CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
He hates surprises, always has. They have a way of turning into disasters.
Like the time his mother decided to throw a surprise party for his father’s fortieth birthday, and she invited all his friends, and made all his favorite foods, and even bought a stupid birthday cake, one of those gooey, sugary concoctions like the kind you had when you were a kid, with lots of icing and rainbow-colored flowers running amok across the top.
Well, her husband surprised her, all right—by not coming home until well after all the guests had gone home, the smell of alcohol on his breath, the scent of another woman on his fingers. And when she’d dared to get angry, he’d responded by scooping up a fistful of that gooey white icing and forcing it down her throat, then grinding what was left of it into her face and hair.
The next morning, the remnants of last night’s surprise lay smeared across the kitchen floor, like a coat of sticky varnish, and his mother sat nursing a swollen eye. He could have told her this would happen, had she been smart enough to ask for his opinion. Of course, brains weren’t exactly her strong suit.
Truth to tell, she got what she deserved.
So much for surprises.
Which is why he’s always taken such pains with his preparations, and why he feels so blindsided, so betrayed, by the events of the last several days. He’d calculated everything so carefully, down to the most insignificant detail, only to see his meticulous planning backfire when circumstances beyond his control threatened to ruin everything.
Take Tiffany Sleight.
Yes, please,as the old joke goes,somebody take her.
He’d spent weeks wooing that bitch online, going slow, teasing her with compliments, giving her his best bad-boy-in-need-of-a-good-woman persona, advancing only to withdraw, answering some of her texts within minutes, waiting days to respond to others, whetting her appetite while keeping her off balance, setting up two separate assignations and then not showing up to either, pleading last-minute cold feet and a fear of rejection, then begging for a chance to redeem himself, “treating her mean to keep her keen.”
And it had worked, as he knew it would, as it always did.
He’d been confident that after having been stood up twice, sweet Tiffany would be loath to confide in her friends that she was setting herself up for a possible strike number three. And even if she did tell someone, so what? The name he’d given her was as fake as his excuses. The minute he showed his handsome face, she’d be putty in his hands.
And everything had unfolded exactly as scripted. Any trepidations she might have had dissolved the minute they locked eyes. All it took was thirty minutes of pretending to be interested in every stupid word she uttered, and she’d followed him willingly into the night, into his apartment, into his trap.
“Why are you doing this?” sweet Tiffany had asked, her hands shackled behind her, the tears streaming down her cheeks disappearing into the rope around her neck. A silly question.
What could he say, after all? Because he could? Because he enjoyed it? Because he hated the lemon scent of her cheap perfume? Because she was too dumb to live? How about…all of the above?
He’d finished her off relatively quickly—that lemon scent was making him nauseous—then disposed of her in a landfill outside of town, reasoning that by the time anyone discovered her body—ifanyone discovered her body—she would be nothing but a pile of foul-smelling bones. He hadn’t figured on someone’s dog escaping his yard and rummaging through the mountain of garbage in a desperate search for food, unearthing the poor girl’s rotting remains while there was still enough of her left to identify.
That was the first surprise.
The resulting front-page news had put the city on edge. There was talk of a possible serial killer. And while part of him was pleased to have his work acknowledged, however obliquely, he feared that the women of Boston might not be as quick as they’d been to risk their lives for a handsome stranger.
He needn’t have worried. There was no shortage of stupid women.
Take Nadia.
Yes, please. Somebody take her.
Nadia had been both pretty and not too bright. She’d told him stories of growing up poor in Romania, and of the overly handsy boss in the nearby suburb of Newton whose employ she’d been forced to flee. She even gave a pretty good blow job, not always the easiest thing to accomplish with a knife pressed to your throat. Best of all, she’d made such a considerate corpse, leaving only a minimum of mess for him to clean up.
By the time he’d returned from his little surveillance mission at Faneuil Hall, Nadia’s muscles had started losing their rigidity, making her arms and legs easier to manipulate. He’d stuffed her into two overlapping heavy-duty garbage bags, thrown her clothes, a bunch of rags, and the remains of their dinner on top of her, and waited till the early morning hours to carry her out to the trunk of his car.
Which was when he ran into surprise number two.
Mrs. Imogene Lebowski.
The stupid old bat owned the three-story rooming house that he was temporarily calling home. She lived on the ground floor and rented out the top two. He’d found her through Airbnb, and quickly snapped up the third-floor furnished apartment, which had proved ideal for his purposes. Imogene, in turn, was thrilled to have such a reliable, good-looking young man for a tenant, especially since he would be around for a few months. Unlike most guests, who were usually gone within weeks, if not days.
He loved the transients and tourists who filed through the second-floor unit. They moved in; they moved out. In between, they kept to themselves and minded their own business. They had no interest in making friends or sniffing around where they didn’t belong. If he passed them on the stairs, he kept his head down and kept moving. They did the same.
It was perfect.
As was Mrs. Imogene Lebowski, who was eighty-eight years old and generally sound asleep before ten.