“Why?”

“She was afraid I’d be mad at her. Look, have you seen it? She’s calling attention to herself. I found out about it by accident. She was posting something at the college library and I walked up behind her. She flipped out, first scared and then angry. That’s what we’d been fighting about when that little bitch Kayla convinced her I was a threat. I wasn’t a threat to Angie. I care about her. A lot. I never wanted anything bad to happen to her, but she was playing with fire. First Doug, then the journal.”

“Was there anything embarrassing about your relationship with her in the journal?”

He paused, averted his eyes. “I don’t know. I didn’t read everything.”

Lying again. Now Carina really wanted to read the journal.

“Would you object to a crime technician searching your apartment and borrowing your computer?”

“I’m a suspect.” He said it flatly.

Carina was treading on dangerous territory. She couldn’t admit he was a suspect without Mirandizing him. She didn’t want to go there, not yet. They wanted his cooperation first.

Then she’d nail him to the wall.

“All we want is to verify your story,” Will said. “If you’re not lying to us, we have no reason to suspect you. Do we?”

“Fine. Whatever you want. I didn’t kill Angie. You should be out there doing your job, finding Angie’s killer, not wasting time with me.”

He stared at Angie’s picture, his fingers caressing the screen. So beautiful…

Like all beautiful girls, she knew how to play the game, made all the right noises. But in the end, she was like all of them, nothing but a liar.

Angie was beautiful, but she was a fucking liar and she deserved everything she’d gotten. Everything.

He missed her. She’d been nice to him, sometimes. But other times she had shown her true self, just like every whore out there.

He could still hear his mother.

“My poor baby.”

He was far from a baby, but he could never contradict his mother.

Her speech had always been the same. “I know how hard it is for young men these days. Girls showing their tits to everyone, getting you all hard and aching and there’s nothing you can do. They do it on purpose, you know. To get you to do something stupid. They spread their legs and tell you to fuck them. Then they start crying and scream rape. Don’t fall into their trap. Don’t listen to their lies.”

“I don’t, Mama,” he always said. “I don’t even look.”

“Don’t lie to me. Men look. All of ’em want to fuck every bitch that crosses their path. Isn’t that why your daddy got into so much trouble? The whores. He was weak. He fell under their spell. Like those women of myth. What are they called?”

“The Sirens.”

“Exactly! Sexpots, luring men. Sirens.” She seemed proud of him somehow, in a way he never understood. “You’re a smart one, aren’t you? Smart enough to stay away from the Sirens. If only your father had listened to me.”

He ached. He wanted to talk to his father so bad. Dad would understand. The feelings. The darkness.

His father had been a great man. Great but weak, Mama said.

“Don’t you be a weak man. Don’t give in to those harlots. They only want to torment you with their titties and their twats. Don’t touch or they’ll cry rape so fast you’ll be in prison before you know it. Sluts, all of them.”

He would never be weak.

And when he touched them, they would never cry rape.

Angie would never say another word.

He locked the door, slid the deadbolt. Closed all the curtains. Double checked the doors and windows and curtains. Better safe. And then, only when he was certain no one could walk in, he brought the box of tapes to his bedroom. Shut and locked that door, too.

The tapes had been his father’s. He’d seen his father with them before, though he’d not known what was on them until after his father disappeared. Left without a good-bye. He’d only been a kid then, and he’d had a lot of time to think about it.

The Sirens.

They’d lured him away, made him desert his family, his sons.

He used to sit in his daddy’s closet just to smell him. Remember him and wish for something…more. He never knew exactly what, but he knew if his dad would come back everything would be different, better. Over time the Dad scent faded. Then they moved, and everything about his father was gone. He’d grown up and the memories became fuzzy, so he thought hard, trying to bring them back. He wasn’t certain all his memories were true, but they comforted him, so he kept them close.

The tapes had been in his daddy’s closet. Five of them in a shoe box, far in the corner, buried under boxes his mother had packed when his father hadn’t returned.

Each tape was fifteen to twenty minutes long. Dark and fuzzy, old, colorless. But he knew what was going on. He knew what the faceless man in the picture was doing.

Head buzzing, he turned off all the lights except the desk lamp, which cast long shadows across his immaculate room. Took off all his clothes. He was hard with anticipation, his penis quivering. He stared at himself, picturing how he’d looked in the mirror at the head of his bed when he slid into Angie’s body.

He’d come immediately, the excitement overtaking him.

The second time he’d forced himself in her he couldn’t come. Angry, he didn’t know why. But it wasn’t the same. So he took a beer bottle and shoved it up her cunt. Her body arched; her vocal cords strained in her neck. He watched her neck, enthralled, the faint scream deep in her chest turning him on like fucking her hadn’t.

He came.

Licking his lips, sweating, he slid the tape into the VCR.

The woman was naked on a bare dirty mattress. Because the film was black and white, he didn’t know if the stains were dirt, urine, or blood. Her hands tied to the headboard. Tears on her face. Her mouth opened.

He heard no scream because the tape was soundless, but he saw her body jerk, fighting the restraints, her throat tense, revealing the bones in her slender neck.

A man came partially into view, his face obscured by the shadows. He might have been thirty, a little older. He wore a dark T-shirt, no pants. His penis stood out in front of him. He fucked her. His hands went around her neck.

Fixated on the tape, he pulled at his own penis harder. Harder, to the point of pain, and still he couldn’t climax. It used to be so easy, but after having Angie all to himself, after watching her die, reality was so much better than the old, worn tape.

Next time he’d fuck her with his hands on her neck. Maybe then it would last longer. He’d already bought the plastic wrap, a thin layer of protection.

He reached over to the computer and started a slide show he’d made with his digital camera and downloaded onto his hard drive. Pictures of Angie on his bed. No sound necessary because her face of fear was all he needed. Her eyes. Her body straining. The vocal cords on her neck stretched taut.

Just like the tape.

But his masterpiece was better, much better, than the cheap, grainy, black-and-white film-everything he wanted to see in vivid color. The fear, the blood, the sweat on her face. Each still shot gave him what he needed. The slide show he’d created went faster and faster until the best part, when his back was in view, and his dick stuck out, and he slid the condom on and fucked her. Just like the movie. At last, he came.

He closed his eyes, panting. His hands reached for the navel ring in his own abdomen. The thrill that he had something of Angie’s in him began to diminish. Tears fell, but he didn’t feel them.

Why didn’t you kill her, Daddy? If you’d killed the bitch, she wouldn’t have called the cops and had you taken away.

Five years had seemed like forever, but it really wasn’t.

Only death was forever.