Bleeders

By Anthony Bruno

An FBI profiler plays a dangerous game with her mother’s murderer in this chilling thriller by the author of Seven.
 
FBI profiler Trisha McCleery has been on a twenty-year personal search for the person who brutally murdered her mother. At the same time, serial killer Gene Lassiter has been on an obsessive twenty-year search for the daughter of his first kill.
 
If she finds him, justice can at last be served. If he finds her, one man’s reign of terror can continue unabated—in this dark and suspenseful novel from an Edgar and Anthony Award–nominated author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781626812352

Anthony Bruno

Anthony served in the US Army, during the Viet Nam era, and is currently retired from the New York City police dept. Married and the proud father of two, he was born in Brooklyn, and now resides in Middle Village, New York.

Book preview

Prologue

Gene Lassiter could pinpoint the day he became a monster. May 28, 1989—a magical day for him.

He had been 19—skinny and scruffy with hair down over his collar and a sparse but mangy beard that looked like reddish-brown puffs glued to his face. The disparity between the dark brown on his head and the reddish beard disturbed him whenever he saw it, but he didn’t have to look at it that day while he was hiking. He had three weeks to kill before his summer job and he’d decided to walk the Appalachian Trail from Tannersville, his tiny hometown in eastern Pennsylvania, to as far as he could go in a week and a half. But in the back of his mind he held onto the possibility of continuing on, forgetting about college and seeing what life brought him.

It was hot as he trudged along the dirt path in the shade of tall maples. His skin was dotted with mosquito bites because he’d never thought to bring bug repellant, and his feet ached even though he had good hiking boots, which his parents had bought him when he was in junior high and were a half size too small. He regretted not letting his mother buy him a new pair, but he was determined to be independent and stop sponging off his parents. He didn’t like his life. He wanted something else. He just didn’t know what.

The sun peeked through the branches as he walked. The soil at the edges of the trail was soft, and whenever he noticed an ant hill, he went out of his way to step on it. One summer when he was little, he’d found a bottle of charcoal lighter fluid in the garage. He went into the woods behind his house and squirted it into an ant hill just to watch the ants run out. The next day he went back with a book of matches and lit the fluid after he’d poured it in, but the ants didn’t run out with fire on their backs the way he’d hoped. They stayed inside and probably burned to death. He was disappointed. He’d wanted to see them die.

He’d stomped out the burning ant hill and wandered into the woods until he found a box turtle trudging through the moss. He picked it up, but it pulled its head and legs into the shell. He set the turtle down and knelt over it, and without giving it any thought, squirted lighter fluid into the shell where its head was. It pulled in tighter. He squirted the leg holes, wanting the turtle to come out, but it didn’t. He doused the shell and threw a lit match on it. A crown of flames licked the air, but the turtle didn’t come out, and it didn’t run off with fire trailing behind the way turtles in cartoons did. Again he was disappointed.

He tried cats next. They were better.

As he walked the trail, Lassiter noticed the sun getting lower. He figured it was between four and five o’clock, and since it was June, he still had a few hours of light, but eventually he’d have to find a place for the night. This was his eighth day on the trail. Tomorrow he’d have to head back so he’d be home in time to start his job at the bank. If he decided to go back. He was feeling antsy. He was at a crossroads. He wanted to do something daring, something big, something unique—he just wasn’t sure what.

He’d just finished his freshman year at Georgetown, but he was bored with school. He was good at math and had thought about making that as his major, but the courses were too easy. He’d briefly considered physics, then philosophy—maybe just to piss off his father who wanted him to be a business major, which didn’t appeal to him at all. His father had gotten him the summer job—his dad and the bank branch manager were golfing buddies. Gene had agreed to take it only because he didn’t have anything else to do and he was saving up for a car. He had thought about staying in Washington, looking for a job on campus, but there was this girl, Steph.

