Imminent Risk Of Death

By Latif Benik

In the greater San Francisco Bay area, two serial killers, a male that strangles his victims; and a female that poisons hers, have caused fear and havoc among the general populace and frustrated the police investigating the two cases.

When a man and a woman are discovered murdered in a Burlingame motel room, the local Medical Examiner finds the man has been poisoned and the woman strangled.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Latif Benik
• Release date: Aug 24, 2010
• ISBN: 9780984233717

Latif Benik

I was born in Canton, Ohio. Adopted as an infant and raised mostly in Columbus, Ohio.I have traveled extensively throughout Europe, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean.Besides Ohio, I have lived in California, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and currently live in Florida.I am widowed and divorced, and now live with my best friend, Phoebe, a resecued Terrier mixed breed.I have a son, daughter-in-law and two granddaughters living in Utah.My hobbies include, landscaping, interior design, fishing and golf. Life long interests are hot rods, reading, travel and meeting interesting people.

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Imminent Risk Of Death

Copyright 2010 by Latif Benik

ISBN # 978-0-9842337-0-0

The characters and events in this novel are fictional; Names, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recorded or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the Author, except where permitted by law.

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Chapter 1

Death by Strangulation

His satisfaction complete, he looked down at the naked, plain featured young girl. He saw she wasn’t moving at all. Her brown eyes were just blank, staring at nothing. He shook her, and then gave her a little slap and got no response. He shook her violently and slapped her again, much harder. He put his ear close to her mouth and nose…he heard no breathing. He felt for her pulse and not finding one, his mind began to race.

What the hell, did I kill her? Shit, this wasn’t supposed to happen. Will this be manslaughter? Murder? One thing for sure, this one won’t be coming back for more. If only she would have just stopped screaming. Hell, the spanking thing and pinning her down were her idea.

He had gotten into it quick enough, though. Being rough always heightened his arousal and his pleasure. Putting his hand over her mouth to muffle her screaming had gotten him bit. The whole thing had gotten out of control and way too rough for her and she had tried to fight him off.

How have I misjudged things so badly?

Until the end the encounter had gone well. During sex he had slapped the girl hard and fear had replaced the desire in her eyes which had excited him all the more. He’d slapped her several more times and enjoyed the feeling of power and superiority. Still she had continued to scream and his hands had gone to her throat. He’d squeezed hard and the screams stopped but his lust had intensified and there was no way to stop, or reason for him to want to. She’d struggled, scratched and tore at him, all to no avail.

The moment her eyes had shown him she accepted his dominance his back arched and his head was thrown back in predatory pleasure, like a lone wolf howling his mastery over life to the universe.

Once he realized what he had done, his feeling of panic was almost overwhelming.

What should I do now? Get out? Run? No, first make sure no one will know it was me. Did anyone see us together? What about fingerprints and hair? She scratched my face. Jesus, I’m going to jail. Calm down, just calm down. Okay, now think everything through very carefully.

He looked around the apartment and realized for the first time that it was sparsely decorated. There was enough furniture, but the things that made a home warm and comfortable were missing. It was not surprising that all of the walls were painted the same off-white color. Apartments were usually painted a non-offensive blah color that was actually offensive anyway. There were no pictures hanging on the walls. No photographs or other personal items other than a few women’s magazines on the coffee table. The apartment was plain, a lot like the girl. It reminded him of the corporate housing he had stayed in when he went back east on a software writing project several years earlier. The big difference with this apartment was that it had hardwood floors and linoleum.

He smiled.

Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

He checked under the kitchen sink for cleaning supplies. There was a full bottle of spray cleaner with a label that claimed its ability to sterilize while cleaning. There were half a dozen rolls of paper towels and a carton of plastic trash bags. He found a vacuum cleaner with replacement bags in the hall closet.

When the two of them had gotten to the apartment it was still early afternoon and he hadn’t noticed any other tenants on the way in. In fact he had commented on how many parking spaces there were available and she had said most of the other tenants didn’t usually start getting home until later in the day.

Two hours later after completing a thorough cleaning and convinced he had removed any evidence of his having been there, Kevin Albright casually left carrying a stuffed plastic bag over his shoulder and feeling confident that he was safe.

Three days later Cheryl Davi, a 27 year old dental technician had been discovered murdered in her one-bedroom apartment in The Tanglewood Apartment Complex near San Francisco State University. When the rarely having ever missed a day of work employee didn’t show up or call in and didn’t answer phone calls placed to her home, she had been reported to police as missing by her employer.

