Prologue
Damn, was he good—or what?
Troy Avery stood in front of the penthouse window, gazing at the skyline glittering in the darkness. A bleached white skull of a moon sulked above the Golden Gate Bridge, hidden on and off by wind-whipped clouds.
He was still breathing heavily, panting with exertion and the bone-deep satisfaction of another job well planned.
Executed to perfection.
Troy was good because he was so smart. Brilliant, actually. More intelligent than any of the other scholarship students who had attended Stanford with him. Troy had been clever enough to drop out and devote himself to an invention guaranteed to change the world.
“I’m much more intelligent than you are,” he said over his shoulder to the dead woman sprawled, legs splayed wide, on the marble floor behind him.
A feminazi if there ever was one.
“Final call,” he had told Francine Yellen as he’d strangled her with the telephone cord.
Hearing the well-known phrase, Francine had stared at him for one—long—frozen second. Then her eyeballs had popped out of her head in sheer terror. For once the renowned psychiatrist, who so glibly gave advice on television, was at a complete loss for words.
She’d been a fighter.
He’d grant her that much. She bucked and kicked and thrashed for a full minute at least. Then she’d gone limp, the air in her lungs exhausted. The capillaries in her eyes had burst from lack of oxygen until the white surrounding those famous eyes became vampire red.
The San Francisco Herald had dubbed Troy the Final Call Killer because he strangled his victims with a telephone cord. He preferred his own term.
Lady Killer.
It fit better because these women thought they were ladies. He knew the truth. They were feminazis who deserved to die.
“Lady Killer. Lady Killer.”
He whispered the words under his breath until they thundered through his head, becoming louder and louder and louder. A second later, he realized he was shouting the term repeatedly like a mantra.
Lady Killer Lady Killer Lady Killer Lady Killer Lady Killer Lady Kiler …