They’d gone out a few times. She was more handsome than pretty—tall and bony with a long horsy face—but to him she was exotic, never without her signature swipe of Cleopatra eyeliner. Steph was smart and hip, and she was from New York. She’d grown up in Greenwich Village and had babysat the kids of movie stars. He’d met her in a film appreciation class, German Film from Murnau to Fassbinder. He’d picked it because it was easier to watch movies than read and it fit into his schedule. Steph had already seen most of the movies and was pretty knowledgeable about film. She seemed knowledgeable about a lot of things.

He’d watched her from afar, attracted but intimidated. She was too sophisticated for him. He’d pass her dorm at night and look through the windows, hoping to see her. He saw other girls but not her. Then one day after a screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, she just started talking to him. No hello my name is, nothing like that. She just launched right into a diatribe on camera angles and set design, technical stuff. He was thrilled that she’d chosen him over the guys in class who wore all black and spouted artsy-fartsy theories in discussion group. She said they were all pretentious ass-holes. She said she liked him because he was real.

They dated from October into November, and two days before they each left for home for Thanksgiving break, they had sex right after seeing Aguirre, the Wrath of God. She didn’t seem that into it because she had talked the whole time, and that bothered him. He worried that he was below average as a lover, that he had done something wrong.

When they got back to school, they made love a lot, almost every night and always in her dorm room. Her roommate had dropped out and she had a single by default. Every time she talked a blue streak, but when it was over, she became sullen and quiet. He was sure he was doing something wrong, but he didn’t know how to ask her. For someone who talked so much, she didn’t talk about that. They kept having sex, but it was always the same—he enjoyed it while it was happening but afterward he felt inadequate. Many nights he lay awake, staring at her, watching her sleep.

Then on the Thursday night before Christmas break, she said she wanted to try something new. She went to her bureau and pulled out a fistful of colorful silk scarves. She told him to lie down on the bed with his arms and legs stretched out. He refused. He didn’t want to be tied up. The thought of not being in control scared him.

Come on, she said. It’ll be fun. She looped a red scarf around his wrist as he sat on the edge of the bed, and he immediately pulled his hand away.

Come on. Don’t be a wuss. She tried to get it around his wrist again.

No, he said.

She shoved him onto his back and leaped on top of him, straddling his chest and kneeling on his shoulders. She was stronger than he’d thought.

She grinned down at him. I am going to tie you up… bitch.

Get off.

Bitch. She laughed as she grabbed his wrist and pinned it to the bed. I’m going to tie you up, bitch—

His free hand struck like a cobra, punching her face closed fist. He hit her so hard they were both shocked. Her face turned red, her Cleopatra eyeliner smudged up to her hairline. He stared at what he’d done, then did it again. He didn’t know why, he just did it. She jumped off him and retreated to the other side of the bed, sitting with her back to him. He knew he should have felt bad, but he felt nothing.

Get out, she said in a moody growl. Just get out.

He stared at her profile. A line of blood ran from the corner of her mouth to her chin. He looked at his hand, his knuckles smeared with blood.

"I said, get out!" she screeched.

And he did. He left and never talked to her again. He avoided her for the rest of the school year, terrified that she would tell her R.A. or a dean or call the cops and then he would be in real trouble. All through spring semester he waited for something to happen, expecting a phone call, a letter, a knock on his door. But nothing happened. He and Steph weren’t in any other classes together, and he saw her only a few times from a distance. She avoided him as much as he avoided her, and gradually his fear turned into a guilty little satisfaction. She’d been so bossy and confident that she could do anything she wanted with him, but he’d changed all that with two quick punches.

Still, when he heard from a mutual friend that she was going to be working on campus in the library that summer, he decided it might not be a good idea for him to stick around. There wouldn’t be enough students to hide in the crowd. She apparently hadn’t told on him, but that didn’t mean she still couldn’t.

He’d thought about her a lot as he hiked the trail. Not so much about her as about hitting her. He ran though the incident, analyzing every part of it, walking miles without realizing. He was still thinking about it.

