Vultures: TCPI 7

Prologue

It was foggy outside, a standard issue San Francisco night. Light from an orange street light penetrated the wet fog in beams. Water dripped off the hotel sign and the canvas canopies that protected store windows. A cat ran across the street. In the hotel parking lot, a man lifted a limp woman out of the passenger’s seat, and carried her inside the hotel.

It was after two AM, and there was no one in the lobby or behind the register desk, but he saw flickering of soft bluish light, indicating a television set was on in a room behind the registration desk. The night clerk was either engrossed in Late Night Saturday, or he/she was sleeping in front of the TV.

An elevator was just to his right. He stepped in and pushed the button for the eighth floor. He never put the woman down. She was not an easy load for him to carry, being bigger than he was. Because he was also carrying her trick bag and her coat, he had to heft her more than once to adjust the load. She was as limp as a corpse, but if you looked closely, you could see her breathing.

Inside room 815, he placed the woman on the bed, and looked at her. She was, in a word, gorgeous...She was tall, dark-haired and she had a swimsuit model’s figure. She was wearing a fifteen hundred dollar Versace dress. Underwear from Victoria's Secret worth over three hundred bucks. Red-soled platform high heels worth five hundred dollars, dangled on her feet. She just reeked of class.

Most unprofessionally, she also reeked of alcohol.

Using the pillowslip under her head to mask his fingerprints, he opened her wallet and removed all the money he had paid her earlier. He turned her onto her stomach, lifted her dress and whacked her on the butt as hard as he could with an open hand. His hand stung for several minutes, but she was branded.

Flipping her back over, he tied her spread-eagle with a velvet strap that he found in her S&M trick bag. He passed it between the mattress and the box springs of the bed. He pushed her dress skirt up around her waist, cut her thong off with a small switch-blade knife. He left her lacy black garter belt and hosiery on. Taking off all his clothes, except for heavy socks, he opened her legs, and settled on top of her. During the rape, she began to wake up, and began struggling.

He slapped her face, somewhat gently, as though he was trying to wake her up. When her eyes opened he said, Bambi ... relax ... and do me. That’s what you’re getting paid for.

Bambi realized that the trick was not going the way he said it would. She had no idea how she got here, but she recognized her date for the night. She also recognized that this room wasn’t in the hotel they were supposed to be in. She was completely confused. Her head was spinning.

But in the manner of The Show Must Go On ever the top echelon pro, Bambi began to give him an excellent rape scenario. She gasped involuntarily when she realized just how big this small man was.

Part of the act was to writhe and struggle against the velvet ties and cry, let me go, let me go! while still thrusting against him.

If I do, what will you do?


I’ll give you a great spanking ...

I like pain. You like pain? he asked, still in rhythm. Oh yes, yes!, Lover. Give me pain.

He was climaxing. I ... intend ... to... Bitch!

When he finished, he got off her, he opened the bedside drawer and retrieved an over-large cigar box. This is where he kept his tools of his trade. He opened the box, and removed some simple office paper clamps.

He got a huge Crocodile Dundee knife out of the box, and carefully sliced the top of her gown from top to bottom, opening it like a coat..

Hey! Dammit, that’s a fifteen hundred dollar dress you just ruined! You owe me for that, you dumb hick!

Shut the fuck up and watch your death, you diseased whore of Babylon!

In shock at first, she began to scream.

He immediately stuffed her mouth with her thong, pushing it far enough down her throat to stifle all sounds, except moans of pain.

Silently, reaching across her body, he held the huge Bowie knife point down, edge toward him. Holding the knife with both hands and lowering his eye so that he could line up things, using a deliberate move, he plunged the point in about an inch deep and brought the knife point slowly towards him, slicing through her skin, her abs and across her stomach. Dark blood oozed out.

He looked at her face. She was completely terrorized and uselessly fighting the restraints. She was bucking like a horse on steroids which he had to control with his body weight. He smiled and made a cut from her breastbone down to her navel, all the time watching her face for reactions. Looking at his deathly cold face, his deep eyes obsidian black and emotionless, Bambi understood that she was dead, she just hadn’t left her body yet. Soon all bodily control over her bladder and bowels left her.

He began slicing deeper. There was no pattern to his cutting, except the more blood there was, the more excited the man became. When an artery began spurting, he quickly fixed a paper clamp on the end, so she wouldn’t bleed to death too soon.

When she passed out, he splashed a glass of water on her face, waking her up. When she did, he returned to his savagery. Mercifully, she passed out for the last time in about ten minutes. He couldn’t revive her. Still, he continued to assail her body. It took a half hour from the beginning of the attack before she had no pulse.

Because of the controlled cutting, there was very little in the way of blood spatter on the distant walls. Nearby there was enough to redden the walls, because he wasn’t under total control. He’d go into a frenzy, then make himself stop and breathe so his pleasure could be prolonged. The bed was pure gore, with dozens of red rivulets running from her body to the fifteen hundred dollar dress then onto the bed to soak in, and a rare few tiny streamlets making it over the edge.

Her torso and neck were a mess, looking something like hamburger. Her throat was sliced from ear to ear. Her lower intestine was visible.

