One Cold Night

followed by a loud scraping sound. She shouldn’t have been touching anything, let alone destroying it; she had to know that.
    Dave followed the noise. As he got closer, he smelled the revolting yet familiar odor of rotted flesh. He had been sure the groom would follow his pattern and take Lisa away. But could it be possible? Could Lisa be here? He denied that appalling possibility with the next, worse thought: It would be too soon for her body to have generated such a rancid stench.
    The bedroom was a shock of carnival color. Jesus and Madonna statues of all sizes and types cluttered the floor alongside a similar variety of porcelain dolls dressed to frilly perfection. Amidst the crowd of figurines, a double bed was neatly made with a green-and-blue-striped blanket and two pillows.
    “You any good with locks?” Ramos asked.
    She was crouched in front of a cage, the source of the awful smell. Inside were a dozen or so dead kittens along with three barely alive ones; limp and shriveled, they were the hairless breed Dave had heard of but had never actually seen before. By the look of it, Ramos had thrown piles of clothes off the cage and dragged it out of the closet.
    “We gotta get them outta there, give those babies a chance.” Ramos jammed a pen into the lock but it didn’t budge. “He takes better care of his plants. Now, that’s a crime.”
    “Why does he want the kittens?” Dave wondered aloud.
    “They cute like me.” Ramos gave up on the lock and stood up. She gestured to the display of figurines. “Any chance Lisa liked dolls when she was little?”
    “I guess so.”
    “Any chance she likes kittens?”
    “She’s allergic to cats.”
    “She’d be allergic to cat fur, ” Ramos corrected him.
    Of course: sometimes the fur, sometimes the dander, sometimes both, was what incited allergic reactions, not the cat itself. Dave felt disgusted by how simply Peter Adkins had summed Lisa up. What little girl didn’t like dolls and kittens? And now, as a teenager, what did he expect of her?
    “It’s called ob-jec-ti-fi-ca-tion.” Ramos hammered each syllable. “I ain’t no dummy. They all do it, every friggin’ psycho I ever arrested and even the ones I tried to love. They think they know exactly who you are and what you want but they don’t know nothin’.”
    It was a rough interpretation, but Dave had to agree. Everywhere in this creepfest of a room, where a man had yearned for a girl, Dave saw his three girls: Lisa and Becky and Lolita. He saw them helpless on the neat bed before their self-appointed savior-monster as he designed the annihilation of their innocence; saw their sexuality stolen and turned against them, hidden behind the bland frozen faces of the virginal Madonnas; saw their quiet agony in the three barely living kittens whose scrawny backs were pressed againstthe inside mesh of the cage as they struggled for breath.
    “He’s a freak, all right.” Dave kept his voice low, just above a whisper.
    “Listen to me, Dave,” Ramos said. “After we catch him, I want him first. I want him. But I figure you want him even badder.”
    “I do,” Dave said. She had seen the collage in the living room and the surveillance setup. She knew as well as he did that, by necessity, Peter Adkins — the groom, if he was the groom — was going to be Dave’s.
    “Johnson!” Ramos called to the main room. “You any good at picking locks?”
    Footsteps headed to the bedroom shrine just as Ramos’s cell phone began to ring with a disco beat.
    Zeb Johnson entered the room, covering his nose with a cupped hand. When he saw the pile of mostly dead kittens, he stopped short and his eyes seemed to droop at the corners. He knelt down to inspect the lock. His hands briefly searched his pockets, apparently finding nothing by way of a tool.
    “Whoa,” Johnson said, glancing around the room at the Jesuses and Madonnas and frilly dolls. He looked at Dave, who looked back without a trace of real shock. Dave hadn’t seen exactly this before, but he had seen different and he had seen worse. Johnson plucked a fake flower from the fist of a plastic Jesus, using its wire stem to quickly pick the lock and free the three living kittens. Dave meanwhile kept an ear cocked on Ramos’s call.
    “Christ-all-friggin’-mighty,” she said. “Mr. Adkins ain’t no good at this game.” She held the phone away from her face to speak to Dave, “Bruno says you got someone who does phone tracking fast, special for