NOTE: This will be the last chapter posted until December or January - I'm using NaNoWriMo in November to finish this story up, and should hopefully move to editing it shortly thereafter so I can keep posting!
{*****}
...in an apparent attempt to recreate murders committed in the 1960s by Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler. My confidential sources tell me that a special task force has already been created focusing on this specific angle.
Peter Foley hit the Back button on his web browser, taking him back to the main page for Jill Morelli's blog. He'd just been reading her evening entry - the one she posted every weekday around 6pm. He spared a small smile for the perfectly made up image of Morelli displayed in one corner of the site - she was nowhere near as clever as she thought she was, but she had her moments, and he rather enjoyed reading about them.
Still, he had more important things to consider just now - like the speed, or lack thereof, at which the media was absorbing and then broadcasting the details of his work, and if it was sufficient for his overall plan. As far as he could tell, the general media was still one step - one killer - behind, and hadn't caught on to his recent change in methodology.
It was also possible, of course, that they were simply being kept from that realization. He didn't really have enough detailed information on the two lead Inspectors - Mears and Elliot - to fully gauge their competency, but he'd seen enough to think that they should have figured out the game by now. Admittedly, though, he was a little confused by the conspicuous absence of the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit if that were in fact the case.
On the other hand, Mears had apparently had the profoundly good sense to bring Amanda Collins into the game. With Collins on board, involving the FBI would be beyond redundant - she'd understand what was happening the instant Mears and Elliot got her all the information they'd managed to gather. He was trying to patient, but he hoped it wouldn't take long - until he and Amanda Collins were on the same page, he was a Van Cliburn, or maybe an Itzhak Perlman, performing without an audience.
A huge smile broke across Peter's face. It was good to be in synch with one's muse - he just hoped Amanda Collins understood that his performance was for her and her alone.
The smile stayed in place as he reached for his worn copy of Our Sons, Our Killers: Profiles Of The American Serial Killer. He felt a little bad about the book's condition, but this was his working copy, and he had a pristine copy, complete with autograph, safely tucked away.
The damage to this particular copy had been come by honestly enough. It was his primer, his Bible, and he used it heavily during the planning stages of each kill. It was essential that he get everything exactly right, down to the smallest particular - that was the only way to properly showcase his own subtle twists and trademarks, so that Amanda Collins could properly appreciate his genius the way he did hers.
{*****}
"...this latest killer. Apparently, the San Francisco Police Department has chosen to bring in noted criminal psychologist Doctor Amanda Collins. You may remember her from the Daryl Lee Cullum case - her expert testimony helped convict Cullum for the killings of a dozen women. He's currently on death row awaiting execution..."
Nikita, watching the news in the conference room the task force had taken over, held her breath as she waited for the inevitable segue into Daryl lee Cullum's horrifying attack on Amanda. The idea of Amanda being reduced to just another of Cullum's victims pissed her off in a way she couldn't quite express - fortunately, the news report made the wise decision not to go there, and a breath Nikita didn't know she was holding whooshed out of her as she shut the television off.
"Aw fuck," Owen exclaimed, voice overly loud in the sudden silence. He turned to Nikita, who was eying him quizzically. "I ran into Morelli in Collins' parking lot the other night - I didn't give her anything, so I figured it would be okay. She must have said something to one of her buddies."
Nikita snarled a curse much like Owen's as she dove for her phone. It started ringing before she even had it in her hands, and the name displayed was exactly who she'd thought it would be. "Listen, Amanda-"
"You lied to me!" Amanda sounded nearly hysterical with fury, and Nikita couldn't blame her. "My name is all over the news!"
Owen winced as he overheard, and tried to look apologetic before moving safely beyond Nikita's reach. Glaring at him one last time, Nikita tried to calm Amanda down. "It wasn't us, Amanda, I swear. A reporter by the name of Jill Morelli has been dogging the case and must have figured it out somehow."
That sucked a little of the wind from Amanda's sails, but not much. "Do you even understand what this means, Inspector? What kind of danger it puts me in? What kind of danger it puts Alex in?"
Nikita flinched at that, though none of this was her fault. "Look, if I'd known that Morelli was going to be a problem, I would have handled it. I'll find some way to make this right, okay?"
Looking up, she realized that every pair of eyes in the meeting room was fixed on her with open and avid interest. Rolling her eyes, she stood up and grabbed her coat before heading for the door. "I'm coming over, okay? We'll find a way to fix this - whatever you need to be safe."
{*****}
"...the brutal murders of twelve women. During the trial, Cullum escaped from custody and attacked Doctor Amanda Collins, killing the police officer assigned to protect her. Police remain tight-lipped about the progress and focus of their investigation, but today's discovery of a possible fourth victim is undoubtedly causing many San Franciscans to wonder if the police have made any progress at all in catching the killer..."
