Page 160 of Long Way Down

“But you knew what he was doing.” It wasn’t a question. They’d already talked at length with Crider, and had another run at Doug; then rounded up and interviewed every member of Eyes Ahead.

Osborn lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “He would tell me stories. I think he was trying to impress me. Like a cat bringing a dead rat to your doorstep.”

His eyes flared ondead. A there and then gone again flash of something sinister that lay deep beneath the surface.

“You know he’d insinuated his way into Dana Brown’s life. That he was her boyfriend.”

Another shrug. But his gaze lifted to meet hers, arresting, suddenly, intensity blasting through the veneer of indifference. He wet his lips before he answered, a fast flash of his tongue that brought to mind serpents. “He said it was the closest he’d ever felt to someone. Being where I had been. Carving a place inside her, like I had.”

Melissa swallowed. “You knew he was planning the other rapes. He and his new friends.”

“How was I supposed to stop him from in here?” he countered, and when his head tilted this time, it was with the unnerving suddenness of a bird. Somewhere between the last few sentences, he’d decided to let his skin slough off; had shred the societal veneer in favor of the beast that lived beneath. It was conscious; he wanted her to see him like this.

“You could have told someone. Notified police. You could have been honest when my partner and I were here last.”

He grinned, revealing straight, white teeth. “Ah. Let me rephrase that last question, then: given what you know about me, Melissa, whywould Ihave stopped him?”

The prickling, crawling, goosebump sensation had spread across her chest and down her back. She felt cold inside, but sweat was gathering beneath her arms. “Maybe because I don’t get the impression you liked him very much.”

“Oh, I loathed him. Obnoxious little toady. He’s just like all the other freaks in that group of his: cosplaying rapists to feel powerful.”

“Cosplay is pretend,” she said, more sharply than intended, and watched his eyes crinkle up as his smile widened. “The rapes they committed are very much real.”

“As is their sense of having been wronged by the world. The sense of being vastly important, while also being helpless. They’re full of rage, those boys. Rape is an outlet. Mimicking me is a way to be noticed.”

“By you?”

“By me. By the general public. Every man worships something, Melissa. Take God out of the equation, and he’ll make a deity of his own. It’s not my fault they rendered me in stained glass above their altar.”

She suppressed a shudder. “You know, that’s the sort of mindset that gets guys shanked to death in the lunch line.”

His grin stretched another impossible degree, eyes dancing, dark and feverish. “Tell your little gang they’re welcome to try.”

~*~

The early days of a case were the most taxing: the sleepless, headlong rush of searches, and interviews, and chases. When the trail was fresh, but the quarry was unknown, and the suspect pool wide, and deep, and full of surprises, like the white bellies of dead fish bobbing up suddenly to the surface.

But there was a certain, dragging sort of exhaustion that came with, after having figured out the who, nailing down the whys, hows, whens, and preparing the case to hand over to the DA. That was when, Melissa had found, you learned all the unsavory details about the person – or, in this case, people – you were investigating, and disillusionment kicked in hard.

They had learned the following:

It had begun with Spencer Bradley, who truly was a lawyer…one who’d dumped the majority of his clients when he insinuated himself into David Osborn’s life. It was Osborn who’d told him about Benjamin Crider’s Eyes Ahead, and he had of course joined. Finally, he was in the company of others like him – and he’d seen an opportunity to proselytize. A chance to enlighten others of his ilk to the magic (in his estimation) of a man like Osborn, who threw society’s restrictions to the wind, and seized what he wanted.

He had approached the members individually, after group meetings, about, as Tobias phrased it, “taking things further.”

“He told me he was convinced that the only cure for our impulses was to act on them. That the longer we denied them, the more violent they’d become.” Tobias had refused. “I’d been doing good. I didn’t want to be dragged into anything.” And, according to their Forensic findings and the testimony of the others, he hadn’t.

Ben and Doug had been receptive, though.

Ben had been the one to visit the prostitutes of the Dirty Dog bar and brothel. The one who’d sweated and chanted over the working girls, and, when he got too rough, been stabbed for it. They found the scar on his side, badly suppurated and in need of medical attention.

Doug had decided to play things closer to home, dabbling in familiar territory. He was the one who’d raped Lana and Lynn. The portrait Melissa had painted in her mind – of a disaffected, disturbed young man detached from reality and consequence, with all the money he could want, and none of the responsibility, mired in his own deep unhappiness and plagued by a rage seemingly without a source – was solidified when, remorseless, he sucked his teeth and said, “Those bitches think they’re better than everyone.”

Bradley had been the one to rape April, though he’d enlisted Ben’s help, and Doug’s car, in the disposal of her body when, upon a second attempt, she’d struggled, nearly gotten away, and he’d stabbed her fatally. This was all according to Ben, seeing as Bradley couldn’t speak for himself, what with being dead. It was his fervent, religious dedication to Osborn that had driven him to carve his message into her skin.

It was her blood, collected with a medical syringe just after her death by the shaking hands of a madman, that Bradley had scrawled across Melissa’s door. Hoping to frighten her into backing off; Ben suspected he’d wanted to use it to make Doug seem even more unstable, but they’d bungled the timing of it.

Despite Melissa’s efforts with the DA to lessen the offense, arguing that she’d been in fear for her life, Dana was being charged with Spencer Bradley’s murder. Melissa had advised her to let it go to trial in the hopes of landing a sympathetic jury.

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