When Alex Unroth was sixteen and a freshman at Pine View School for the Gifted just outside Sarasota, Florida, she was a slender attractive girl, short with beautiful dark eyes and silken black hair. The girls didn’t like her because she looked like an athlete—all lean muscle—though she never went out for sports. And the boys didn’t care for her because her breasts were too small and she was smarter than just about everyone in school.
Her stepfather, Leonard Unroth, was a drunk, and her mother laid around most days, reading movie magazines, eating candy and other sweets, and bitching about everything.
She remembered one night in particular, the start of her real education, when her stepfather came into her bedroom around two in the morning, pulled down the covers, pulled down her pajama bottoms, and began fondling her. She was a virgin, though she had begun masturbating and reading books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover two years earlier, so she understood all about sex. Especially its uses for control.
She touched his hand. “If Mom wakes up, she’ll hear us,” she whispered.
Leonard stopped for just an instant. “Fuck her,” he said, his breath from booze, cigarettes, and bad teeth nearly unendurable.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday. You’ll take the fishing boat out, and I’ll come with you. I’ll tell Mom I’m going shopping with my friends.”
In the dim light filtering in from outside, she could see the confusion on his face. And suspicion.
“Some of the boys in school want to fuck me. But I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t want to make a fool of myself. You’ll teach me. But you’ll use a rubber.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
“Go ahead. And when you’re done, I’ll call the cops and you’ll end up doing jail time. It’ll have been the most expensive piece of ass you’ve ever had.”
He was stopped, directly over her.
“Either that, or we have a deal. Wait until tomorrow, and we’ll anchor someplace and you’ll teach me. It’ll be a deal we can both walk away from happy.”
Leonard backed off. “You’re a fucking whore,” he said.
“Not yet,” she’d replied.
* * *
The day was blazing hot and humid. Leonard found a relatively isolated spot to tuck in just north of the Holiday Inn near the airport. The boat was a battered old twenty-four-foot Chris Craft cabin cruiser, and belowdecks, with the hatch closed, the interior was like an oven.
Alex took off her clothes and lay down on the settee, spreading her legs for him.
It was only ten in the morning, but he was drunk on beer already. He pulled off his shorts and underwear, and spread her legs farther, pawing her with his calloused fingers.
She pulled a razor-sharp skinning knife from where she’d hidden it in the crack of the cushions and buried it to the hilt in his chest, directly into his heart. He gasped once and fell back on the cabin sole, dead almost immediately.
She checked the ports, but no one was around. For the next fifteen minutes she mutilated his body. Starting by cutting off his penis, she worked her way up to his neck, which she sliced from ear to ear, and then his face, which she skinned—cutting off his nose, his lips, his eyebrows, and his ears, leaving them lying in the incredible mess where she’d dropped them.
She drew water from the sink and washed her body, checking the long mirror on the back of the door into the tiny head to make sure she hadn’t cut herself. At that time she didn’t know all the details of forensic police work, but she didn’t want to leave any of her own blood behind in case she could be identified.
She’d brought a bikini, which she put on, and stuffed her clothes into a watertight plastic bag. Before she went out on deck and jumped overboard to swim ashore, she checked the portholes on both sides of the boat again to make sure no one was nearby to see her leave.
Onshore, she made her way across the rear property of the Holiday Inn, where behind a Dumpster she changed into a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. Then, stuffing the plastic bag into her purse, she walked around the long end of the hotel’s parking lot, unnoticed, and out onto Tamiami Trail and to the first bus stop.
Her mother didn’t report her husband missing until the next morning, and it wasn’t until late that afternoon that his body was found. His time of death couldn’t be fixed to anything closer than a six-hour window, and when Alex’s mother had been questioned, she had no alibi. It was Alex who produced the time-and-date–stamped receipts from a couple of department stores that fell within the six hours, and she told police she had come home immediately after shopping, and then she and her mother had watched television together.
