Urban Prey Read online

  “That’s the woman you’re supposed to bring in?” Lisa asked. She’d been so quiet while the tape was running that he’d almost forgotten she was there.

  “Yes, she is,” Ron said.

  “When you do, could you put me in the cell with her? She’s gorgeous.”

  “Down, girl,” he chuckled. “I don’t even know what she wants yet.”

  “I could help you find out,” Lisa smiled slyly.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” The tape stopped rewinding. He hit the “play” button again, and then hit fast forward.

  “Why are you doing that?” Lisa asked. She slid forward to sit on the edge of the couch, resting her elbows on her knees.

  “First you listen to the interview,” Ron said. “Then you watch the interviewee.”

  “Okay, but why are you fast-forwarding? You can’t hear anything now.”

  “I don’t need to hear anything. I’m watching her body language now.”

  “Yes, but why fast-forward?”

  He hit the “pause” button. “It helps to spot movements. Humans’ eyes are drawn to movement, just like most predators, but we can miss it if it’s slow enough. Speed things up, and it’s easier to spot.”

  “Predators?” Lisa frowned.

  “What did you have for dinner last night?”

  “No, I get that,” Lisa waved a hand. “It just sounded kind of odd.”

  “Okay. Now just be quiet again and watch the tape with me.”

  “All right. Can I get more coffee first?”

  “Sure, if you’ll get me some too.”

  “Deal.” Lisa took his mug along with hers into the kitchenette. “You know, you’re not what I was expecting,” she said as she poured the coffee.

  “Well, I wasn’t expecting you at all,” he rejoined. “So we’re about even.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” she said as she came back into the living room carrying the filled mugs. She handed his to him carefully. It was full to the brim.

  “What did you mean, then?”

  “You’re a lot more…controlled than I thought you’d be.” She sat down on the couch with care and sipped at her coffee. “Usually that little act I put on earlier gets a guy a lot more bothered. He starts thinking that maybe I’m not into just girls after all.”

  “The thought had occurred to me,” Ron smiled. “But if you’re going to be working with me it’s best if you don’t try to distract me from the job to hand.”

  “I like that,” Lisa smiled.

  “You like what?”

  “What you said: “Working with me”, instead of “working for me”. I think we’ll get along fine.”

  “Good,” Ron nodded. “Now please be quiet again.” He started the tape back up.

  Elizabeth Anne didn’t move a lot during the interview. She didn’t use her hands at all while she was talking. Occasionally she would shift positions in her chair, but that was about it. He got the impression of a very relaxed and confident woman. The tape ended and he hit the rewind again.

  “You come here,” he muttered to himself.

  “What?” Lisa asked, puzzled.

  “She’s what I call a ‘you-come-here’ type,” he said. “She’s used to other people making an effort to get to know her, to get close to her. She’s not bothered if they don’t, either, because there’ll always be someone willing to take their place.”

  “So, she’s a stuck-up bitch?” Lisa suggested.

  “No,” Ron shook his head. “I don’t think so.” The tape stopped. “I’m going to watch again.

  Be quiet. Watch her eyes this time.”

  “All right.”

  Lisa might be a little abrasive, but she stayed quiet when he asked her to. They watched the tape in silence until it came to the end again. He hit ‘rewind’ again.

  “Well, what did you see?” he asked.

  “She’s a gorgeous woman,” Lisa shrugged. “She’s got beautiful eyes and a great smile.”

  “She also looked down for a moment before answering some of the questions.”

  Lisa frowned. “Yeah, well, so what? Lots of people do that.”

  “Yes, they do. Lots of them look up, too. It depends on what you’ve asked them.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “If somebody looks up before they answer a question,” Ron told her, “they’re thinking about it. It’s as if they’re asking themselves what they think about the question before they answer.”

  “You said she looked down a lot. What does that mean?”

  “Down means they’re asking themselves how they feel about the question. That’s what Elizabeth Anne was doing. She looked down and to the right most times as well.”

  “You’re going to tell me what that means?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Ron admitted. “It all depends on whether she’s right-handed or left-handed. I can’t tell from this tape.”

  “Now I’m lost,” Lisa leaned back on the couch, shaking her head. “How does that affect anything?”

  “Say you’re right-handed. If you look up to the right, you’re asking yourself what you think of something familiar. If you look down to the right, you’re asking yourself how you feel about something familiar. If you look to the left, you’re doing the same thing, but it’s about something unfamiliar.”

  “And it’s the opposite way with left-handed people?” Lisa asked.

  “You catch on pretty quick,” Ron smiled. “That’s how it works.”

  “Where did you learn all this?”

  Ron shrugged. “You pick up things here and there.”

  “Geez,” Lisa muttered. “Now I feel a little creepy, wondering about how you’ve got me pegged.”

  Ron laughed. “Good!” He ejected the tape from the VCR and put in the one marked ‘2’. “Now please be quiet again. Feel free to stew in your own juices as long as you do it silently.”

