Drained by E.H. Reinhard Page A

it.”
    “Would we expect to get it back?” Mr. Murphy asked.
    “If there is nothing on it that leads anywhere, absolutely. If there is, the computer would be used as evidence,” Beth said.
    Mr. Murphy looked at his wife.
    “Let them have it,” she said.
    The husband went back to the garage and returned a moment later with a black laptop case. “The computer is inside.” He set it on the dining-room table.
    I went through another half hour’s worth of questioning with the parents, just trying to get a better idea of the person their daughter was. Beth and I left their house a few minutes after noon and drove back to the hotel.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
    Monica’s body lay upon his embalming table. Brett had just slipped the needles into her thighs. A soothing calm came over him as he watched the blood flow. He knelt and watched it as it worked its way through the plastic tubing. The blood reached the end and ran out, into the drain in the floor. Brett took the tube in hand and let the blood flowing from the end cascade over his fingers.
    He looked up. From his kneeling position, he could just see Monica’s left hand hanging off the side of the table. “I have to say, Monica, I guess I’ve always had a thing with blood. I don’t know when it really started—probably six or seven. I had to go live in a boys’ home for a bit. The place was a real dump. Rats would climb through the walls at night. I started catching them and killing them. I guess I was just bored. I found it enjoyable to watch them bleed. Then I got shipped off to live with some foster parents. They didn’t care for me all that much. All they cared about was getting the checks from the state. They never really noticed I was there until I twisted the head off of a pigeon that flew into the front window of the house. I squeezed the blood from its body all over the living-room carpet. The foster parents found me with it in the living room. I blamed it on the cat, said it must have dragged it in from outside. The cat’s name was Sprinkles. He was a gray tabby. I killed him the next day.”
    He stood and poked his blood-covered fingers into the center of her forehead.
    “Those foster parents shipped me back to the boys’ home. The people in charge there thought it would be right to have me see a shrink. I did and spent years in therapy. Care to guess the first human I killed?”
    Monica, unconscious, didn’t respond.
    “Nope. Not the shrink. I killed Sally Best when I was twelve. She was the same age. Another foster family picked me up and welcomed me into their home. I went to school, got okay grades. Sally was popular but seemed nice, though she’d never talked to me. Well, I mustered up the courage to ask her to the fall dance. I figured all the other kids were going and it would be the normal thing to do. I made her a little card with a heart drawn on it. I asked her to circle yes or no to the question if she’d go with me. She ripped up the card I made right in front of me.
    She looked me in the eyes, laughed, and called me a creepy little weirdo. I can still hear her voice. The rest of the class joined in her laughter. Little Sally never made it home from school that day. Something happened to her on her walk: she accidently tripped and fell in front of a car.”
    Brett went to Monica’s right arm and inserted a needle into a vein at her elbow.
    “Do you want to know how many people I’ve killed?” Brett looked at her face.
    The woman lay motionless.
    Brett smiled. “That wall there behind your head is one of three. That’s not even close to all of them. The older I get, the more I perfect everything. I used to be reckless, killing every few months. Now I just do it in spurts—usually about five or ten at a time and then take years off. Give everyone enough time to forget about it, you know? I started with that after the wife and I got divorced. I was so happy with my newfound freedom that I went on a little rampage, turns out a bunch at