Elysium Dreams

Indecision

He knew he had screwed up by smashing the pictures at the teacher's place. Marshal McMichaels would have figured out that it was personal. He just hadn't been able to help himself. To see his child smiling out at him from her photo had enraged him.

His Grace, smiling, staring out at him, with her fifth grade teacher behind her, also smiling was too much. Grace had hated her. She had been mean and cruel. Grace had been sent to the office one day because she was sneezing in class and the bitch found it disruptive. But the bitch was the cause, Grace was allergic to cats, she always sneezed around them. And that bitch teacher had owned three of them at the time.

One by one, they had all disappeared from the teacher's house during Grace's time in her class. By the end of the year, Grace was back to being a healthy child.

She had even had the nerve to call him and his wife in to talk about Grace's problem. Her suggestion had been homeschooling the girl if her allergies were that bad. But Grace's only allergy was cats and she could handle them to some degree. She just couldn't handle all the dander the teacher carried on her clothes.

Henry picked up a cigar and a photo album. He took both outdoors. The women in his house were sound asleep. He had ensured it. His original plan had been to go hunting, but that hadn't worked out for him. He'd had a flat tire. It was the second time he'd been delayed this month. He wasn't happy about it. He had a schedule to keep.

Instead, he would content himself with the album. There were two hundred pages in it. Each page could hold four, four inch by five inch photos. However, that wasn't what was in the photo album.

Each photo holder carried a three inch by four inch swatch of skin. Under it, in meticulously neat handwriting was the name of the person the skin belonged to and the date they had died. He'd found it in his son's things.

The first three swatches had his son's illegible scrawl under them. It reminded him of Marshal Reece. His handwriting was nearly illegible on his autopsy notes.

His best estimate was another two weeks before they finally caught up to him. Marshal Reece had been muttering the entire time he had done the autopsy. Now the results of toxicology were going to go straight to the Marshal. And Marshal Reece, despite his unkempt appearance was a man who didn't miss much.

Henry had been unable to stop the basic tox screens that identified the sedative he was using to subdue unruly victims. However, he had been able to make them disappear. It wasn't hard. But Reece would see everything, find the clues. It would take a while to put it all together, but they would.

He had three women on his list. The whore upstairs, snoring her head off, was among them. Maybe a fourth, if they figured out it was him and he could manage it, he'd get Marshal Cain before they arrested him. She hit all the wrong buttons. Her dismissive wave today had been irritating. She thought she was so smart and so superior to him. He'd show her.

The waitress was still on his list. If his fucking tire hadn't been flat, she probably would have been on the menu tonight. The Marshals seemed to bring bad luck with them.

Tomorrow night would be her turn. After she was found, he'd go after the uppity bitch at the police department--the one that wrinkled her nose and walked away every time he came to talk about a case with her.

Then there was his secretary at the doctor's office. She had the audacity to think he was hitting on her, flirting with her. She'd been with more men than anyone on the planet. He had treated her for several sexually transmitted diseases and yet the bitch still thought that he wanted her.