Carnage: Short Story Read Free

the others. Givers.
    He opened the laptop and adjusted its position so the sun wasn’t shining directly on the screen.
    He wasn’t surprised when he couldn’t get online. That was okay. When he left here, he’d check into a motel that featured online service. Then he’d take another look, do another quick read-through on a young woman named Patricia Maria Angelina (called simply Pat by her zany Facebook friends).
    One of those friends was the killer.
    He wasn’t one of the crowd Pat ran with in the real or virtual world, but he’d learned a lot about her via Facebook. That she was nineteen, five foot four, a natural blonde (he’d see about that), and liked heavy metal music. She was planning to enroll in college at Northwestern University in Chicago as soon as she had enough money saved. Unable to get along with her mother and father, she’d moved out and was living with her roommate, Jessica, in a small apartment near the beach. The killer had seen the address in the background in one of her Facebook photos, a shot of her standing next to a small shaggy dog. The dog must belong to someone else. The killer knew Patricia didn’t own a dog, but had a battle-scarred black-and-gray tomcat named Snuffy, which she loved very much. She was the type who could love almost anything or anyone without reservation. A trusting soul with a luminous smile.
    He liked her on Facebook.
    Without reservation.

4
    New York
     
    Quinn smoothed out the newspaper page from the package the mail had brought. It was wrinkled but readable.
    According to the Spindrift Bugle, the murder of young Taylor Reminger was a once-in-a century event. Spindrift was one of many resort towns in Florida, places where spring breakers occasionally lost their lives in one way or another. Booze, drugs, sex, youth, and an ocean were a lethal combination. But even those kinds of deaths hadn’t occurred in the town in over twenty years.
    Taylor was Taylor “Tey” Hope Reminger, from Long Island, a student who’d expected to start college in New Orleans later in the year. Her photo was one of a reasonably attractive girl making the most of her looks in what appeared to be a high school graduation photo. Quinn noted that she was twenty-two, so she’d put off college for a while.
    The thing about her that interested Quinn was the manner of her death. She’d apparently been tortured with shallow, skillful cuts by a sharp blade, where it would hurt the most. Not only hurt, but humiliate. Nipples had been removed, along with an earlobe, found lying alongside Tey’s head with a cheap souvenir shell earring still attached. Her clitoris had been cut off. Then there were what seemed to be cigarette burns in strategic spots meant to be most agonizing.
    The ME’s opinion was that most of the injuries had been inflicted ante mortem. While she was still alive. Even the cuts on her forehead, where the letters D.O.A . had been carved. Some of that blood had been wiped away after her heart had stopped pumping and her breathing ceased, so the letters were more legible. Those who looked closely noticed that her hands were misshapen.
    Quinn gave the small-town newspaper page out to the others to read. Everyone was quiet as the news item was passed around.
    “Looks like he was trying to get information out of her,” Fedderman said, when the page had made the rounds and been returned to Quinn. “Or he’s just a sadistic bastard.”
    “She displayed some bravery,” Helen said. “Her torturer didn’t get whatever it was he wanted, even after he broke her fingers one after the other. D.O.A. is thorough.”
    “The same might be said of his copycat,” Quinn said.
    Helen didn’t seem surprised by the notion. It had passed through everyone’s mind. Killers like D.O.A. often inspired copycat murderers. To some of the twisted, he was a hero.
    Quinn knew that was what worried Renz. That and a sixth sense that hinted at what was about to happen in his city. New York was