He removed the paper clamps from Bambi’s now unpressurized arteries. The clamps were extremely generic, but he was a careful man, and he didn’ t want to leave any clues. He wasn’ t too concerned about his DNA. It wasn’t on file anywhere. He believed that DNA couldn’t be tracked, unless the authorities had an identified sample in the system. And he didn’t plan on getting caught.

Besides, when a woman charges what she charges, he wasn’t going to spoil a chance for a great piece of ass, specially when it was going to be bareback. Physical things like the office clamps could possibly be traced, but it would take a miracle. The velvet ties were hers, so he left them. He stepped back, admiring his handiwork. Odors from the remains on the bed began to filter into the room air.

He was pleased.

He checked himself in the mirror. His body was soaked in blood in the front, and stark naked white on the backside. He thought he looked like a strawberry sundae. He wiped blood from his face, then went into the

bedroom closet and put on a cheap rain suit over his blood smeared naked body. He pulled on some surgical gloves and packed his tool kit and the towel he used to wipe his hands and face into a canvas grocery bag. Carefully looking the room over for any forgotten clues, he picked up his shoes, put them in the bag, and stepping carefully so as not to disturb any blood spatter, quietly stole out of room 815.

Standing in the doorway, he pulled off his blood-soaked socks and stuffed them into the bag. He dropped his shoes in the hall and slid his feet into them, not bothering to tie them now.

In the cold dewy morning, an hour before predawn, his truck started easily, not like sometimes when the battery would stall because of the cold.

He breathed a sigh of relaxation, and drove across town to the Pacific Ocean. He pulled into the sand beach near the zoo, turned off his lights and pulled the truck right up to the edge of the wet sand, but stayed on the loose dry sand. No tire tracks would betray him.

He got out and removed a softball sized rock from the pickup’s bed, stripped off his rain suit, put the rock in a pocket, put the heavy blood soaked socks in another, wrapped the bloody mess into a ball, walked into the surf, and heaved the bundle as far into the blackness as he could.

He knew the rock would hold the rain gear down for at least a couple of days. By then, any DNA traces of him and Bambi would be long gone. Even if the DNA didn’t wash off, there was nothing to tie the bundle to him. He was untraceable.

Using salt-water soap, he bathed himself in the ocean. No traces of his salt-water bath could ever be found, as he was performing all this at low tide. A shark might be able to detect the blood in the water, but no one else could.

He put on clean clothes, and drove away singing along with the country and western song, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, satisfied and pleased that his work for the night was finished.

Chapter One

If there’s anything I hate, it’s Saturday Mornings. Especially Saturday mornings when the sun is shining, and I’ve got things to do on my boat before a race Sunday. Saturday morning is the time of the week Mrs. Lockland, my lovely landlady, housemother, and ‘adopted’ mother-figure gives me that withering stare and asks in her fibber-vaporizing voice, Tracy, have you done your housework yet?

Which meant Do I intend to clean my room and do my laundry?

Getting to it, Ma’am.

Believe it or not, I am a grown woman, living in a boarding house. I just turned thirty one, stand five two, weigh about 110 and have a reasonable cleavage if I try to touch my two shoulders together. I’m blonde with sky-blue eyes. I have a pretty good life. I’m a full partner in a law and Investigative firm. Brooks and Cunningham. My present dilemma is that I’m between boyfriends.

And sometimes I’m still treated like a kid. I don’t mind. Most of that’s my own fault. I mess up my room all by myself. As a growing teen, I didn’t have a mother to properly instruct me in the specifics of household chores that’s known as drudgery. Mom died when I was still between the Saturday morning version of Roy Rogers and the Saturday night version of Brad Pitt as heart-throbs.

Dad never got on my case about my room until I couldn’t close my bedroom door. As soon as my lovely old landlady found that out, she decided late was better than never, so she’s taking me back to my youth. Only on Saturdays. Never on Sundays. Always ragging on me. Giving me grief. Making me learn. Saturdays, Mrs. Lockland is an ol’ grouch, but I love her.

Sheese. It’s not as though I have clothes piled all over the floor! There’s just one pile. And it’s hidden from the door. It’s not as though I haven’t made my bed since last Saturday. I have, but usually I’m in a hurry so I don’t do a good job. Since I’m not in the Marines, I don’t care if it’s not tightly stretched.

Anyway, before breakfast, I did my chores. Cleaned my room good. Vacuumed the area rug. Mopped the floor. Dusted! Changed my linens! I separated my pile of laundry into three stacks. One white, one colored and one to go out for cleaning. The one to go out was by far the largest. The other two I could probably hand-wash in a bathroom sink. All at once. I lucked out and got to the pair of pre-historic washing machines in the basement first.

Tell you how bad I am at this housework stuff.

I have to use those soap tablets that you don’t have to measure.

Toss in the dirties, toss in a pill and turn the machine on. While I ate breakfast with some of the other roomers who liked Saturday Mornings, my clothes tumbled themselves clean. That’s right. Tumbled. After I finished wolfing down a stack of pancakes and half of a cantaloupe, and I had all my domestic duties completed to Mrs. Lockland’s satisfaction, I took a quick shower, put on my grubbies and escaped before she found something else I should do.

