Los Angeles, California
Tuesday, June 26th, 2018
What Pixie had seen on TV wouldn’t leave her mind, so she scoured the Internet looking for more information.
Online papers and video snippets from TV channels only offered a handful of details, the police likely keeping the rest away from the public while the investigation was still ongoing.
But she did find a strange conspiracy blog of sorts, with several photos of police perimeters. Whether or not the caption was true was up for debate, but the cop cars in the shots displayed the Boston PD logo she was familiar with.
Pixie scrolled down some more until she saw a photo of a gurney with a black body bag. She glanced at the wall of text that followed, making her head spin. Swallowing suddenly became a chore. The anonymous blogger hadn’t bothered to include paragraph breaks, making the never ending stream of words uninviting, to say the least.
She hit CTRL + F on her keyboard, and a little search field appeared. After entering the word “blonde,” she was rewarded with a handful of highlighted words within the never-ending paragraph. Her eyes jumped to a couple of lines prior to the first instance of the word, and she began reading:
“The victim is blonde, in her early twenties. Lori Davis, according to the neighbors. The news later confirmed her name. Most of the neighbors were crying around me as we watched her body being taken out of the house, saying things like ‘such a lovely girl!’ ‘She lived with God in her heart. Who would do such thing?’ and ‘While her parents were away!’”
Pixie hit the arrow to find the next instance.
“A second blonde woman was found yesterday. My source at the police department hinted at something religious about the crimes and a weird way to pose the bodies.”
That last bit piqued her interest, so she kept reading, hoping to learn more, but the blogger had gone off on a tangent about some other murders he’d heard about while growing up.
She hit the arrow again to find the next “blonde” instance.
“In both cases, the blonde hair was tied in a braid, and the victims wore clothes that weren’t theirs, but I couldn’t get my source to spill the beans here. And both scenes featured a religious theme, but once again I wasn’t able to obtain more precise information.”
Fuck! she thought.
It could be him. Was she certain? No. But it added up.
She clicked to see where the other two instances of the word “blonde” appeared and read inane details about the blogger’s first girlfriend and how he still missed how her hair looked while the sun shone on it.
“Pixie, sweetie! I’m back!” John said from the front door.
“I’m in the bedroom!” Pixie yelled back, glancing at the rest of the article and deciding she’d wasted enough time on this.
She closed her laptop.
Why did she care so much? Even if it was him, she was safe now. John and she were far, far away from his deranged mind. Their plan had gone off without a hitch.
John grinned at her as she moved her laptop over to the nightstand and tossed her legs over to the side of the bed.
His arms wrapped around her and their lips met.
“You had a good day?” he asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“Boring work, but it’s over now. I’m ready to celebrate! What did you want to do?”
She looked up to him, her heart swimming in gratitude for having met the perfect man for her. Not only had he tamed the crazy out of her—looking back, she was embarrassed at the things she’d done, the people she’d done—but he’d forgiven her and showed her what it was like to really love someone.
And oh! did she love the man he was.
Not every boyfriend would have uprooted their entire life and cut all ties—not to mention broken a few laws—to up and move to California without notice.
“A full year of Californian freedom… I’d love to go to the Santa Monica Pier and get on that Ferris wheel. What do you say?”
“Or we could head down memory lane. You could make more of those X-rated photos like you used to when we first met. Remember?”
She punched him lightly on the shoulder, a big grin on her face. “Hey! They worked, didn’t they?”
“I still remember those dial-up days… Watching the images fill my screen line by line… Those photos you shared…” His hands went to her breasts, groping her through her shirt. “You had—and still have—the tits of an angel.”
“I thought you preferred my other shots? From behind, with my mini-skirt riding up, exposing myself.”
“I loved every single one of your photos… You must have driven someone mad with desire where you had your photos developed.”
“I did,” she said, undoing her shirt. “Alan Black, his name was. I still remember him like it was yesterday. He got to see a lot of failed shots, though. Oh, the money I spent on film back in those days.”
“Developing them couldn’t have been cheap.”
She peeled off her sleeves and tossed her shirt aside, propping her chest forward as she moved her arms behind her back to unclasp her bra. “That’s where you’re wrong. After the first roll, Alan and I came to an agreement. He got to keep some of the shots for himself and developed my films for free.”
“Is it all he did?”
“Well,” she started as she lasciviously stripped the bra off of her, watching the hungry grin grow on his face. “You know how horny I was back in those days. How about I show you what Alan and I did in his darkroom before you managed to tame my wild ways?”