Swatting mosquitoes as big as daddy long legs, he guessed he was somewhere in Sullivan County in lower New York state. He had crossed from New Jersey into New York about three hours ago and was heading toward the Catskills. He could just keep going, he thought. Keep going and never go back. A tempting idea.

He spotted a pair of hikers rounding the bend up ahead, coming toward him. He’d passed only a few hikers on this trip. As they got closer, he saw that they were women, older than him, mid-twenties. A pretty blue-eyed blonde and a brunette with a long face like Steph’s. He heard them talking in some language he didn’t understand. They might have been Scandinavians, but he wasn’t sure. As they were about to pass, they smiled and said some sort of greeting, but they didn’t slow down and neither did he. He just raised his hand to say hi and kept walking. But his eye went to the edges of the trail, looking for a rock small enough to hold in his hand but heavy, like a brick. He imagined bashing the long-faced girl over the head. Pounding her repeatedly, making her bleed. The blonde, too. But he didn’t see any good rocks so he kept walking. Thoughts like that flew into his head every so often.

The trail hugged a ridge at the base of a hill, a steep upward slope on his left, a gentler downward slope on his right. The forest floor was covered with the previous fall’s leaves, and as he walked, he could see the edge of a grassy pasture through the trees. The green of the pasture was brilliant in the light of the setting sun and contrasted sharply with the browns and drab greens of the canopied forest. Golden light shone through the leaves and dappled the ground. He figured it was time to start looking for a place to set up his tent for the night.

As the trail rounded the hill, he heard something odd and out of place. Music. Rock music. First, drums and a heavy bass line, then wailing electric guitars and male voices added to the mix. It grew louder as he walked. He’d thought it was a boombox, but the closer he got, the more it sounded like a live performance. He glanced down the slope to his right. The landscape was changing. The pasture gave way to some kind of compound.

Curious, Lassiter got off the trail and trudged through the dry leaves to get a better look. He saw a large lemon-yellow house with gables and a mansard roof. A red barn as big as the house sat across the courtyard. The rock band played on a stage between the two structures. As he got closer, he saw that despite their old-fashioned design, the house and barn were in good shape, as if they had been recently built or renovated.

The leaves crunched under his boots as he walked closer. The place was mobbed, well over a hundred, maybe two hundred people. They were gathered around the stage or seated at tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths on the lawn and around a kidney-shaped swimming pool. He smelled the smoky sweet aroma of barbecue and saw drifting smoke moving through the sunlight. All of a sudden he was hungry.

Two men in knee-length aprons tended four large grills near the edge of the woods, brushing sauce on whatever they were cooking. People lined up at a nearby serving table to fill their plates. He imagined all kinds of meats on those grills, particularly ribs. He loved ribs. The guests seemed to be having a good time. They were mostly older but seemed friendly. If any of them had noticed him coming out of the woods, no one attempted to chase him off. He shrugged out of his backpack and set it down behind a tree with a wide trunk so it couldn’t be seen from the compound. He wandered onto the lawn where a cluster of people sat on the ground in a circle—three men and two women. They were in their forties, he guessed, and two of the men had full bushy beards. One of the women had light brown hair down to her waist and wore a white peasant blouse with colorful embroidery across the front. Old hippies.

Hey, want some, one of the bearded men said, holding out a joint. Lassiter could smell it.

Ah… no thanks. He’d never tried marijuana. He was curious, but he felt like an intruder here. This wasn’t the place to have his first experience.

Get yourself something to eat, the woman with the long hair said.

Lassiter shrugged. I wasn’t invited.

Don’t worry about it. Eat.

He looked over at the food tables. Chrome serving trays loaded with cole slaw, potato salad, macaroni salad, and health salad. Wooden bowls full of green salad. A pyramid of corn-bread squares. The two barbecue guys were taking orders for burgers, chicken, steaks, sausage, and ribs.

Go. The woman brushed him toward the food with her fingers. Eat. Have fun.