I headed for the marina to look after my classic Cal 2-30. The boat’s name is Strumpet, AKA Strumpy. She’s Porsche Red, with orange and white graphics. An older boat, a lot older than me, in a couple of years she might be eligible for the Master Mariner’s Series. A few decades in the water is a lot for an old girl who still wins races. The boat was a mess too, and needed my attention. That was from the last party last weekend.

There was only two of us at this particular party, and I’ll tell you, the guy was all hands! I met him at a club function, a protest committee meeting. The Protest Committee is the only club committee I sit on. I’m on the committee because I’m well-known as a Sea-Lawyer. For you landlubbers, that’s someone who knows all the rules in sailboat racing, and applies them.

We usually don’t meet on Friday nights, but one of the ‘Warring’ parties wanted a review of his last race protest, before the next race. I should have known better then to even smile at the creep. But once I get a few warming drinks in my tummy, sometimes the discriminator circuits in my brain short out.

The guy who was on my boat was a crewman for one of the competitors and I guess he figured that it was his turn to find out the rumors of the pixy sailor’s ‘athletic’ abilities in a bunk were true. Maybe they are, maybe they’re not. But he’ll never know, nor will anyone else in the club. I made it a policy a long time ago not to mix my recreation with dating. Don’t ask me his name.

Once I smartened up, shoved him out the hatch and told him to get a hold of himself, I promptly forgot it. Just like a bad taste in my mouth. That was another thing. If you ever want a second kiss from this pixy sailor, you better not taste like an stinky ol’ ashtray. Smokers. Yeecchh. I hate `em.

I set about my duties, and for some reason, cleaning my old boat from stem to stern wasn’t ‘chores,’ it was fun. The day’s activities were planned to be some ‘Hangar flying’ with some other boat owners and fellow members of the West Bay Yacht Club. Maybe I’d hoist a few brews or Irish Coffees if the weather turned cold, a distinct possibility in the San Francisco mid-summer. But the main plan was to generally kick back. Tomorrow I would be racing, but today was scheduled to be ab-sol-u-tely nothing ... exactly the way I wanted it.

After I finished the scrub-down of my boat, and had cleaned and inspected all the equipment we’d be using tomorrow, I drove to the club. I keep my boat about a mile or so away. The club doesn’t have any docks for permanent membership use. We’re not rich like other clubs I can name. I was one of the first members of the Saturday Gang to arrive. I sat in the window section of the lounge and sipped black coffee, scanning the local rag, trading jokes with the man who was cleaning the bar. I didn’t even bother reading the national news. I don’t like being depressed on weekends about things I can’t control.

The local news was more of the same old things that were talked about every day. The mayor was in trouble with every faction in the city, including his own party, there were three murders during the night, countless muggings, robberies, and other things that happen during a full moon.

Don’t scoff.

If you think the full moon B.S. is B.S., ask your favorite bartender. Normal, sane people do things they’re sorry for until next time they overdo it. Dogs bark, cats hiss, and ants bite. Weirdos come out of the woodwork.

People who know better drink things like B-52’s, Pink Squirrels, Tall White Dirty Mothers and Vulcan Mind-Probes, which is a Long Island Ice Tea with some beer added.

Hey. I’m not making this up!

The homicides interested me enough so that I read the full articles. Two were domestic related killings, jealous husbands, drunken fights, that sort of thing. But the last of the three killings was a malicious murder, committed a week ago today. From what I read, the San Francisco P.D. was trying to keep this one a bit of a secret. They weren’t saying much of anything, especially that they had a serial killer on their hands. The ‘Inquiring’ reporter of this fine example of Yellow Journalism hinted broadly that this was the third killing in as many months that seemed to have the same M.O..

He took the P.D. to task for not warning the public about a maniac on the loose. I looked at the front page again, to make sure I hadn’t gotten my hands on some grocery-store tabloid. Nope. It’s our same old paper. Some M.O.. Find a woman of the evening, contract for her services, then cut her to ribbons with a "Large, Sharp Object.’ Read Butcher Knife.

I read the names of the prostitutes carefully, looking for any women I might have known. I’ve been out of that business for a long time now, and from what the paper said, these women were hotel hookers, not upper-class callgirls, but there was always a chance one of my old friends might have slipped a few notches in the nonce.

I folded up the paper when Bill Chapman came in. He was a buddy who was also one of my better competitors. I could usually beat him, but he was better than the rest of the ‘D’ handicap class. Between the two of us, no one else got further than a third. No brag, just fact.

Hiya Trace, he said and poured himself a cup of coffee. How’s the best looking skipper in the area?

Why? Is Doreen someplace around?

I’m not being mean. Doreen Mugglesea was without a doubt the best looking woman skipper racing. Well, maybe not so good looking. Her real claim to fame was that she had a figure that wouldn’t quit. And that’s what every man who watched her giggle, jiggle and wiggle hoped. She’d never stop.

But if Dumb Dora ever got into the College