Broken Prey

He’d come home, planning to run, and had then heard the bumping on the wall. Ten minutes later, she was pounding away, and here he lay, naked, writhing with her, eyes clenched, ears plugged into the stethoscope, riding with her . . .
    Remembering the first woman, Angela Larson:
    The first woman hadn’t been very interesting. He’d noticed her in an art store six or seven months before the killing and had gone back a few times, just to look. She was a tall, dark-haired woman, but with pale eyes and a kind of wide Slavic forehead and sensuous lips. The first night, while he was still developing into a god on his own, he waited until the shop closed, planning to follow her to her car, and then to her home. The lights went out, and he waited, but she never came out.
    The next night, he found her going out the back. He watched her as she walked down to the bar, which had a bigger parking lot than the craft store, slipped into her car. He followed her efficiently, using techniques learned from Robert Ludlum, and was disappointed to find her going into an apartment building. Lots of lights, lots of people around, and since it was mostly students, a lot of awareness.
    But that moment in the alley . . . did she always do that? He watched three more nights, and her routine never varied.
    On the night he became a god, he’d waited until she started turning out the shop lights, had pulled into the alley that led to the bar parking lot, and then pulled into a space between her and her car. There was some ambient light from the bar, but not much. He could see her coming as he got out: he was humming a snatch of song, which he later remembered as “Danger Zone” from the Top Gun movie. And that’s what he felt like, like the top gun . . .
    He walked around to the back of the car, checking that nobody else was in the alley: here was the danger zone, at least for him. He messed around in the trunk, as if he were opening a suitcase or something, and watched her with his peripheral vision. He could see by her hesitant step that she thought about turning, and walking away from him, out there alone in the dark, but that would have been embarrassing, and so she came on, angling a bit away from him, but she was still within a step or two as she went by, watching him out of the corner of her eye.
    He let her get another step, to relax just that fatal notch, then with a quick two-step approach, hit her with a dowel rod. The dowel was a little more than an inch thick, sold as a clothes-closet rod, and five feet long. He meant to stun her with it: but in the excitement and fear of the moment, he hit her too hard. She went down, he scooped her up, dumped her in the trunk of the car, tossed the stick in after her, slammed it, ran around to the door, jumped inside, and was rolling.
    The first time, he’d been intensely frightened. What if a taillight went out? What if he forgot to signal a turn? What if somebody hit him, an accident, and the cops found the body in the trunk?
    All kinds of things could happen.
    None of them did.
    And then the disappointment: he’d hit her too hard.
    When he opened the trunk, she moaned but never seemed aware of what he was doing. He picked her up, and her head rolled, and her eyelids fluttered, and he thought she might be faking. She wasn’t.
    He was careful, in handling her, to never let her get in a position to slash at him . . . but she never even stiffened as he hauled her into O’Donnell’s shed. O’Donnell was in Madison, seeing his mother. The availability of his car shed had been the key to launch the attack. He’d gotten the shed ready before he went after her—had laid down a plastic painter’s drop cloth that he’d bought from Home Depot. He’d hung a piece of nylon anchor rope over one of the exposed ceiling beams, designed to hold the weight of an automobile engine. He tied Larson’s hands and lifted her with the rope.
    She was absolutely slack, all her weight on her shoulder joints, but she never protested, never made a sound other than the low gagging moan.
    “Angela,” he called to her. He’d gotten out his wire flail. “Angela, can you hear me?”
    She couldn’t. He snapped the flail at her; the wire cut into her back, and blood seeped out of the cuts. Nothing but the moan, the fluttering eyelids.
    He hit her again and then a kind of blankness descended on him, and he began beating her with a fury, hitting her, hitting her, until a misstep sent him skidding