Necessary Evil Read online

  “Now Ted, it’s time for you to die. But before you do, I want to see your face. I want to see if you have the same look Karen had after you finished with her.”

  After the soaked blindfold was yanked free, a bleary eyed Ted felt a needle prick his arm, an all too familiar sensation. He tried to beg for mercy, but his throat was too injured and his mouth was too dry. Only a small peep escaped his cracked and bloody lips before he looked up into the glaring face of his malicious attacker, his gaze widening for only an instant. His wicked heart stopped forever and his body gave a final jerk as lethal blackness overcame him.

  “I know Karen will sleep better now with you punished and burning in Hell, but never as good as before your vicious attack and mutilation.” Supplies were gathered and placed in a nylon duffle bag: syringes, bottles, candles, extra rope, matches and other pre-used items. “Castration isn’t the answer. A taste of your own medicine is what you vile rapists need and deserve. And death, so it stops here. Yes, Ted, you creep, this is Justice. This is necessary evil.”

  A careful look around the small room gave assurance that everything was in order and no evidence was being left behind for the police to find: no hairs, no fibers, no DNA, absolutely nothing to even hint at who did this task. “You’ll be found naked and bound in a bed of humiliation with putrid smells of vomit and urine fouling the air, just like you did to Karen. Not a single neighbor will view my escape, just as none saw my arrival. I see, hear, and know all, Ted, so nobody will discover my identity. After Tippi has a taste of sweet revenge, maybe she’ll smile again, if only just a little bit. May you rot in Hell, Ted Silverman. Justice has been served.”

  Friday, June 15, 1990

  David Crouch struggled against the bonds disabling him as he slowly awakened from a drugged state. It didn’t take long for him to realize there was no way he could free himself. His wrists were tied to his ankles by ropes traveling underneath the bed. He was restrained facedown and stripped as naked as the day he was born. What the fuck! If this is a robbery or—

  “Finally, you’re coming around. Welcome to our little party, David. I was getting worried you wouldn’t wake up before your wife got home and we finished our business here. Wouldn’t want to hurt her just because she was stupid enough to marry a low-life like you. But I will if she intrudes before we get to your coming out party. You didn’t really think you’d get away with your evil acts, did you? Yeah, I guess you did since the courts turned you loose. Technicalities, loopholes, leaks, bribes, and sleezeball lawyers: screw ‘em all. But thwarted Justice has a friend on her side: me.”

  Who is this crazy fool and what’s he yammering about? Why’d he strip me and tie—

  “You like pain, David? Lisa liked it, don’t you think?” A steel pipe was slammed against the man’s right thigh. Then, his left thigh. Then, his side. Each time a blow landed with a thud, the victim writhed and moaned. “Lisa wanted to be beaten with a rod, too, didn’t she, David? She needed to be brought down a peg or two. Just like you.”

  As the hard weapon continued to strike his body, David tried in desperation to get away from it, but he couldn’t move more than an inch or two. He was gonna kill this bastard the instant he was freed! David planned to give him the licking of his life, especially since his attacker would be dead when he finished with him. Women liked rough sex. They always pretended to say no when they really meant yes. They liked their men to be strong and in control. Sometimes a man had to convince the stubborn ones that they were gonna obey, but then they usually went along with his sport. Lisa was the only one who had called the police. That troublemaking slut was gonna get the shit kicked out of her for sending someone over to treat him like this! After he knocked her senseless, he’d fuck her three ways to Sunday and leave her in her own blood for someone to find. But first, he was gonna get this bastard. He heard ribs crack before knifing agony took away his ability to breathe without causing sheer torment.

  “I think I heard some bones breaking, David. Maybe I’d better move to another area for a little bit. Wait, didn’t you keep hitting Lisa in the same spot until she needed to have her spleen removed because it ruptured and she nearly bled to death? You must like it that rough, so let me give you some more.”

