Clenching his jaw, Vlad snapped back to reality. He couldn’t stand here indefinitely and remember Tara. Nor did he have time to fantasize about what it would be like to watch Kristi as she showered and toweled dry, her wet hair clinging to her white skin. His teeth ground together and he pushed aside the want that always snaked through his blood. He knew that his lust was only one part of his life, and the girls he so lovingly sacrificed were only a means to an end.

Without wasting a second, he hurried down the stairs and out a back door. On quiet footsteps he made his way through the alleys and streets, always taking a different path, never allowing himself the luxury or trap of using the same route, one where he might be seen over and over again.

Noiselessly he unlocked the door to his private space and entered. He was restless and knew the bracing cold water of the pool would settle him, but there was no time. He’d spent too long at the window, watching Kristi Bentz, trying to decipher what it was she was doing at her desk so long. She’d spent hours on the Internet and he doubted that she was studying for any of her classes.

Already dressed in black, he spent a few minutes applying dark face paint, pulled on a wig of light brown, then covered his features with a nylon stocking…just in case. He already had lifts for his shoes, so he appeared taller than he was…no one would recognize him and he’d been careful in his dealings with the women, so that there would be no way to link him to them.

He walked quickly, past the shimmering pool and further to the space beneath the old hotel’s kitchen. He unlocked a heavy door and carefully pushed it open, feeling the cold breath of winter against his skin, the kiss of Jack Frost. He snapped on a light. The single bulb illuminated the interior of the freezer in a glaring light that reflected in the thick bands of ice crystals lining the frigid room and sparkling, almost giving life to the open, dead eyes of the four women who hung on meat hooks, their skin frozen and pale as snow, the muscles of their faces solidified into expressions of sheer horror.

He hated to let them go.

He enjoyed visiting them after a long swim.

He’d walk between their cold bodies feeling the icy air on his own naked flesh. He would rub against them, feeling an erotic high, his white-hot blood almost boiling in his veins, the arctic air against his skin and the hard, smooth frozen muscles of these, the first of what would be many.

Licking his cracked lips, he leaned forward and ran his tongue over Dionne’s breast, darker than the others, the nipple taut in icy death.