Daryl Lee Cullum ground out his cigarette, then got up and turned off the tiny television that sat on shelves across from his bunk. It had been a gift from one of his many female admirers.
"Well, good for you, Amanda," Daryl Lee said at length, addressing his empty cell and the blank television screen.
"Hey, good for you, Daryl Lee," came the sarcastic reply from the neighboring cell, but Daryl Lee ignored it.
Joe Dellums - the source of the sarcastic comment - apparently thought it was hilarious, and chortled about it for a full five minutes. He stopped just as suddenly as he'd started, probably having forgotten why he'd been laughing to begin with.
No one said anything, though. Joe Dellums was no genius by any stretch of the imagination, but he'd managed to slice and dice a fellow inmate during his last stay at San Quentin - that was no mean feat, considering the frequency and thoroughness with which both prisoners and cells were searched. The thought of doing more time was meaningless to Joe, since he was already serving three consecutive life sentences for a combination of rapes, murders, and breaking-and-entering.
Daryl Lee, for his part, had about 50 IQ points on Joe Dellums, and used that heightened intellect to stay the fuck away from him.
Daryl Lee was of the firm opinion that anyone believing hell was only experienced in the afterlife had never entered the gates of San Quentin. The state penitentiary - now over 150 years old - sat across the bay from San Francisco, on the other side of Paradise Cove. Daryl Lee still marveled that a little stretch of water was all that kept him separated from Amanda Collins.
In truth, however, the good doctor had little to fear from that. San Quentin was one of the most finely tuned and impregnable maximum security facilities out there - escaping from it would be like escaping the gates of Hell itself. Even just walking the yard was an exercise in terror and danger - between five and six thousand of California's most hardened felons lived within those walls, and both prisoners and guards alike lived in a state of constant vigilance.
The most stringent unit of San Quentin was the Adjustment Center - a prison within a prison. The guards referred to it by its initials - AC - but it had always been better known as 'the hole'. The most famous inmate to be housed there - Black Panther George Jackson - had been killed crossing the yard in 1971 after leading a mini-insurrection that left six dead.
The lesson there was that no one escaped the hole. Daryl Lee Cullum, living in Room 23 on the North Tier for this past year, had taken that lesson to heart when he made it his new home after his capture and subsequent re-trial.
Like most residents of the Adjustment Center, Daryl Lee was not considered safe enough or trustworthy enough to allow a prison job. He only got to walk the yard - to see the administration buildings, the main gate's gun tower, and the armed balcony towers - on those rare occasions when he had a meeting with his lawyer.
On those occasions, he walked as slowly as he could get away with to allow himself just a few more seconds of precious sunlight - he couldn't know it, but he'd grown every bit as pale as Amanda Collins.
Daryl Lee made sure never to complain, though - sometimes, as he made his way along the prison stairs in the Adjustment Center, he heard the groans and wailings of the prisoners currently occupying the strip cells. These were windowless concrete boxes with a hole in the floor to act as a latrine, and Daryl had made an very intelligent decision to avoid ever being put in one if at all possible.
It was more a fervent vow than a simple decision, actually, and to that end Daryl Lee Cullum was obsequiously obedient to every guard in the North Tier. The byproduct of this behavior was that Daryl Lee had somehow managed to become a model prisoner, and that he'd found his time in San Quentin to be exceedingly productive.
Now that Joe Dellums had quieted down, Daryl Lee could get on with the next set of scheduled activities. Picking up his Bible and his hard cover, first edition copy of Our Sons, Our Killers: Profiles Of The American Serial Killer, he carried them both over to his bunk. He'd already pulled out his handwritten first draft of his own book - Daryl Lee, My Story: The Truth About Why I had To Kill.
The completed manuscript had been written longhand with a black felt-tip plastic pen - not due to any specific artistic choice on his part, but just because that's all that was available to the prisoners. Daryl Lee hadn't minded that at all - writing helped pass away the long hours that would otherwise be spent staring at the gray walls of his cell or enduring the seemingly endless rantings and arguments of his neighbors.
He'd tried to spruce up his cell as best he could, using what was available to him, and magazine cutouts and photos of the most attractive of his correspondents covered parts of the wall. Even with those embellishments, though, there was no disguising the fact that he was in a claustrophobic hell mapped out in cold steel bars and concrete walls the color of oatmeal - and, odd as it sounded, Daryl Lee actually kind of respected the honesty there...
Unlike people on the outside, finding time to write wasn't exactly a challenge for Daryl. In his own words, the only other things he was allowed to do were eating, showering, shitting, and Bible class - and Bible class had been 'temporarily' suspended ever since another inmate had hidden a knife in his New Testament and used it cut off the ear of his new cellmate, whose religious views apparently clashed with his.