  David jerked against the confining ropes as he tried to curse through his gag. He tried to elude the pipe that was causing him great pain, but he couldn’t do that either. After his gag was removed, David felt his attacker’s hands pull his hair to jerk his head back. He reflexively parted his lips to shout threats and profanities, but was prevented from doing so when a large object was jammed into his gaping mouth, following a grim and horrifying warning.

  “Don’t bite me or I’ll smash all your teeth, nose and skull with this hammer in my hand. Show me how much you want me, or I’m gonna use this pipe to beat your cock and ugly face to bloody pulps. Don’t bite, and obey me, or your own mother won’t recognize the mess I make of you. Now, lickspittle me good, you sorry pile of horse shit!”

  This ain’t happening, David tried to convince himself. When his wife came home from the bar where she danced, she would help him kill this asshole! He groaned as he envisioned her face if she were to see him like this, bound naked and giving a blowjob to a faggot. She would have to die, too. He couldn’t let her tell anybody about this humiliating incident, or rib him about it later. He would tell the police this bastard had killed her, and he had taken a beating while trying to defend them. No one must ever know the truth. As David planned his assailant’s demise, the steel pipe was still striking his bruised and broken ribs. He heard the chilling voice again.

  “David, I said for you to suck me off, just like you made Lisa do to you while you beat her with a pipe. You’d better do as I say or I’ll flip your ass over and grind your meat for some dog’s dinner.” During that warning, the pipe was slammed into David’s hip to reinforce its message.

  David began to cry as he obeyed the repulsive command, the rough invasion of his mouth tearing at his dry lips without mercy. He felt bile ooze into his throat. Blood began to trickle down his chin. He was tempted for one moment to chomp down hard on his molester’s salami, but he believed the daring brute would do as it had threatened. And he was going to need his dick for years to come. His stomach heaved as warm fluid was squirted onto his tongue. He tried to spit it out, but the gag was poked into his mouth before he could do so. Mother fucking bastard! I’m going to kill you and Lisa and that bitch of a wife when this is over! She’ll regret being late tonight!

  “David, you’re a slut. A whore. You just sucked my cock and you don’t even know me. Wait, you carved the letters S-L-U-T on Lisa’s cheek to brand her for what she was, didn’t you? Well, you’re a whore now, so I guess we need to mark you up, too.” A scalpel was pulled from the nylon duffel bag and its blunt edge was traced along David’s cheek. “I need to find the perfect spot to do this, so I do it right the first time. You wouldn’t want me to mess up and have to start over on the other cheek, now would you? So hold real still and I’ll try not to slip.”

  As the sharp blade was pressed into his face, David felt his bladder let go and he urinated on the bed. Shit! Damnit! Fuck! The searing pain sliced through the agony of his other wounds and focused all attention on his face. He would be scarred for life! He wouldn’t be able to keep this blowjob a secret! Everybody who saw him would know what had happened to him! He tried to scream, but no sound escaped his terror filled throat. He felt blood dripping from his chin and imagined the red stains on the carpet. Now, he’d have to think of something else to tell the cops and doctors, but he sure as hell wouldn’t tell them everything. This was nobody’s business.

  The attacker continued to slash David’s back and legs and taunt him. “Did Lisa urinate on herself when you razored her cheek? How about when you cut her here? What about here? Did she try to scream, too? She deserved what you gave her, didn’t she? She was so pretty and so young. She had no right to look that way when you were around and not give you what you wanted.
”

  The scalpel suddenly stopped and David let out the breath he had been holding. Surely, this nightmare was over. Fucking bastard! From the moment of silence, he thought the stranger was finished and he was going to be set free. Until the next words he heard uttered sunk into his horrified mind.

  “Just as you have no right to be lying there with your bare and tempting ass poked up in invitation to me. You slut. You want me to slide my big cock in your ass, don’t you? Otherwise, you wouldn’t be offering it to me like this, would you?”

  David felt gloved fingers stroke his buttocks. Fucking bastard! No way was this homo going to put a prick up his ass! He shook with all his might until a steel pipe began to unleash its destructive force on his body. Minutes later, he couldn’t move if he wanted to; he feared that most of the bones in his body were broken. Damn that bitch; he should have killed her. This was all her fault!