  The second tape had been made the day after the first one. Maybe they’d given Elizabeth Anne a little time to prepare herself for it. This ought to have her sexual fantasies, as told by herself. The first five minutes of the tape were taken up by the usual pleasantries of ‘good morning’, ‘how are you’ and the like as the psychiatrist eased her into the more difficult parts. Once again, Elizabeth Anne came across as poised and confident, but she was more guarded than she had been on the other tape. She was wearing a different business suit. He wondered about that. Did she think the interview was some sort of business deal, or did she dress that way most of the time? Maybe she just liked to dress that way. Mentally, he shrugged. Right now the answer to that question was unimportant. On the tape, the psych had just asked Elizabeth Anne about the earliest fantasy she could remember.

  “Oh my,” she looked down and to her left briefly before answering. “I got into that sort of thing late, you know. I think I’d just graduated from high school, and one of my aunts gave me a couple of romance novels as a present.” She laughed once. “She was always reading those things. I guess she thought I might like them too. I would read anything in those days. That night, I started reading one of them in bed.” She paused. “I know I read both of them, but today the only one I remember was the one with the young noblewoman captured by a pirate. Once he’d taken her aboard his ship, I remember thinking that it might get really interesting. Then for the next twenty or thirty chapters, there was a lot of talking, some sword fights, and not much else.” She sighed. “I kept on reading it, though. The only time I’d ever seen the ocean was during a class trip to Galveston once, so sailing the seas sounded kind of romantic to me. And I kept hoping that the pirate would do something besides moon over his beautiful captive whenever he wasn’t taking a merchant ship or running away from a warship. Instead, he let her go and made sure she returned to her home safely. He didn’t even try to ransom her! I remember thinking that he wasn’t very good at being a pirate.”

  “What would you rather have read?” the psych asked.

  “Well, she was beautiful, and h
e was supposed to be a daring buccaneer. I was hoping that he’d try to seduce her at least. Instead, all he did was kiss her once. She slapped him for that, and afterwards he let her live in his cabin while he slept someplace else. I think the author intended that to show that he’d fallen in love with her, but it seemed kind of wimpy to me. She kept expecting him to try something, and she always seemed a little disappointed when he didn’t.”

  “How did the story end?”

  “Oh,” Elizabeth Anne waved a hand…her left hand, Ron noticed, “In the end, she finds out that the navy set a trap for him, so she steals a little sailing boat to go and find him and warn him. Then a storm comes up and her boat is damaged and she’s left adrift out in the middle of nowhere. She even had sharks circling her boat. I’ve seen buzzards do that, but I don’t think that sharks do. Anyway, the same storm let the pirate escape from the trap, and his ship just happens to come across her while she’s about to die of thirst. He saves her, they kiss again, he swears to give up piracy for her, and they sail off into the sunset. All the story needed at that point was to finish with: ‘and they all lived happily ever after’.”

  “So you were disappointed?”

  “Very,” Elizabeth Anne nodded vigorously. “But at the same time, I was intrigued. I read the second book, thinking that it might be better. It wasn’t. It was practically unreadable, and I gave up about a third of the way through.”

  “What did you do then?”

  Elizabeth Anne smiled. “I started thinking what the pirate should have done differently, but there were so many of those things that after a while I gave up on him and started writing little stories of my own. I kept them hidden from everybody.”

  “What were your stories like?”

  “I never finished any of them. I’d always get to a point, and then shy away from going any further.”

  “Why do you think you did that?”

  A shrug and a rueful glance down and to the left, Ron noted.

  “I didn’t really know that much. I grew up on a ranch, so I knew all about sex, at least as far as horses and cattle…and the cats…but aside from some kissing and a little petting I didn’t have any real personal experience. I really started to feel as if I’d been missing something then.”

  “What did you do about that?”

  Ron leaned forward to hear her answer.

  “Nothing. I was going to be going away to college soon, and the last thing I wanted was to start something in my little hometown that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish. So I went out riding a lot, just to get some privacy and think. There was a lot of open space for that. I’d imagine some rugged outlaw, or a fierce warrior captured me. He’d tie my hands behind me and maybe put a rope around my neck and lead me back to his camp behind his horse. Just thinking about that always got me very excited. There was just the two of us, usually. Once he got me to his camp, he’d strip me naked. I fantasized a lot at first about being staked out on the ground, stark naked, unable to move or fight him off.” She shivered and stopped talking.

  “Sometimes you imagined more than one man?”

  “Yes, but while my captor might show me naked in front of those other men, he always kept me for himself. He was always strong enough to do that. He might threaten to give me to his men if I didn’t please him, but in my fantasy I just knew he would never really do that. But it was exciting to pretend that he might.”

  “Did you masturbate while you were fantasizing?”

  “Always,” Elizabeth Anne was emphatic. “Like I said, there was a lot of open space to get lost in for a while. Sometimes I worried that I might get noisy and then someone would hear me.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I always carried a bandana with me. I’d gag myself with it.”