Detective Harry Evans of the S.F.P.D. Homicide Squad was called in as the detective on call by the Coroner’s office. It hadn’t taken much detective work for Harry to see that the young girl had been strangled as there was severe bruising around her neck and the blood vessels in her eyes had ruptured. The fact that she was lying sprawled on her bed naked might mean there had been sexual activity.

Have you got a time of death for me? Harry asked the young medical examiner.

I would estimate she has been dead for between three and four days, which would mean the crime was committed last Friday or Saturday.

Which is it Friday or Saturday? Harry asked.

That’s the best I can do here. You’ll have to wait for the autopsy report for the exact time of death.

Ah huh. When will that be? Harry asked.

Answering with some apprehension due to the look and tone from Harry, the young doctor said, Look detective, we’re really jammed up with work at the morgue. If I had to guess, I’d say day after tomorrow.

No one could blame the young man for his concern about how he answered Harry. Even at 60, Harry was not a guy you wanted to mess with. He kept his graying hair cut military short and his steely grey eyes had a piercing frightening glare. At 5 feet 10 inches and 230 pounds, only 5 pounds heavier than in high school where he had been agile, quick and nasty enough to make All-State as a linebacker, Harry was an intimidating presence.

Trying not to antagonize the Doctor, Harry said, Well, do the best you can, if it’s any sooner, that’ll help me out.

There was no sign of forced entry. Nothing was out of place or broken. The clothes the victim had been wearing were strewn around the bed in a manner that might suggest having been removed and thrown aside during a session of passionate love making.

What about rape? Harry asked.

There may have been sex, but I’m not finding any indications of rape.

It was what was missing that was beginning to bother Harry. There wasn’t a shred of evidence suggesting anyone else had been in the apartment, except of course the lack of evidence where there should have been some. There were no fingerprints anywhere in the apartment, not even the victim’s. No body hair in the bedding either. The forensic investigators had checked thoroughly. Everything in the apartment had been vacuumed and wiped clean.

Leaving the scene, Harry was frustrated and pissed.

Damn, this is going to be a ball buster of a case.

True to the Medical Examiner’s prediction, it was two days later when Harry got a copy of the autopsy report and it more or less confirmed what he already knew or suspected. Cheryl Davi had in fact died on Friday, probably late in the afternoon. There had been sex shortly before or at the time of death. Whether with the perpetrator or not wasn’t determinable. Whoever did have sex with her had worn a prophylactic. Her body had been scrubbed clean with rubbing alcohol and her finger and toe nails had been clipped back severely.

Well that’s just fucking perfect, not a goddamn thing to go on.

Over the next few days Harry interviewed her co-workers, friends and neighbors determining that she was well thought of, liked by most and somewhat of a private person. No one knew if she was currently dating anyone in particular or even if she had ever had a regular or steady boyfriend. She did her grocery shopping at the nearby market as Harry had surmised from the labels on the milk carton and the cottage cheese container in her refrigerator. Her car had been serviced at the gas station just two blocks from her apartment, but the attendants there didn’t seem to remember her.

Notifying Cheryl’s parents at their home in Sacramento was about as unpleasant an experience for Harry as it was unproductive in generating any new avenues to pursue. Harry had driven over to Sacramento instead of phoning Cheryl’s parents to give them the bad news. He had a good and gentle heart in spite of his reputation as being crusty, mean and tough as nails. All in all, Harry had hit a dead end on the murder and the case just sat on his desk at the bottom of a stack of cases.

Eight months passed and Harry was just packing it in for the day when his phone rang.

"This is Doctor Browning at the Coroner’s office. We met about eight months ago at the Cheryl Davi murder scene.

Yeah, I remember. Harry said.

Look Detective, there’s been another strangulation. The circumstances are very much like the Davi case. Are you available to come over here?

You’re goddamn right I’m available. Where is it? An unsolved case was a lot like a toothache to Harry. He went on doing his job and living his life, but the pain and awareness of it was always there.

Chapter 2

Back At It

When Kevin Albright strangled his first victim, Cheryl Davi, it may have been unintentional and extremely unnerving, but once he regained his self control after his initial panic, Kevin had been methodical in his attempt to remove all evidence of having ever been in her apartment. Several weeks of minor anxiety and fear of being caught had passed before he felt fully comfortable enough to breathe easy. His concern over being caught transformed over time into an appreciation of the experience. He replayed it over and over again in his mind. That replaying had been heady and sufficient enough satisfaction that he hadn’t felt the urge or need to go out and look for another girl.

Not much more than a month after what he had come to call the incident, Kevin accepted a contract to write an upgraded version to the software program he had originally created and sold. Kevin was kept pretty busy for the next few months keeping his mind and imagination focused on work and not on the conquest of women.