  “No wonder Lisa was so black and blue; you must have had to teach her the same lesson. I know you’re just shaking your head no because you’re supposed to, but you really want me to fuck you up the ass, don’t you, David? Lie still and it won’t hurt much after a little while. You want any lubrication? No? Well, okay. Lisa didn’t want any either, which explained the tearing and bleeding she had. I guess you believe the same way she did—the rougher, the better. Well, hang on to your balls, David, because this ride might get a little bumpy.”

  David’s horror and humiliation increased to such heights that they drowned out the pain from his other wounds. Every nerve ending seemed to focus on that one part of his body. Fucking bastard was going to pay for this! Lisa was going to suffer for it, too. It was all her fault this was happening to him. He was going to teach them both a lesson they would never forget. The agony reached every area of David’s body as he tried not to focus on what was happening, but on his future revenge. He couldn’t take this torture much longer. He felt as if his insides were bursting and blowing his life to hell. Then he felt warmth inside his ass and on his testicles as liquid ran over them and dripped to the urine-soaked bed. He was going to kill this bastard soon.

  “Now, David, it’s time for you to die. But before you do, I want to look at your face to see if you have the same expression Lisa did after you finished with her.”

  The blindfold was lifted as he felt a sting on the inside of his arm. He looked up into the sneering face of his brutalizer. His heart lurched in his chest before his body jerked one last time and his degraded soul passed into dark oblivion.

  “Now, Lisa has her justice. I know she’ll sleep better with you dead and buried.”

  A hasty shower washed away all blood spatters on the vigilante. The tub and tiles were dried to prevent that action from being noticed by the police. The damp towel was stuffed into the nylon duffel bag along with the objects brought for the punishment of David Crouch. “Better hurry before the slutty little wife comes home. I wouldn’t want her to catch me here. That would ruin my future plans if I killed her.”

  A final visual scan of the bedroom was taken. “I’d like to give all sick assholes a taste of their own medicine, but that isn’t possible or smart. I have to stick to my strategy. No detours. No diversions. No inessential risks. No careless mistakes. I can hardly wait to tell Tippi and hope she hears me even in her coma. If only you would regain consciousness, my dear, sweet, innocent Tippi, so you could enjoy these glorious moments with me, especially the destruction of our main target. For now, at least I know Justice has been served and this was necessary evil. ‘Bye David, may you burn in Hell forever.”

  Chapter One

  Saturday morning, June 16th

  Lieutenant Dan Mallory grimaced after he walked into David Crouch’s bedroom a few hours later and saw the mutilated corpse. An unpleasant mixture of odors assailed his nostrils and told him plenty. A less experienced officer would be running outside to retch, or backing out the door white-faced and wide-eyed. Maybe he was too accustomed to gore and evil. If only the proverbial walls could talk, he mused, his job would be a lot faster and easier. A full size bed was centered on the rear wall with the victim’s body strapped across it, to the right of where he was standing. A nightstand sat on the other side of the bed, beneath the only window. On it, there was a green lamp and a clock radio that was flashing the time: 2:30 AM. A dresser had snapshots covering almost the entire surface of its age-mottled mirror. Clothes were strewn over the floor, mounded upon an old wooden rocking chair, and tumbling out of the closet doors. A poster of a scantily clad girl with the Hooters emblem across her large breasts was pinned to the left wall with round tacks. The den he had just passed through didn’t look any better than this messy scene.

  Dan wondered if the victim was a male prostitute who’d picked up the wrong john. Had a homosexual encounter gotten out of hand while they were high on drugs, and his partner fled in fear? Or was this a matter of revenge, as the poor bloke appeared badly beaten and sodomized? He wanted a closer look but was waiting for the CSI team and ME to give him the go head and a COD.