Seeing the ribs, he didn’t have to be told twice. He wandered toward the serving tables, took a paper plate, and got in line behind a young guy with a ponytail. Lassiter kept his head down as he helped himself to a few ribs, a sausage, some cole slaw and macaroni salad, and two pieces of corn bread. He picked up one of his ribs and bit into it, tearing meat off the bone. It was the best rib he’d ever tasted. Moist, tender, not too sweet.

Beer’s over there. The guy with the ponytail pointed with his beer bottle to a bar under a tent near the barn. He guzzled what was left in the bottle. C’mon, I’ll go with you. I need another one. Lassiter could see that the guy already had a pretty good buzz going. He nodded as he gnawed on the rib. He was under age, but he’d been to plenty of keggers at school, and it didn’t look like he’d get carded here. Mr. Ponytail jabbered away as they walked.

Can’t wait for Michael to come on. It’s gonna be freakin’ great. I mean the other bands are great, too, don’t get me wrong. But where you gonna find people like this all playing in the same place, just jamming with each other? Eric, Keith, Bob, Joni, Emmy Lou, Carlos, Neil. It’s like a freakin’ little Woodstock over here.

Lassiter listened but was more interested in eating.

Mr. Ponytail talked nonstop as they weaved their way through the crowd. Well-off types mingled with the old hippies—middle-aged women with poufy hair that didn’t move and balding sixty-ish men in light-colored blazers. Clusters of college-age kids congregated at the edges of the crowd, passing joints and slugging from beer bottles. Everyone was having a great time, and most were high, drunk, or both.

Two bartenders worked the bar, affable biker chicks with tattooed arms and bandanas on their heads. A rowboat full of ice held a shit-load of beer and at least thirty bottles of white wine and champagne. Bottles of hard liquor—lots of them—stood at attention on a table behind the bar, each one fitted with a jigger spout.

What can I get you? the skinnier of the two biker chicks said.

Two brews, Mr. Ponytail said.

Bud? Heineken? Sam Adams? Bass?

Heinie for me. Ponytail turned to Lassiter. How about you?

Lassiter nodded, his mouth full of corn bread. Heineken.

Two Heinies, he said to the woman.

"You got it.’

Lassiter expected her to ask for an I.D., but she didn’t seem to care.

Here you go. Ponytail handed him a beer. Man, look at that. He pointed with his new bottle at the stage where another band was setting up—two guitarists, a bass player and a drummer. That’s the Blackstone Brothers, man. They haven’t played together since ‘81, ‘82, something like that.

Lassiter nodded as he sipped. He had no idea who the Blackstone Brothers were.

They are freakin’ great, man. But you know what I’m waiting for? Michael, man. He’s supposed to be playing soon. He is so unbelievable, especially when he plays at home for his friends. Can’t wait to see what he does.

Lassiter took another sip, wondering who the hell this Michael was. This was his house so Lassiter figured he had to be the one throwing this bash.

Ponytail took a slug off his bottle. Hey, I’ll catch you later, man. He walked off toward the stage.

Lassiter drifted back through the crowd and found a shady spot under a stand of white birches where he sat and ate as the band launched into their set. Twangy southern rock with tight vocal harmonies. Hard-driving blues interspersed with soulful ballads. The band wasn’t bad, but they were another generation from Lassiter’s.

He finished his beer and went back for another one, once again astounded that the biker chicks just gave it to him. He drank and strolled around, starting to get a buzz. He found another serving table loaded with cookies and pies as well as a make-your-own sundae station with every topping imaginable from hot fudge to butterscotch to crushed candy bars to walnuts in syrup. He was too full to think about dessert. He also had more hiking to do to find a place to camp for the night. But he didn’t have to go just yet. He had time.

