Chapter Seven

Leslie Adams was in her late twenties, a lecturer in theology at a private Bible College. She was as thin as a rake. She prided herself on the fact that she only ate fruit once a day, normally mid-morning with her chamomile tea. She weighed less than one hundred pounds. It must have been easy to overpower her.

Unlike Rebecca Scott’s thick red hair, Leslie’s was dull and mousy. Her arms were outstretched next to her mauled face, as if she allowed herself to be crucified by her murderer. Her legs were also spread wide—no blood, no virgin, again just heavy bruising. Her eyelids were open. Her apartment was a complete mess. The kitchen was strewn with dirty dishes and several dirty carving knives lay around. What did she use the knives for, peeling fruit? Bowls of fruit turned green with rot from the heat. All the utensils were photographed and sent to forensics, but came back only with Adam’s prints on them.

The bathroom and bedroom floors were layered with clothes. Yet, several Bibles with loads of bookmarkers in them were neatly stacked on her bedside table, clearly visible. Perhaps she wanted easy access to favorite verses. No mention of a vibrator found. Holier than thou. Her left eye was partially removed from its socket, torn sinew streaked over the fleshless remains of her cheek. Her right eye stared peacefully at the ceiling. Just the tip of her tongue was missing. Flesh was carved off with a blunt object, yet no object was found at one of the three scenes. The knives came back clean.

Her remains were discovered by a colleague who got worried when she did arrive for work. That was early Monday morning. Leslie was to do a special lecture on the ‘Moral Nature of Man in the Age of Technology’. When she did not lecture, nobody was qualified to stand in for her. Her boss sent a colleague to her house as she did not answer her phone.

Leslie believed that God would protect her against all evil. She never bothered to lock her doors. As she always said, “God was on duty. He is always on duty. He never sleeps you know!” When her body was found she had been dead for no more than two days. She was killed in winter, so her body only just started bloating.

The third victim was a nurse called Rae Haywood. She also lived on a small holding a few kilometers outside of town. Her body was discovered about three weeks after she died and was in a very advanced stage of decomposition. Sauer recalled that the forensic experts had difficulty in establishing the exact time of her death. Her family alerted the authorities only after she failed to show up for a family lunch. By then her remains were virtually a bag of bones held together by maggots crawling through the rotting meat.

By this time, Hobbs and Sauer were handed the case file. They were both at the scene shortly after the body was found. The worse stench of the rotting meat was gone by now, so Sauer could go into the bedroom and see the scene. He did throw up though. Not just because of the still faint rotting smell, but because of the sight of maggots crawling through the woman’s flesh.

“Why was she not discovered earlier?” Hobbs asked her landlord and colleagues. The answers remained vague. She was a loner. She worked in a government hospital where personnel control did not exist, and she worked different shifts. Nobody knew why she was not discovered earlier. It was not as if she was completely disliked. Her colleagues liked her. They thought she was a hard worker, and she liked to take her smoke breaks outside the building. Nobody knew anything about her personal life. Some suspected that she was a lesbian as she was extremely butch. She sauntered like a man and always stood with her legs wide apart. As she did not associate with her colleagues after hours, nobody knew what her sexual preference was.

The truth was that she was a lesbian. She liked going into Hillbrow on Thursday nights and weekends to pick up younger woman. That was when Hillbrow was still Hillbrow. That was before the legions of illegal immigrants from North Africa invaded the once trendy suburb.

She would never take the girls home. She would make them an offer. Once accepted, she would grope their breasts and fanny through their clothing. She would not allow them to do her. She liked doing them, normally in the backseat of the car. She would gobble at the woman’s genitals like a hungry child. She would insert as many fingers as possible into their vaginas. She would firstly thrust the fingers in slowly, waiting for the lubrication to start. Then as she licked and sucked harder at the pussies, she would thrust harder. She liked hearing them moan. She was proud that she could make whores moan and come, something men were mostly unable to do. Afterwards she would light a cigarette for herself and the whore. She would still lightly stroke the genitals while smoking. She could feel the blood pumping through the labia lips. After the cigarette, she would thank the whore, drive home and masturbate herself with one of her vibrators.