  He remembered his Captain’s warning which had awakened him at two this morning: “Dan, from the preliminary report, we’ve got a new case that sounds strikingly similar to a murder that occurred two months ago. I want you and Mory to look into both of them and make sure we don’t have a psycho on our hands. We don’t want the kind of public pressure and panic a case like this would cause. It could make our life a living hell. The victim’s wife found him a little before two this morning when she got home from work. Call me before you write your report and let me know what you come up with.” A voice behind him interrupted his thoughts.

  “Makes your skin crawl, doesn’t it? I didn’t think there were that many sickos in Augusta, but this is the second time I’ve seen almost this same thing in two months.” Harold Bates chattered on, “I’ve been working in the lab for almost five years, so I’ve seen a lot. I even worked on a woman who’d been mutilated similar to this a couple years ago. But I’ve never seen a man tortured this way. What a horrible way to die.”

  Dan looked at Bates, one of the special crime scene investigators, who was trying to capture the macabre sight on film before he bagged evidence. Harold was tall and slender with light brown hair and an odd shade of green eyes. His face was scarred from a bad case of teenage acne, but he wasn’t ugly or self-conscious. Dan noted that he seemed to be gentle and caring when investigating a crime scene. His glasses made him look like the classic nerd, but he was good at his job. “What do you remember about the first one? It look like this?”

  “Kinda like this, Lieutenant. The first guy was tied to his bed spread eagle style, hands and feet to the bedposts, but rope like this was used. We figured that one was a junkie or male prostitute. He had needle tracks on his arms and his legs from frequent shooting up. His name was Ted something or other. The friend that found him claimed he wasn’t a homo, said he was some kind of stud with the ladies. But there he was, tied to the bed with lots of wax drippings and... you know, sex at both ends, some pretty strange sex. I’ve done rape kits and gathered evidence from many women, but I’ve never seen anything as awful as this. Now I’ve seen it twice in two years. First a female and now a male.” Harold walked to the other side of the bed to make sure he had pictures from all angles. “We’ve got evidence over here. Seems he was gagged and blindfolded at some point, just like the other man. I’ll bag these later.”

  Dan glanced to his left as the medical examiner returned from the bathroom. He had been told that the auburn haired woman was in her mid-fifties and had served on the local police force for almost ten years, until she got fed up with the system for letting criminals go free and for ramming new rules down the policemen’s throats. The rights, Dan fumed, which were now misused to protect the guilty and to blame a policeman for something he had failed to do or had done wrong in order to arrest and convict a criminal. He knew that Henri, short for Henrietta, had returned to school and earned a medical degree, certain she could be more helpful in another capacity a
nd at least bring some part of the evil deed to resolution.

  “Mornin’, Henri. Got us a real gut twister here.” Dan greeted the first female in the history of the city to become the chief medical examiner. Though she’d been at her new job for only a month, he already had decided from prior work together that Henrietta Harper was going to be the detective’s gift from heaven. Henrietta was tough but, having been a police officer, knew they were on the same team: the last ME had been territorial with information gathered in his investigations.

  “Yeah, looks like Ed got out just in time to leave the weirdoes to us. We’ll be taking the body to the lab soon where I can run some tests and do a rape kit. I’ll know more once I’ve completed the autopsy,” Henrietta stopped and smiled. “But I assume you want my first impressions, so I’ll tell you what I’ve put together so far.”

  Henrietta took a deep breath and looked down at her notepad, her short reddish-brown locks dropping toward her brows. “Vic’s name is David Crouch, age thirty-one. Lives here with his wife. She was at work at a strip joint at the time of death. He’s been dead approximately four hours. Liver temp puts T-O-D at about ten PM. His wife left for work about eight o’clock. The perp must have arrived soon after that because it took hours to do this much prep, damage and clean up. He has a lump and bruise on the back of his head, but I don’t think he was struck hard enough for that to render him unconscious. My guess is the blow only stunned him enough to be overpowered, stripped and bound. There’s sperm in his mouth and rectum indicating oral and anal sodomy. We’ll send samples to LifeCo for testing. I’ll also be looking for any pubic hairs that don’t belong to the victim. Let’s hope at least one of the attacker’s hairs got caught in his teeth or a rectal crease.”