Once Bitten by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online Page B

bellowed.
    “Morning Captain,” I said, my heart heavy.
    He charged over to where I was sitting, put his hands on the desk and loomed over me like a storm about to break. “Have I got a scumball for you,” he said. “We pulled him in about half an hour ago. He killed two small boys last night. Tortured them with a soldering iron. And then bit their peckers off. Can you believe that? Bit them clean off and swallowed them. Said it would boost his potency. You know what I'd do to someone like him, Beaverbrook? I'd hack off his balls with a blunt hacksaw and lock him away for life. That's what I'd do. But you, Beaverbrook, maybe you'll think he's just a bit disturbed and that we should put him in a nice hospital somewhere and let him take woodwork classes and go for long walks in the fresh air. Anyway, he's in room C, why don't you go and get inside his head.”
    He pushed himself up off the desk and leered at me. “And the Batmobile's got a ticket again,”
    he said, before heading off towards his office.
    “He's still got it in for you, hasn't he?” asked Filbin, as he picked up the phone and began to dial.
    I didn't reply, just grabbed my briefcase and headed for the interview rooms.
    I was in room C for the best part of two hours and I felt sick when I came out. Sick and dirty and tainted. The man was insane, no doubt about it and the program labelled him as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and I knew that Captain Canonico would not take the news kindly. I sympathised with him. I hated child-killers more than any other type of murderer, hated them with a vengeance. If I'd had my way I'd quite happily give the bastard a bimedial leucotomy there and then with a broken bottle, but that's not the way the American justice system works. There were times when I hated the job, and hated even more the people it brought me into contact with.
    There's no excuse for killing children. None. I went straight to my office and drew up the report and put it in a file and then dropped it into the internal mailing system because I didn't want to be around when Canonico got hold of it.
    He'd never forgiven me for what happened a few years back when I was on one of my first cases. The Teen Killers, they called them, two nasty pieces of work who'd ended up in a cell together at San Quentin, both of them serving time for rape. They spent several years telling each other stories of rapes they'd committed and planning what they'd do when they got out. They came up with this great idea, that they'd buy a large van and use it to kidnap and rape girls, but to make it a bit more exciting they'd go out with the intention of getting girls of every age between thirteen and nineteen. It was a sort of game. A contest. A full set, nothing less would do. Their names were Ed Vincent and Ronnie Bryant but after the third rape the media began calling them The Teen Killers. It was Vincent's idea that the girls should be buggered as well as being raped, and it was Bryant's idea to fit up a video camera and lights in the back of the van so that they could film what they did to the girls. It was never really known which one of them decided that the girls should be strangled with their own underwear because when they eventually came to trial they both blamed each other.
    Vincent was the smarter of the two, he had an IQ of 154, and in court Bryant said that he fallen under his influence and that it was all Vincent's doing. They got caught after the fifth murder. The MO had been the same in each case, the naked bodies were discovered by the side of a freeway with a number written on their back in lipstick. The number was the age of the girl. Within a year of them both being released they'd killed a thirteen-year-old, a fifteen-year-old, a seventeen-yearold,
    an eighteen-year-old and a nineteen-year-old. They'd almost got the set, Vincent told me, and he seemed more upset at missing out on his target than the fact that he was facing the death penalty.
    Anyway,