Page 2 of Sinners Retreat

“Hmm?”

“Why is your car parked in front of the scene of the fucking crime?”

She steps beside me and begins fidgeting. “Shit. I was in such a hurry that I forgot you said to park at the pump-and-dump motel. Sorry.”

I sigh. What the fuck else can I do? “Just drive me back to my car.”

Grass and weeds peek from the busted cracks running through the concrete walkway. I sidestep them and make my way past the rusty chain-link fence. The gate lies askew on the ground.

We get inside her beater, and I’m grateful that the busted thing blends in with the surrounding area. Which is to say, the car looks like it smokes a lot of crack.

Squatters and addicts occupy most of the houses on this street, though I use the term “houses” very loosely. These rundown buildings are mostly crumbling relics of their former selves. Long gone is their glory age—a booming mill town run to ruin when the mills had to close after the jobs were sent overseas.

I click my seatbelt into place, and the car grumbles to life. As Cat pulls the rust bucket away from the crumbling curb, her fingers flex and tap on the steering wheel. It’s a nervous habit, which she partakes in—much to my displeasure—when her mind conjures a question her mouth is too nervous to ask.

The radio doesn’t work, so I have two options. I can continue listening to this incessant, nerve-grating representation of her anxiety, or I can give her an opening.

“Cat, just ask the fucking question.”

She needs no further invitation and promptly spits it out. “Can you tell me about your brother’s murder?”

My shoulders stiffen, and my stomach clenches until I’m certain I’ll shit or vomit. Maybe both. I suppose that’s a natural reaction when a mind is forced to relive a traumatic event.

Cat clears her throat. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have a reason, but I want to be sure before I say anything.”

My ears perk up. I’ve been searching for my brother’s killer for as long as he’s been in business, but even though I’m a stellar journalist with a nose like a hound, the man has been a ghost. Untraceable. Undetectable. If talking about what happened can bring me closer to finding him, she can shove a pull string up my ass and yank it to her heart’s content.

“Well, I was seventeen,” I begin. “The killer pulled up to the house in a black van in the middle of the night, broke in, and hung my brother from?—”

“Meat hooks?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “In the garage. I was the one who found him. The image is burned into my brain, and not just because it was the first dead body I’d seen.”

“The Abattoir Adonis,” she breathes.

I nod.

“So what burned it into your brain?”

“You mean, aside from the fact that my brother was levitating four feet off the ground with meat hooks through his armpits? Or maybe it was that he had no eyes to speak of, he was completely nude, and the number seven was carved into his body in several places? It certainly wasn’t the copious amount of blood painting the concrete floor.”

I turn to her with a deadpan stare, but she’s too busy imagining my description of the scene to notice.

She nibbles her lip and takes a right turn, putting us in view of the seedy motel. I chose the place because it lacks any cameras. Its clientele doesn’t like to smile for photos.

“How strange,” Cat says.

“What?”

She ignores my question and poses one of her own. “What year was he murdered?”

The disconnected tone she uses when talking about my brother’s demise rubs me the wrong way, though it shouldn’t. It’s the same way I ask questions when I’m covering a story. But then she works out the answer before I can offer it to her.

“Wait, you were seventeen, so that means...your brother was his sixth victim. He’d established his MO by that point. Why did he deviate?” Her eyebrows pull together as she turns in at the motel.

“That’s the million-dollar question, Regis. If I knew the answer, I’d probably be closer to finding him.” I scoff and look out the window.

My brother is the only Adonis victim to be stripped nude and have his eyes removed and numbers etched into the skin. He typically just hangs and drains.

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