Fashion Victims

By R. Saint Claire

A Face-paced Psychological Thriller!

A serial killer is targeting New York’s Fashion elite. And each victim is linked to Len St. Michel, a designer on the brink of a make-or-break comeback.

Leading the murder investigation is Mario Corso, a New York native with the accent and hard exterior to prove it. Len’s attraction to the handsome detective is as irresistible as his compulsion to visit Volupté, a high-end sex club where he acts out his fantasies to a dangerous degree.

As Len pushes himself to heights of creativity and depths of degradation, he partners up with a new muse and model, Lilly Rose, whose innocence and beauty inspire him to greatness.

With Fashion Week approaching, and the Seventh Avenue Slasher closing in, Len will risk everything to land the cover of Vogue, even if it means ending up a murder headline on the Daily News.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. Saint Claire
• Release date: Oct 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463269558

R. Saint Claire

R. Saint Claire writes adult and YA fiction and screenplays (horror mostly) as well as poetry and music when the mood strikes. Honors include a Watty award for her horror novel, Code Red, a Webby Honoree for her original web series Gemini Rising, and multiple screenwriting awards. You’ll find Regina and her alter-ego Batilda hanging out on her YouTube channel Regina’s Haunted Library.

Book preview

One

Rena Faye gazed out through the open French doors of her Upper East Side penthouse balcony. Even from her awkward seated position—long legs stretched across the polished parquet floor—the view was impeccable. They say women age from the face down. If this were true, Rena’s legs did not look a day over twenty-five. That thought made her proud. When they find her, at least her legs will still look good.

She watched the sky change from a cool violet-pink to the color of lox from her favorite bagel place. On the Queens’ side of the East River, shimmering lights pierced the morning mist, reminding her of Christmas.

Christmas in August.

She tried to keep her thoughts on the pretty pink sky and colored lights and not the burning pain in her throat. A cool breeze fluttered the silk drapes on the open French doors with a crisp promise of fall.

Fall!

A sigh stuck in her throat and stung. Swallowing over it, she sucked in the cool breeze and thought about her favorite time of year.

For fashion people, fall is the holiday season marked by the advent calendar of Vogue arriving in August in preparation for the celebratory peak of Fashion Week. Even when Rena was penniless, fall had always meant clothes. She remembered the first item of clothing she’d bought for herself from her job at Fairfax Shopping Mall: a Fair Isle sweater of a genuine wool blend. It was a luxury compared to the polyester hand-me-downs that had always been her lot. Even as a child, she had towered over her older siblings, forcing her to wear dresses with sleeves too short and humiliating flood pants.

Her mother was confused as to how her squat, thick body had produced such an alien being. Someone dropped you off in the middle of the night, she would tease her lanky daughter. You don’t belong to us.

The family would laugh at her expense, and when Rena would sulk and withdraw, the insults would continue, worsen. They’d accuse her of being stuck-up, of thinking she was better than the rest of them.

But I was better.

Growing up in the Washington D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia, Rena was a misfit. Looking at her high school yearbook photo, one would see a young beauty with raven hair, high cheekbones, and dark eyes sparkling with more than just small-town dreams.

Being over six feet tall at seventeen, however, was not fun. Dubbed skyscraper by her bullying classmates, Rena never lost the slouch that later became her trademark runway pose. When she had bought the penthouse, she remembered thinking, now the skyscraper lives in one.

Until I’m forced to sell it.

It hurt to think of that now, just like it hurt to think of the searing pain in her neck, made worse with every breath. Better to keep her breathing shallow and controlled, better to think about the old days when her best friend Gabi Hughes, a gorgeous blonde nearly as tall as Rena, had dragged her to her first modeling class in a strip mall. It wasn’t exactly glamorous, but the teacher (a former model who had married a congressman and settled into the suburbs) saw potential in the awkward teen, told her to stand up straight, be proud of her height and her beauty, embrace her difference. Rena listened, and it changed her life.

Against her parents’ wishes, she moved to New York as soon as she graduated and embarked on a modeling career that proved an instant success. As luck would have it, her androgynous look was ‘in.’ Rena’s waist-length hair was cropped to a short geometrical cut at Vidal Sassoon; Way Bandy’s magical hands accentuated her high cheekbones. She landed her first Vogue cover at twenty-two, and for thirteen years her endless legs strutted across the top designer runways.

She quit modeling before the humiliation of being past her prime caught up with her. She used her natural flair, good taste, and connections to become a sought-after stylist, bringing understated elegance with a whiff of old Hollywood to the casual grunge decade. She found success in the industry she loved.

