“I swear I will fucking rip you apart, you pussy!” he screams, spraying foul spit onto Jeremy’s cheek.
He thinks about taking some pliers to Matt’s front teeth but doesn’t have another clean ironed dress shirt to change into now. Besides, it is hard to feel anything but disgust for a man sitting in his own piss and still using words like pussy. He responds instead by aggressively grabbing Matt’s face and planting a deep kiss right on his mouth, biting hard enough on his bottom lip to hear a satisfying crunch. Sometimes he allows himself to give in to hedonistic instincts, and rarely does he regret it.
“You came here willingly. Remember that,” he growls as Matt’s mouth fills with blood.
Matt sputters and yells incoherently while Katie quietly whimpers beside him. Jeremy smiles in return as he heads upstairs, using a tissue to wipe away Matt’s blood from his mouth and giving himself a quick once-over in the hallway mirror. He pushes a stray blond hair back into place and walks out the door.
His day job is data entry and billing for a warehousing and logistics company. It is exactly as dull and mindless as it sounds, and he loathes that he has to spend the bulk of his week regurgitating numbers into a computer program. Today he walks into the lobby of Lovett Logistics after leaving the thick atmosphere outside. Summertime in Louisiana makes walking across a parking lot feel like trudging through warm butter. Heavy, humid, and oppressive. Inside, he feels his body struggle to acclimate to the canned cold air that pumps out of every direction. Between the overused air-conditioning, the slack-jawed company men, and the knowledge that he’ll be crammed into this petri dish for the next few hours, it is an absolute waking nightmare for him. He reaches into his bag and realizes that he forgot the ID card that grants him access into the building, thanks to Katie’s distractions last night. With a quiet sigh, he approaches the woman behind the front desk. She is slightly overweight, with arms that remind him of oiled, crispy chicken skin that she routinely shows off with sleeveless dresses and blouses. Her round face is framed with overprocessed blond hair that clearly doesn’t grow from her dark roots. He has never bothered to see what color her eyes are, because the amount of makeup she applies to them makes him sick to his stomach. Today, he spots shades of green, like a fungus has taken up residence in her ocular cavities, breaking through her eyelids to colonize the rest of her plump face. As usual, she is swiping away on her phone, no doubt checking on the masses of heathens who fill her inbox with vaguely assaulting propositions on whatever dating app she hopes will bring her to her soul mate.
“Can I do something for you, Jeremy?” she asks as he approaches.
He winces when she uses his name, as he has made it a point to deny committing hers to memory. He plasters on a friendly smile and leans his elbow on the desk in front of her.
“You can be an angel and override the door lock for me,” he charms, gesturing to his bag, “I forgot my key card, and am just itching to get in there and get to work.”
She laughs loudly, covering her mouth as if it will make her look like a lady. He resists the urge to heave, and instead chuckles along with her. She smiles and presses the override key with an acrylic nail.
“You owe me,” she says with a wink.
“I don’t owe you shit,” he responds to her coldly as he leaves the lobby. She will probably take his comment as a joke. He doesn’t care either way.
CHAPTER 4
WREN SECURES HER FACE SHIELD and silently gazes over the body that lays before her on the cold morgue gurney. The woman looks back at her from behind one saggy eyelid. Even the sliver of her right eye screams of the horrors she endured.
Her waterlogged clothing has already been photographed and removed. Technicians are now scanning them for a fiber, hair, or anything that could be traced back to the beast that did this. Wren palpates for signs of broken bones, taking special note of the petechial hemorrhage still visible on her face even though decomposition has already started to ravage her features. The Louisiana sun is pretty unforgiving to the living, but it is particularly cruel to the dead. Wren estimates that this victim was outside in the elements for maybe a day, as evidenced by the slight bloat and lack of significant putrefaction.