Close to the end of the project, when he wasn’t immersed as deep in code, he wondered about what had happened in the girl’s past that had made her want him to spank her and it wasn’t just a light spanking she wanted. She had demanded that he do it harder, and harder, hard enough that after awhile his hand started to hurt. Pinning down her hands above her head had really gotten her excited. It wasn’t until he initiated some nasty pinching and squeezing of her breast that she started screaming. Choking her was the only way to stop the screaming. He hadn’t planned or intended to kill her. Accidental as the killing had been, the thrill of it was magnificent. The thought also occurred to him that maybe he really had intended to kill her. Not that it mattered. In the heat of the moment he was only aware of the new height of lust and anticipated pleasure that squeezing her neck was producing and not that he was going to get in trouble for being too rough with her. Of course it was too late now to find out what was in the girl’s past that motivated her demand to be spanked and treated roughly during sex.

Kevin, if nothing else, was extremely logical in his thought processes. It never occurred to him that he was anything but normal. He seldom, if ever, thought about the events in his own life that got him to where he was. After the up-grade project was complete he spent a great deal of time going over in his mind all of the minutest details of that day’s events. It was in no way an introspective attempt at trying to understand what had happened and why. He felt no concern or guilt whatsoever over killing the girl. His only concern was that he had put himself at considerable risk in doing so. He had thought, what the hell, it’s not like I just woke up one day with a compulsion to kill women.

The mind and its processes were fascinating to Kevin. Like when he thought of some event in his childhood that triggered some action or event in the present. He believed from his point of view, his childhood had been okay and fairly normal. He’d done some weird shit but so did a lot of the other kids. Both of his parents worked, leaving him to his own devices most of the time. He remembered summer vacation being the loneliest time and when he seemed to get in the most trouble.

During one summer when he was seven or eight he had found a rusty old magnifying glass behind Mr. Kelly’s garage, and used it to burn bugs, but his friends liked doing it too and they all took turns burning bugs over that whole summer.

Another time he had played doctor with the girl next door up in her attic using a Popsicle stick to explore their differences. The girl’s mother caught them and told his mom and she, in turn, told Kevin to wait in his room until his father got home. Five hours of pure anxiety and fear, fear of what was going to happen to him when his father came home. Not that he had any idea of what was going to happen just that it would be awful. When his father did come home and his mother told him what had happened, his father at first told his mom Boys will be boys but his mother screamed obscenities at his father who then gave Kevin a nasty beating.

Some older kids had let him tag along when they had broken into what was known as the haunted house over on Harrison Street. One of the older kids got caught and turned in everyone else that had been there. The juvenile judge was a crotchety mean old man and severely reprimanded all of the kids singling out Kevin, even though he was the youngest, and was particularly roughest on him. Even Kevin’s father was pissed about that and said the judge must be senile. It was the only time Kevin could remember his father sticking up for him or having any involvement in his life at all.

Before reaching his teens he had gotten mixed up with some guys that sold themselves to queers. He tried that for awhile. One particularly strange guy paid boys to sit naked on his glass coffee table and crap while he lay underneath watching. That was just too weird for Kevin and was the last thing he was part of in that very strange world.

Masturbating every day, sometimes three and four times, and liking it seemed fine to Kevin. He had stolen some pornography from the Johns, as the other boys called them, and some Playboy magazines. But for Kevin daydreaming and his imagination did a better job of getting him excited than the pictures.

There was the older couple that he regularly visited for the better part of a year. The husband liked watching his wife have sex with young boys and paid Kevin fifty dollars each time he did it. Kevin liked having the sex and fifty dollars was a lot of money to a thirteen year old. He’d guessed the man had gotten bored with him when he wasn’t invited back after a year or so.

His parents seldom asked him where he had been and when they did ask, he lied. They accepted what he told them every time. Cutting school to participate in various sexual adventures had necessitated lying to the school, forging his parent’s signatures on report cards and faking sick notes had become the norm.

When he was fifteen he went to a big New Year’s Eve party at one of the hotels downtown. Most of the people there were in their late twenties, rowdy and drunk. Some of the worst guys there threw a television out the eighteenth floor window. Everybody started splitting and the guys Kevin came with disappeared before he could find them.

A girl that Kevin couldn’t help but notice at the party, who was pretty and all dressed up, but more than anything had the biggest tits he had ever seen, asked him if he needed a ride. Even if he hadn’t needed a ride he would have gone with her. She took him to her house and they started kissing. When she reached into his pants and grabbed his erection, he came instantly.

After that they had a beer and a couple of cigarettes. They talked about how crazy the drunks at the party had been and how much she liked him. She took off her dress and started kissing and fondling him. He got hard again and she had him straddle her and rubbed him over and between her enormous breasts and he came again.