It seemed natural that her next step would be designing. So, with the help of a few investors, she launched her own company featuring her signature line of form-fitting dresses. She prospered; the money poured in. Her world grew bigger in proportion to the emptiness inside her. She began spending recklessly to fill it. Her expensive taste being her downfall, she overspent on traveling, vacations, a few poor tax decisions and investments (like that castle in Austria), and men. On every trip and shopping spree, there was a man who was happy to go along for the ride, then cut and run as soon as things became too serious.

Oh, the men.

Rena’s eyelids fluttered, making her view of the river zoom in and out of focus. Two divorces and a slew of younger lovers had left her emotionally and financially depleted. The most recent had been to Ronny Regal, a rock star twenty years her junior. She’d believed him when he said he loved her. She mortgaged her apartment for a cool two million to launch his career, including a complete wardrobe overhaul, a video directed by an art-scene darling, and the best marketing team she could find, all culminating in a world tour.

Thoroughly enjoying lavishing all her attention on her young lover, she ignored the red ink in her business ledger. The penthouse was mortgaged again to launch her fashion show, but the clothes didn’t sell. Her bridge line at a chain store was underperforming as well. And once the rock star established his career on Rena’s dime, he left her, running off with her young assistant.

There had been a string of young girls who worked for Rena. Pretty. Hungry. She had been young once too, and ambitious, but she was too soft, lacking the killer instinct—

The pain in her throat rose like a crimson wave. She coughed; a spray of pink mist fanned across the white silk drapes.

Suddenly, thinking it mattered, that some journalist would write about it, she looked down at what she was wearing. Over La Perla panties she had on a man’s black shirt—silk, worn to a party by the rock star; the expensive cologne she’d purchased for him still clung to the smooth fabric.

It hurts. God, it hurts. . .

With a gurgling groan, she grabbed a fistful of the drapes and sat upright, adjusting her long legs to one side until she was in a kneeling position. The effort caused the pain in her throat to intensify, made it nearly impossible to breathe, but there was something she had to see. The sparkling Christmas lights, winking at her from across the river, were fading now. She couldn’t let them go, not yet.

Hand over fist, she pulled herself up until she half stood, knees still bent, with her large feet (always a source of embarrassment) twisting in painful knots beneath her towering frame. She swallowed over something hard, cold like metal. Bending over, she coughed out more blood, a red torrent staining the parquet floor.

A cry of regret escaped through a mouthful of blood as she lifted her head to look across the river one last time.

Then, like a newborn colt, her legs folded under her. She pitched forward, her face slamming into the floor; her fine nose flattened. It was over now. She took one more needle-pinned breath as a steel-gray sky absorbed the shimmering lights, and a new day in Manhattan exploded into life.

Two

Len St. Michel was about as French as the stale croissant he carried in the paper bag with his coffee as he chased the dawn down Seventh Avenue. He was christened Leonard Michael McBride forty years ago in Breezy Point, Queens to grandchildren of Irish immigrants. From them, he inherited his auburn hair, his fiery disposition, and (from his father particularly) his fighting spirit.

Len loved the sounds of the city just waking up. The clickety-clack of garment racks on the sidewalks blending with the honks of taxi horns made music sweeter to his ears than any Carnegie Hall symphony.

Sadly, for Len, there were few garment racks on the sidewalks these days. The fabric and notions shops that once lined the avenue were now mobile phone stores and banks.

This morning, in particular, he needed those sounds to wake his brain and soothe his damaged self-esteem.

Have some fucking confidence, you moron. That was his father’s favorite line, never hearing the irony of it. Len silently repeated it to himself now.

After all, he was in his prime. He could still pull off skinny jeans, even if he did wear his dress shirts untucked of late to hide a softening waistline. As he had each morning for the past twenty years of his career, he had tried to look like a winner. But despite his efforts, he was feeling (and looking) rather green around the gills.

But the world didn’t need to know that. He was St. Michel, the wunderkind of Seventh Avenue—fashion’s ‘King of Kink’!

But that moniker had been awarded to him decades ago. His last collection hadn’t exactly tanked, but the press had been cold to it. Lacking innovation, a few critical fashion journalists had noted. It was a damaging verdict for a designer who was known for combining fashion forwardness with wearability.

Melanie Vandergrift, editor-in-chief at Oomph Magazine, had stood by him, featuring him in a two-page spread. But he had failed to win over the new crowd: the fashion influencers of the digital age. One had labeled his show #farty on Instagram. It went viral and became a joke around town. That little bitch was only thirteen, Len had groused, and suddenly there she was, in the front row of all the shows, sitting next to Melanie like some medieval court dwarf. Major department stores canceled their orders. Even Princess Lesia, who had worn St. Michel exclusively for years, defected to Len’s rival, Oskar Wenders.

