, highly specialized responsibilities. Although the surroundings changed daily, the sex acts from girl to girl remained almost constant, demeaning but not especially defined by the personality of the victim in the middle. They hadn’t dressed up the prom queens as prom queens. The actress played the same parts as the animal activist. The prey was not the important part of this equation. Laura stood bent over the railing, flashing a glimpse of the chain that ran between her nipples, down, and then disappeared into her pubic hair. Legacy stood by her, dug his fingernails into the soft wood of the banister. He actually felt the wood, it was so solid, and the room was very real to him. He could feel something coming together, but he wasn’t sure yet what it was. His mind scrambled through all of the tapes he’d seen, searching for something to connect to what he was watching. He drilled down into the aquifer just above his medulla and there it was – “What an idiot!” She could have been anybody. In that moment Legacy realized how they picked their victims.

  The 3D photorealistic crime scene slipped away. Legacy’s eyes found the familiar shapes of his study coming back into existence around him. It was three AM; Chess wouldn’t be going to school until 7:30. He waited for the sun. Legacy knew for the first time that he had found a short cut to get ahead of them – and with each second ticking off the clock, he worried that he was giving back his lead.