He wandered toward the barn and leaned on a split-rail fence at the edge of a field where five horses grazed peacefully in the distance, unfazed by the loud music. He walked around the barn to the front of the property where dozens of cars and vans were parked along a gravel driveway—everything from stretch limos to Volkswagen Beetles. The driveway was next to a large pond speckled with hundreds of water lilies with dark pink blossoms. He peered across the water to see where the property met the road, but it must have been a long way off. This Michael must be pretty damn rich, he thought.

He started walking back toward the party, thinking about making a sundae, when he noticed that the front door was wide open. No one seemed to be around. He was curious to take a peek at the inside, see what else this rich guy Michael had. He mounted the wooden steps that led up to a spacious wrap-around porch with groupings of cedar Adirondack chairs and old-fashioned sliders. He approached the front door cautiously, feeling like a trespasser. He poked his head inside.

The front room was huge but intimate with clusters of sofas, rocking chairs, and piles of pillows on the floor where people could gather in conversation groups. An assortment of acoustic guitars, dobros, banjos, and mandolins hung from the walls near a fire-engine red grand piano. An enormous fieldstone fireplace large enough to burn the whole piano dominated one side of the room. Lassiter killed off the rest of his beer and parked the bottle on the porch just outside the door. He stepped inside and crossed a large round rug with a geometric tribal pattern in burnt orange, blue, and ivory. As he approached the piano, he could feel the thrum of the music outside resonating with the instruments in the room. He stared at the black and white keys and imagined this Michael guy making music here.

He walked over to a wide winding staircase with a whimsical balustrade—a carved horse’s head on the newel post and irregular veins and knots in the exotic light-colored wood. He peeked behind the staircase and peered down a corridor that led to a bustling kitchen. The catering staff, he assumed. He noticed the skinny biker-chick bartender sitting at a high counter, eating something from a bowl, and he ducked out of sight. He didn’t think she’d spotted him. Too busy eating.

He considered going back outside before someone caught him there, but he was curious to see what was upstairs. He started climbing the carpeted steps like a burglar, careful to keep his fingers off the railing. They were a little sticky with barbecue sauce.

Framed photographs hung on the wall along the staircase, and it was like a slide show, the same guy in every photo. Slender and fit with floppy brown shoulder-length hair that swept over one eye. And the same knowing grin in each shot. Lassiter figured this must be Michael. Michael with Mick Jagger. Michael with Ringo. Michael with Tina Turner. Michael with Jack Nicholson. Michael with Stephen Spielberg. A very young Michael with Jim Morrison. Michael with President Carter.

On the second-floor, hallways branched off in three directions. Several large abstract paintings hung from vanilla-white walls in one hallway. The other hallways were painted misty rose and a purplish pastel blue. He headed for the blue hallway, careful not to make noise. The first room he came to was a library, floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books, mostly well-worn paperbacks. A black leather couch and a matching armchair were in the middle of the room. An open copy of Stephen King’s The Stand was face down on the arm of the couch, a hardcover edition of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran in the seat of the armchair.

Lassiter left the library and peeked into the four other rooms on that hallway, each one a bedroom with a king-sized bed and a private bath. The beds were unmade, and the presence of suitcases and duffels indicated that guests were staying over. He turned around and headed for the misty rose hallway.

He sensed that this was the wing where the family slept. It felt more lived in. Photographs of Michael and what Lassiter assumed were his wife and children hung on the walls. His wife was a pretty, petite brunette. His two daughters appeared at various ages in the photos—as toddlers, as little kids, and as homely middle-schoolers with awful hairstyles and braces. The older girl had light brown hair like her father. The younger one had dark coffee-colored hair, like her mother. The sound of the band outside was louder in this hallway.

He poked his head into the first room on his left. One of the daughters’ rooms, he guessed. The bed was made and had a ruffled purple bedspread. Tidy desk. Bottles and jars arranged neatly on the dresser. Galloping horses on the wallpaper.