  “And you did this until you went away to college?”

  “Just about every other day. Some days I had too many chores to do to get away.”

  “And when you got to college: What then?”

  Chapter Six

  Tape number two went on for another thirty-seven minutes, but Elizabeth Anne became less and less open as the interview continued. It seemed to Ron that she was more shy than embarrassed. In spite of the best efforts of the psych, she would not go into much detail about her time at college. She did say that she’d had a couple of boyfriends and had lost her virginity to one of them, but she wouldn’t say much more than that. When the psych asked her if she’d ever had one of her boyfriends tie her up, she really did blush. Apparently she’d asked the first one to do it, and it had gone disastrously.

  On the other hand, Ron picked up a lot of other information that could be useful. She had tried oral sex just once, and the guy had gotten too excited and tried to shove himself down her throat. When he ignored her pleas to stop, she bit him just hard enough to finally convince him he’d gone too far. That had effectively ended the relationship, and it was the last sexual one she’d had at college.

  “Why was that your last relationship?” the psych asked.

  “Two reasons,” Elizabeth Anne answered. “First, I realized I was at college to get an education, not screw my brains out.” She sighed.

  “And the second?” the psych prompted.

  She sighed again. “I’d thought my home town was full of gossip. You have no idea how fast a story, true or not, can get around a college campus. Guys, young guys, can gossip worse than some of the girls I knew when it comes to sex. It got so bad that I considered transferring to some other school.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I toughed it out. A lot of the talkers wound up dropping out or transferring themselves. After a while, the ones that were left found other things to talk about. It was still kind of lonely for a while.”

  “It didn’t stay lonely?”

  “No. I made some friends. I went on group dates or double dates. It was fun, a bunch of us sitting around a table at the pizza parlor, talking about life and politics and how tough some of the professors were.” She sounded wistful when she said that.

  “No more sex?”

  “I thought about it, but no. I was taking some very demanding courses then, and I didn’t have the time.”

  “What about after you graduated?”

  Ron watched and listened. Elizabeth Anne hadn’t lived like a nun, but she’d certainly gotten much less action than he would have thought. She certainly didn’t get to act out any of her captivity fantasies. Near the end of the tape, the psych finally asked a key question. As far as he knew, they always asked that question at the end of the interview.

  “Why are you contemplating doing this now?”

  Elizabeth Anne sighed heavily. “I went to college, made a good career, earned more money than I’ll need to live comfortably for the rest of my life. I’m only thirty-nine, and I could retire today. And then what?” She shook her head. “I feel like I’ve missed something. I feel like I’ve been too safe and too…insulated…for too long. I want some risk. I want some thrills. I want an adventure before I’m too old to enjoy it. Does that make any sense to you?”

  Ron didn’t wait for the psych’s answer. He hit the stop button and then ‘rewind’. The VCR made a threatening whirring noise. They probably ought to replace it soon. It might also be a good idea to switch to DVDs, but that wasn’t his department.

  “Are you going to watch it again?” Lisa asked. “If you are, I’ll get myself some more coffee now.”

  “No,” Ron shook his head. “I think once will be enough.”

  “You have her all figured out, then?”

  “Well, I have a place to start,” he replied. “And I was right. She wants an adventure, just like she said. Somebody made a mistake when they thought she just wanted the standard treatment.”

  “What?”

  “She’s looking for something special,” Ron said. “Somebody didn’t pick up on that.”

  “Maybe they did, finally,” Lisa suggested.

  “What do you mean?”

&n
bsp; “They sent for you, didn’t they?”

  He laughed. “You may be right,” he said. “But I still have to figure out how to get to her.”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Lisa smiled. “I read your file. Hell, I think every female at the office did once they got word you were coming.”

  “I thought you were into girls.”

  “I was curious.” Lisa shrugged. “So what?”

  “Nothing,” Ron said. “I didn’t realize I was a celebrity.”

  Lisa giggled. He hadn’t expected her to be the giggling type.

  “So, you think you can bring her in?”

  “Maybe,” he replied. “I have to do some thinking, though. Do you know of a good gym around here? I’ve kinda let myself go the past month, and I could use some tuning up. Besides, nothing helps me think more than working up a good sweat.”

  “Sure,” Lisa nodded. “There’s one only five or six blocks away: Mommsen’s Fitness Center. I can take you there.”

  “Do I need a membership to get in?”

  “Nah,” Lisa said. “They’ll charge by the hour. As long as you’ve got proper I.D. you can get in.” She stood up and stretched her arms over her head. “Want me to drive you now?”

  “No,” Ron smiled up at her. “But I do want you to take me there. I’m going to make myself some breakfast first. You hungry?”

  ***

  “This is a pain,” Lisa mumbled as she walked alongside him. It was bitterly cold out, and she kept using him as a windbreak whenever a gust hit them.