8
Lee Healso was a cute and attractive twenty-two year-old girl of Japanese ancestry. She had started working in Las Vegas as a dancer, but between legitimate dance jobs, she turned to hitting the streets and selling sex for money. She and her friends called themselves sexual escorts, but the police called them hookers. Amore Carpenter was of Japanese and English ancestry, but she had been found dead on the floor of the cell, the back of her head crushed inward. A blow to the head had also killed Nikki Rasmussen, but the fourth of Lee's friends, Monica Underwood, was missing. Ecklie suspected her of escaping with Bobbitt, but Grissom was not ready to take that belief at face value. Whatever had happened was locked in Lee's head.
"She's in shock." Dr. Thomas Shaw had arrived to the jail to check out the terrified girl. "She needs to be moved to the hospital."
"Not just yet, doc." Ecklie became more than a bit annoyed when a serial killer escaped his jail. "She's a witness in a double homicide."
"Let me talk to her." Grissom lifted his head up. "Let me try and get something from her."
"She's unstable." Shaw stood his ground. "She just watched her best friends killed right in front of her. She may not talk."
"I can try!" Grissom proved he cared a lot for these discarded pieces of humanity. Ecklie and Brass looked at each other in the jail corridor.
"You have five minutes."
Grissom quickly turned down the corridor for the single cell Healso had been moved. There was a female security officer standing in the open door. She stepped aside and allowed him entry to the cell then stepped out of visible range. Young Lee was sitting on the bottom bunk in silence. She hadn't moved. Clad in a red later top with leopard-skin covered tight pants and over painted with make-up and cosmetics, her fragile brown eyes just stared at the blank wall before her. Her best friends were gone. She was alone now.
"Lee," Grissom's voice was calm and fatherly. "Can we talk?"
"They're gone." Her fragile voice barely creaked. "They're all gone."
"I know, and I'm so sorry…" The bearded criminologist responded respectfully. "But… we didn't see it. Can you tell me what happened?"
"Tengu okawa tu amatsu." She spoke her native Japanese. "Face of the demon. I looked into her face."
"What did you see?"
"Face of the demon." Lee's tiny voice echoed. "Monica unleashed her."
"How did she do that?"
"She not leave her alone." The young beauty flashed back on the incident. She and her friends had been arrested for being boisterous at a pizza place out near the college when the owner got tired of them and called the police. That might have been it had Nikki not knocked over a rack of paper cups and created an incident that the police called disturbing the peace. The fight ended up with all of them getting arrested. Five police officers, two patrol cars, Lee and her friends were booked and tossed in the cell, but then Monica looked over and saw who was in the next cell.
"Oh my god…" It was an hour earlier, and Underwood recognized the other cellmate. "It's little Miss Independent!!"
"What are you doing in here?" Rasmussen looked through the bars at their neighbor. "Did someone catch you trying to sing?"
The Kelly Clarkson clone was sitting on the bottom bunk of her cell. Her back against the wall behind her, her legs stretched out and draped to the floor, she barely acknowledged the girls yelling at her.
"Is that Kelly Clarkson?" Lee's memories recalled the singer in jail with them. "Oh my god, it is her!"
"She looks like she's had a major boob job." Amore made the next snide comment. "She's built like Anna Nicole Smith!!"
"You never heard of Kleenex, baby!"
"What happened?" Underwood shot off the next remark. "Did Justin Guarini turn you down?"
Bobbitt started inching forward attracted to their comments.
"I bet Simon Cowell had her arrested for releasing records."
"Girls, girls…" Monica Underwood turned from the bars and tossed back her blonde hair. "Let's face it… she could never sing worth a damn." The Clarkson clone popped up behind her from out of nowhere and grabbed her by the hair. Jerking her head back into the bars hard silenced Underwood cruelly and dropped her to the floor. What happened next was to be unexpected. Healso, Carpenter and Rasmussen jumped back in shocked silence as Bobbitt stood on the lower horizontal support bar and grabbed two bars before her. Her teeth gritted together, her fingers curled tightly on the iron bars, she hissed and grunted in her conniption as she started pulling them apart. With her long brown hair flailing, her eyes contorted into hostile anger, she continued pulling at them, gradually getting a slight increase in space then a much wider area much more open. There was a creak, a groan from the strained steel and the Clarkson clone pulled an opening wide enough for her to get through.
