Read Top Ten for Free Online Page B

tapped the wall in a random succession of spots. “Connect the dots, Grace. Connect the dots.”
    “When was she found?”
    “April second, though we know she was killed on the first.”
    “April fools day,” Ariel said. “The second significant day with Valentine’s day.”
    “And March fourth, Agent Grace?” Jaworski challenged her. “What day of significance is that, other than the day that Ricardo Lomanico choked on his own dick?”
    There was no answer to be had. She was thinking too fast, here. Taking in too much all at once and trying to put it in place, without knowing what the places were. She was trying a puzzle without having a picture for reference. That would not work. She had to see all the dots before trying to connect them.
    “Who was next?” Ariel asked, signaling her readiness to go on. Jaworski obliged.
    “This one is called ‘Taken For A Ride’,” Jaworski said. The accompanying photos showed the naked upper torso of a man seemingly grafted to a horse lying on its side, both dead. “The guy with half of himself missing was James Ondatter, victim number four. He drove a taxi in Centre Hall, Pennsylvania. He was found in the same area. The mount he’s stuck to was called Lady Anne Green Apples. Her owner looked out a window in the morning last April third and saw Lady Anne galloping around the pasture. It looked like someone was riding her. Someone was.”
    “The horse was alive when he did this?” Ariel exclaimed more than asked.
    “Police shot it when they got there. They found Ondatter’s lower half less the dick stitched to the underside of another horse wandering through open country outside of town. The dick was in the horse’s rectum, which was stitched up. That one died before they could shoot it. Stress from a too-high dose of a veterinary tranquilizer called equipsyx.”
    “He has access to drugs.”
    “And surgical glues, sutures,” Jaworski said. “But we’ve done those dots. Pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, doctors, etcetera, etcetera.”
    “You couldn’t have checked everywhere,” she said.
    “You can never check everywhere, Agent Grace. And even if you could, there’s no guarantee you’d see this guy. I doubt he’s walking around drooling and showing off his collection of catgut and equipsyx.”
    Likely not, she knew, but he had to be getting his toys somewhere.
    “He used duct tape on Susan Rollins,” Jaworski added. “We ran the lot. It came back as shipping to over eight hundred outlets over a year. Maybe fifty thousand people bought it. Mostly cash transactions.”
    “Not much chance there,” Ariel commented. A thought came to her. “Susan Rollins was from New Jersey—how’d she end up in Centre Hall one day before Ondatter was found?”
    Jaworski tipped his head approvingly toward her. “Now there are some dots, Agent Grace. Susan Rollins was in Centre Hall on business. Real estate business. A company she worked for back home was purchasing a tract of land in the area. She was there for an appraisal. She never showed up.”
    “So why kill her?”
    “Dots, Agent Grace. Dots.” Another step down the line, to the last two in the grisly series. “For six months our freak was quiet. Then these next two were killed. Close in proximity, and even closer in time.” He touched a photo showing a naked man impaled on an iron rod in a clearing in some brush. “Lew Bradford, fifty. A car salesman. Found in a field near Oneida, his home town, on Friday morning. Not far from here. He was killed Thursday night. Napoxcypharin in his system, as well. Our freak hammered a sharpened piece of scrap iron about an inch thick into the ground so that about six feet of it stood proud like a flagpole. The he sat Lew Bradford on top, positioned the point in his anus, and let him slide. Gravity did the rest. Near the end our freak helped things along, tipping Bradford’s head back so the top of the pole would slide out his mouth. Topped it off with you know what on