He crossed the hallway to the opposite bedroom, which looked like a tornado had blown through. Bedspread mostly on the floor along with random articles of clothing. Dresser drawers open. Electric guitar propped in a corner, the amplifier’s power light glowing red. Every inch of wall space was covered with pictures clipped from magazines—famous people, people he didn’t recognize, bands, cats, dogs, guitars, surfers, scenery, sunsets, moonscapes, oceanscapes, all kinds of stuff. He wondered if this chaotic collage reflected the girl’s personality. He had pasted a bunch of pictures over his bed in his dorm room, but nothing like this.

He stepped closer to the bed and spotted a black satin bra in the tangle of sheets. He stared at it, the sound of bass and drums pounding in the distance. He picked it up and rubbed the slinky material in his fingers. He wondered which girl owned it—the older one or the younger one. He held a cup in each hand and crushed them.

Are you sure, Natalie? A woman’s voice out in the hallway.

He dropped the bra and froze.

I can stay, Natalie. I don’t mind.

Lassiter tiptoed to the door and peered out. A plump middle-aged woman stood in the doorway of another room, facing in. She wore a floor-length, sleeveless black-and-white batik dress and had long red hair tied in a single braid down her back.

Really. I don’t mind. She was talking to someone inside the room.

Go on. I’ll be fine, another woman said, her voice fainter. Go join the party. Have some fun. I promise, I won’t go anywhere.

The plump woman laughed, but it was a sad laugh.

Go get something to eat and leave me alone for a while. I want to take a nap. I’m tired.

Okay, you take a nap, the plump woman said. I’ll come back in a little while to check on you.

No, don’t check on me. Go have some fun and let me rest.

Okay. I’ll be back later.

Lassiter ducked back into the bedroom. He didn’t move, his breathing shallow as he listened to the plump woman’s departing flip-flops. He stood absolutely still for at least five minutes, listening, staring at the bra on the bed. He thought about taking it but decided not to. That was sick, he thought.

He peeked out the door. The hallway was empty. He could hear the band playing a ballad, just a lonesome voice, an acoustic guitar, and a mellow electric bass. It was time to get out of there. But then he heard something. Someone moaning. The woman in the other room.

He stepped quietly toward the room, thinking she might be in some kind of trouble. He peeked around the doorjamb, and as soon as he saw her, he stopped breathing. Not what he expected. A small woman in a hospital bed, her head sunk into the pillows at an uncomfortable angle. Her dark, shoulder-length hair was threaded with silver; her face was pale, almost translucent. Her hands on top of the covers were thin and delicate, and her shoulders seemed as fragile as a small bird’s.

He just stared at her. She seemed to be sleeping, but her brow was furrowed. He wondered if she was having a nightmare. Maybe she was in pain.

Outside the band stopped playing, and raucous cheers replaced the music. Lassiter took a tentative step toward the window next to the bed. The stage was right across the lawn, a bird’s eye view. The musicians were taking their bows.

A collection of amber-plastic prescription bottles along with a drinking glass and a white plastic carafe cluttered the woman’s night table. He leaned in closer to read the labels, but the names of the drugs meant nothing to him. Clearly she was very sick.

Behind the pill bottles was an 8 X 10 photograph in a rustic oak frame. It was another family photo—Michael, this woman, and the two daughters—but the sisters were older in this one, teenage. Their names were burned into the frame—Cindy, Michael, Natalie, and Trisha. Cindy, the older daughter with the light-brown hair, was about seventeen, and she looked like her father. Trisha, the younger girl—fifteen, maybe sixteen—was the spitting image of her beautiful mother. The same straight dark hair, fair complexion, and wide blue eyes. The family was seated on a sofa, parents in the middle, kids on the ends. The older girl smiled and leaned her head on her father’s shoulder. The younger girl and her mother tipped their heads together, the light catching their eyes. Daddy’s girl and Mommy’s girl.

Lassiter compared the woman’s face in the flesh to the face in the photo. She seemed thin and drawn in the photo, sick but not as sick as now. He looked out at the stage where a new group of musicians was setting up. Time to get going, he thought.

He walked softly toward the door, but when