"Guard!! Guard!!" Rasmussen started screaming at the door to her cell. Healso bounced off the brick wall in back first and collapsed to the floor. Carpenter tried striking Bobbitt next, but it barely fazed her. The Clarkson clone grabbed her by the jaw, lifted her off her feet and struck the back of her head against the steel bars. Underwood started fighting unconsciousness and lifting herself up to hear Nikki screaming her last. The back of her head would meet iron-wrought bars next. The next thing she knew, the Clarkson clone had turned back to her and grabbed Underwood up by her long blonde locks. Monica's screams sounded as she was flung into the bottom bunk with Bobbitt coming after her.
Her back hurting her, her head still dizzy, Lee Healso lifted her head up off the cold cement floor. Her vision a bit deluded, she listened to Monica screaming her head off. The Clarkson clone was killing her! She had her friend pinned to the bottom bunk under her body, but all she could see was the would-be Kelly pushing Monica deeper and deeper into the cot. Underwood's screams were inadvertently cut short; the strange sound of gurgling or sucking emanating from the bed. One minute, Underwood was on the bed under her attacker, and then she was no more, her clothing fell limp and empty; her devoid boots falling without her to the floor. Her breath racing, her pulse racing, Bobbitt stepped back on to the floor zipping her leather jacket back up and jumping on to the door. She grabbed the top of it and started working her inhuman strength on it as well. Flailing her upper body back and forth, her hair whipping around her, she peeled the top of the door outward like a tin can, working it backward and twisting it open that she could squeeze herself out. With the wrought iron door peeled open, she reached upward to a pipe in the ceiling and looked back briefly to Healso before pulling herself up out of the cell and scaling the underside of the ceiling looking for a way to freedom like a human spider.
"She absorbed my friend." Lee told Grissom with a haunted face. "She not human."
Sara Sidle meanwhile had kept busy by turning to the Internet for clues. Searches for Lisa Bobbitt had lead to website reports of the New York female slasher who had followed Jeff Hodges, her ex-boyfriend, around to kill the girls he had dated. Convinced that female psycho was not the one she was looking for, Sara then ran a search from the Chicago arrest report for Lisa Parker. Reporter Carl Kolchak had been a tabloid reporter for the International News Services there, and he had exacerbated the Chicago Police Department by claming that Bobbitt, then Lisa Parker, was a vampire. In the end, Kolchak only muddled the Chicago police's efforts to catch her, allowing the Clarkson clone to escape the city by distracting the police long enough for to vanish. The photo he took of her could have been the Las Vegas Lisa Bobbitt, but the grainy quality of the images could have been Sara herself as well.
Another link about Kolchak lead to the book he had written. In 1996, Kolchak, working with a paranormal researcher named David Collins, had published a book detailing his supposed clashes with the government over UFOs as well as near deaths with cryptids and paranormal forces. The determined reporter wanted to prove this activity was real, but supposed government agencies had censured the book. Copies of "The Kolchak Tapes" were hard to find, but prints still floated through used bookstores and discount bins. As Sara leaned in to study the photos from the book, her blood ran cold over the quality of a photo from 1933 Germany. There in the sepia-toned photo from Kolchak's collection was the Clarkson clone in a photo with the Fuhrer himself. She did not look like Kelly Clarkson; Kelly Clarkson looked like her!
"She hasn't aged a day in over seventy years!!" Sara told herself.
Forty miles out of town, truck driver Eugene Pratt pulled up alongside the shapely hitchhiker by the side of the road. Hauling a load of vegetables in a cooled truck to Wyoming, he was always looking for company on his long trip. The girl looked harmless. She was brunette, petite and looked to be not much of a threat. He stopped his truck alongside her as she hopped up on to his cab and opened his passenger door.
"Where you heading?" He called to her
"Denver." She claimed.
"Do you know you look like…"
"Yeah, yeah, yeah…"
"Well, hop on in…." Pratt waited her to swing her pack in and get settled. "I got a cooler of the sodas in back if you want one. Hey, what are you doing?" The girl had an odd look in her eyes. A few seconds later he was screaming for his life, and then he was no more and someone else was driving his rig…
END