Wenders, née Aaron Weinstein, had started his fashion empire with a hefty family inheritance. His career amounted to shamelessly licensing his name on everything from cheap shoes to terry cloth towels. Still, his star had somehow never tarnished. Unlike Len, he was a highly successful schmoozer. His swipes at St. Michel in the press had been brutal. 

There is only one solution for my predicament, Len thought as he cut a wide arc around a cluster of out-of-towners standing before an idling tour bus. My new collection must be a triumph.

He pumped up his chest with a confidence he didn’t feel. The day before, more bad news had arrived in the form of a certified letter: his major financial backer was pulling funds from his show to support another designer group. This worry inspired the bender he’d indulged in the previous night. He now fought the resultant pounding headache.

Eying his reflection in the glass window of a big box department store, he sucked in his gut, and then crossed the street diagonally, dodging speeding traffic chasing green lights downtown.

The sign on a passing city bus, windows darkened by packed-in commuters, advertised the latest St. Michel accessory line with a digitally enhanced photo of his model/muse Francine Bartell. In repose, she held onto a St. Michel purse between her open legs as if it were a vibrator.

Len hated the ad campaign, hated designing handbags based on prototypes and manufactured in China. Everything that came out of China felt cheap to Len. Even the silks were of poor quality. He could feel the difference of the yarns, smell the change in the warp and weft of the wovens. Maybe what really smelled was the stench of human misery, of the barefoot children working in factories while the robber barons of industry attended two-hundred-thousand-a-table charity balls.

Yes, I am bitter, he thought as his Gucci loafer pivoted left on the corner of 22nd Street. But I’m honest.

Fashion had always been a hooligan’s hustle—only the strong survive. After all, the New York fashion industry was built on the backs of immigrants. That’s the stock he came from and was proud of it.

His mother, Rose, had been a Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union member for thirty years in a Seventh Avenue sweatshop that now housed million-dollar condos.

Len had learned his craft as a child watching Rose stitch samples at her Singer sewing machine in the family garage on weekends. Money was always tight, but she didn’t mind working extra hours. Using her Butterick dress patterns, she had taught her son to cut fabric on the grain and the bias once he advanced. At seven he began making clothes for his neighbor’s Barbie dolls. As a teenager, he designed, cut, and stitched his girlfriend’s prom dress, and had lost his virginity to her that night. He’d realized he was gay when he liked her better in the dress than out of it. At eighteen, he earned a full scholarship to the Fashion Institute of Technology. The snobbier designers considered it an inferior school to Pratt or St. Martins in London. But he knew that in the creative fields, it didn’t matter where or even if you went to school. What mattered were the three things Len possessed in spades: skill, talent, and timing. Although at present, he was feeling shaky about the latter.

He slid two bucks across the newsstand counter, picked up a copy of the Daily News, and tucked it under his arm as he headed into his building.

The view inside the elevator, two facing mirrors reflecting multiple angles of his image to infinity, did nothing to lift his mood. The harsh overhead lighting deepened the shadows on his face, giving his light complexion a drained, ghostly appearance.

No wonder my models are shitting themselves when they come into my studio. Francine will have to take care of that.

Francine Horowitz was his partner behind the scenes or seams as it were. What she lacked in design inspiration, she made up for in business acumen. Her bulldog personality came in handy during tough negotiations, but her insistence on the word designer being included in her title grated on Len’s last nerve. Still, he’d be lost without her. Or so he thought.

He smiled when the elevator opened to his studio and he realized he’d beaten Francine to work once again.

My early morning hours are killing her, he thought sadistically.

He had no time to waste. The new collection was going to the runway in three weeks. It needed to be a success if he was going to continue renting the building’s top floor for a whopping $25,000 a month.

His label’s symbol, Saint Michael the archangel, greeted him as it did every morning. The gilded life-size statue that guarded the studio door had been a gift from the Italian designer, Bruno Cavalli. Cavalli (more gangster than designer) had made a killing in the 1980s selling glittery gowns to New York society dames. The statue was as tacky as Cavalli’s designs. It didn’t match the St. Michel aesthetic, but Len had a fondness for it, joking that it was the closest thing to an Oscar he’d ever have.

As he did each morning, he patted the angel’s bare ass before unlocking the studio door. It was his daily prayer to the fashion gods for luck, for inspiration, for something that had never been done before, something to set the world on fire.

He whistled as he turned off the alarm and switched on the overhead lights; the fluorescent bulbs buzzed to life. He put his coffee cup in the microwave, heating it for two minutes. Then he dragged a high stool to the cutting