The brutal murder of Leonard Unroth was never solved and eventually went into the cold-case files. But for a time the people of Sarasota had been traumatized that a seriously disturbed nut-case killer was running around loose among them.
* * *
Alex graduated at the top of her high school class and then did three years at Northwestern, earning her degree with honors in foreign affairs with a double minor in Russian and Chinese. She had only a handful of boyfriends, but in Sarasota she sometimes worked the North Trail as a prostitute, and the kinkier the sex, the better she liked it.
At college, during the short breaks between the spring semester and summer semester, and then until the fall semester started, she went out to Las Vegas, where she worked first as an ordinary prostitute. Then one night a high roller picked her up—because he liked young stuff—and her second real education began.
She got a taste for the seriously bizarre, including role-playing, S&M, and a few other tricks, including orgasm at the moment of suffocation. Timing was everything in that game. At exactly the right instant during sex, her on top and her John on the verge, she would place a plastic bag over his head. At the instant he was about to pass out, he would come.
A certain type of man and a few women she had sex with liked it that way, and were willing to pay top dollar. Until the one night it went too far. Her John, paying her one thousand dollars, begged her to put the bag over his head, but he was too early. He had a heart problem, and he died while she was astraddle him.
She was honest with the hotel security people, who she’d always tipped very well, and they let her go.
“You just can’t come back here, sweetheart,” the chief of security told her with regret. He liked the money, but he also liked his sex with her straight.
Two weeks later she was in Washington, applying for a job with the CIA. And two weeks after that, her initial background check completed, she was called to an office in a federal building on the Beltway for her second interview with a case officer who wasn’t much older than she was and who sported an actual military-style crew cut. He said his name was Dominick.
“Northwestern’s a good school, and you picked the right studies,” Dominick told her. He looked up from her file. “What do you want to do for the CIA?”
She had smiled. The office was plain, only a table and two chairs, with a lousy view of the parking lot four stories down. The walls were bare, the floor a bland off-white tile, and there was nothing else.
“Truth, justice, and the American way—isn’t that what I’m supposed to say?”
Dominick showed no reaction.
“Seriously, I want to be a field officer. An NOC.”
“Why’s that?”
“I want to kill bad guys. I think this country has some serious shit coming its way. I want to be one of the guys on the front line, but I definitely don’t want to join the Marines.”
“Says you were questioned in the murder of your father when you were sixteen. Did you kill him?”
“Stepfather,” she said automatically. “No, but I should have. The son of a bitch tried to rape me. Someone else just beat me to it.”
“You don’t think you’d have any trouble killing a human being?”
“It would depend on who it was.”
Dominick gave her a long, appraising look. “You’re staying at the Hay-Adams. Expensive hotel.”
“I have a little money set aside,” she’d said.
“An inheritance?”
“No, I earned it the old-fashioned way.”
Dominick closed her file and got up. “We’ll get back to you, Ms. Unroth.”
“Don’t take too long. I was thinking about going to work for Microsoft.”
“You know computers?”
“I get by. But they’re going global, and they need someone who understands Russian and Chinese.”
Dominick showed her out, and she took a cab back to the Hay-Adams, where, before she went inside for an early lunch, she stopped a moment to look across Lafayette Park toward the back of the White House. Troubling times were coming for the country, and she wanted to be part of it. Soon.
Two weeks seemed to be the magic number for the CIA, because it wasn’t until then that they called her again, and in the same office she spent the better part of the day with a couple of clerks, filling out forms and questionnaires about her work preferences, her previously unreported skills, her work history, her next of kin—which was no one. Her mother had drunk herself to death last year.
The next day she was driven in a panel van with three men about her age to Camp Peary where her third real education began.
* * *
Marty Bambridge came in, and Alex looked up and smiled. The nameplate on her desk said: DOROTHY GIVENS.
“Good morning, sir. Go right in. The director is expecting you.”
“How was your vacation?”
“More like a long weekend,” Alex answered. “But it was good to get away from all the hullabaloo around here.”
“Amen.”