After sleeping for awhile he woke up and thought he had better get home and started getting dressed. His rustling around woke the girl and she asked why he was leaving. When he told her he had to get home she began asking him questions. One thing led to another and when she asked him how old he was he told her fifteen. She got a very scared look and started getting dressed, she drove him straight home.

He had tried a number of times to get together again with the girl with the big tits, but she wouldn’t even talk to him, convincing him he should have lied to her about his age.

By the time he was a teenager, sleeping had become a problem for Kevin and he didn’t know how to deal with it. Some nights he would lay in bed between asleep and awake and it felt like an explosion would go off in his head. Not knowing if it was just some phenomenon of not getting enough sleep or whether he was going to die, Kevin made a deal with himself and decided to curtail his lifestyle a bit. Headaches had become unbearable and popping aspirins three or four times a day had done little more than make his stomach constantly upset. Several months of conformity at school attendance and doing his homework for a change had given him some relief from the headaches, encouraging him to continue his new behavior for awhile. In fact he managed to stop most of the extracurricular activities he’d been involved in and have what appeared to be an outwardly normal life. It never occurred to his parents that any change had taken place at all.

In high school some girls just sort of gravitated to him. There had been a lot of them, all different types, usually not very good looking, but all needing someone to talk to who didn’t judge them. For some reason it was easy for him to relate to what girls wanted and needed to hear.

He had an in-depth list of responses that he used whenever one of these girls wanted to talk about how she felt. It really didn’t matter what they were saying or what they were whining about. His responses, learned from movies and television, were generic. When a conversation lasted long enough to exhaust his pat responses, he just went back to the beginning of the list and started over.

Not all, but some of the girls he talked with enjoyed his company and liked spending time with him. Some wanted more than friendship. He was not exceptionally handsome but, he was okay looking and by the time he was a freshman he had already reached his full height, while being a little on the thin side.

Nobody thought he was anything but a nice guy, who got passing grades and managed to stay out of trouble. While he wasn’t particularly good looking, for some reason there were some girls who just couldn’t keep their hands off him, not that he had minded. He loved the attention and having sex was fantastic. He was always interested in what girls were thinking and listening to them was easy for him. That one attribute alone had served him particularly well with the opposite sex.

Everything was more or less the same when Kevin went to junior college until he had his first exposure to computers. Discovering a love for the logical progressions and patterns involved in computer programs, he found himself writing his own programs. Dropping out of school he went to work as an intern for a small software development company. Over the next few years he was so consumed with writing software that his lust for girls faded into the background.

Selling his first software program as a freelance developer had made Kevin pretty secure, financially. The success and the prosperity that came with his success prompted women to be even more attracted to him and his involvement and lust for women slowly crept back into the forefront of his interest and activity.

Somewhere along the line, even as far back as high school, he had progressed from having what he thought of as fairly normal sex, to having rougher and rougher sex. Some girls, more than he had imagined, even seemed to like it that way, which further encouraged his inclination, and fed into his lust.

He didn’t realize that it was happening, maybe because it took place gradually over such a long period of time but, it had become more and more difficult for him to keep an erection and impossible to climax, without inflicting pain on his sexual partner.

About eight months after finishing his upgrade project, Kevin found himself in a large bookstore at one of the area’s bigger malls. Kevin felt he was in familiar territory as hanging out in bookstores had proven a productive source for meeting women. Kevin targeted an average looking woman by observing her particular sort of interest then touting some pertinent book randomly selected by him to start a conversation. This approach worked more often than not and produced better results than hanging out in some bar trying to pick-up a girl.

Once engaged in conversation, Kevin was in his element. The ability to draw a woman out of her shell or depression was his biggest asset. Asking leading questions and then being a great listener offset the fact that he wasn’t terribly good looking. Except for his eyes, described to him on numerous occasions as being bedroom eyes and that he was quick to smile, which made him more attractive.

In the Self Help section he had spotted her. Hanging back an aisle away he watched her pull out books like Feeling Good About Yourself, Getting Over Being Shy and Be A Happier Person. She was tall and thin with light brown hair, had an angular face with olive colored skin. He guessed she wore about a size 7 dress. Definitely alone, wearing no wedding band and looking a bit forlorn he decided she would be worth approaching.

Excuse me, I noticed you passed by this book by Robin Kennedy. Kevin held up a book towards the girl that he had pulled off a shelf. I really found his book to be helpful and full of good advice."

Well, this is the first time I’ve even looked at self-help books.

I’ve been reading everything I can to try and improve myself for quite some time. I don’t know if it’s helping or not though. Kevin said.

At least you’re nice enough to try and help someone else out. I’m Stephanie, by the way.