Daryl hadn't really found the canceled Bible study to be much of a hardship. It had allowed him to finish his book, and even get a typed copy made - one of his correspondents, Sherry Diane, was an aspiring paralegal (and Sunday School teacher) who had believed in his literary efforts enough to type the handwritten manuscript up for him.
Sherry had also taken it upon herself to further help Daryl Lee out by sending a copy of the manuscript to one of those True Crime publishers. They'd eaten it up, and, after some back and forth with Daryl Lee's lawyer, had agreed to purchase it - Daryl Lee, My Story: The Truth About Why I Had To Kill would be hitting the shelves in paperback any day now.
Daryl Lee himself would see no profits from the book - by law, any profits made would go to the families of his victims - but he'd made his peace with that. Given his circumstances, the fame and attention was of more use than the money anyway. He'd even made private arrangements for an autographed advance copy to be sent to Amanda Collins, the person whose opinion he valued most - he deeply regretted that he wouldn't be there to see her face when it arrived.
Sherry, ever the soul of compassion and forgiveness, thought Daryl Lee's book was a work of genius and would be a must-read for every young person in America. In fact, he owed the final chapter detailing his finding of religion to her - he'd never really intended to include anything about that, since he didn't want anyone being distracted from seeing his true message about his wicked ways by the thought that someone as bad as he was could find redemption.
No, the entire point of Daryl Lee, My Story had been to fulfill the God-given duty of revealing the horrors of his childhood, and to tell the world how Satan had compelled him to do all those evil things. Besides, Daryl Lee felt that he was too unique to just lump in with other serial killers - he wasn't some quiet repressed freak who'd suddenly started killing people.
He was far too clever and handsome to be compared to those other guys. His gaze involuntarily slid to the small shaving mirror over his sink, smiling at the wavy red hair done up like Elvis (minus the grease) and the blue eyes that seemed all the more vivid against his prison uniform.
The rest of the reflected image he filled in from imagination, his delusion that he was some sort of sex symbol allowing him to overwrite the aspects of his appearance that were less than ideal. He never saw his bad skin reflected, or the neglected, stained teeth produced by a lifetime of bad or nonexistent dental habits. He also had a completely different mental image of the puffy lips that he just knew drove girls wild.
To be fair, it wasn't as if there was anything challenging Daryl Lee's delusions. He'd never had any problems attracting girlfriends - though even he admitted that most of them were just as sick and twisted as he was. He'd probably have no trouble keeping them, either, if it weren't for his irresistible urge to carve them up once he started to get close to them.
It definitely posed a problem as far as maintaining any kind of long term relationship - Daryl Lee acknowledged this, and blamed his troubles on the lack of a healthy parental role model. His father had been shot in a bar brawl when Daryl Lee was four years old - before that, he'd beaten Daryl Lee, Daryl Lee's mother, and Daryl Lee's sister on a regular basis.
Daryl lee's mother hadn't been broken or cowed by the abuse - it had just turned her hard and mean, and had put some pretty extreme notions in her head. She'd ranted and raved at every opportunity about how evil the flesh was, and also praised God at every opportunity for removing Daryl Lee's father from her life.
None of this was especially compatible with a young son entering puberty. Daryl Lee's first wet dream had brought her complete and focused wrath down on him, and she'd tied him to his bed for three days, denying him food and water in hopes of purifying him. Once she released her terrified son, she very specifically forbade him to masturbate - that was the sum total of their conversation about the physical changes that had led her to imprison him for three whole days.
She'd also been hard at work during those days to ensure that there was simply no opportunity to defy her edict. She removed the door handle from his bedroom door and from the bathroom door - as well as taking the locks off every door in the house - allowing her son no sense of privacy whatsoever. Daryl Lee was from that moment on allowed only a single minute at a time to himself in the bathroom - after those sixty seconds had passed, his mother stood there with him while he finished his business.
It was entirely possible that Daryl Lee's growing rage and increasingly homicidal fantasies might have remained solely focused on his mother - had she lived. Unfortunately for all his future victims, Daryl Lee's mother died in an automobile accident when he was just fifteen. With no other target, an angry and confused Daryl Lee had started taking out his trauma on whoever happened to be both conveniently placed and vulnerable before finally being put into an adolescent reform program.
His own sister would probably would have wound up as one of his victims had they not been separated after their mother's death. All contact between them had ended just before Daryl Lee moved from troubled and violent to completely unhinged.
Writing his autobiography had proved something of a pleasant challenge for Daryl Lee - coming from what he himself described as poor white trash family and background, he'd never really had much formal schooling. The reform program had actually helped him there - he actually managed to earn his high school diploma before his release, and had even been educating himself in some of the classics. (This was also where he had acquired his skill with woodcarving, which he later applied to carving flesh instead.)
When he finally decided to start writing his book, though, he'd been hard-pressed to find a tone and style he deemed suitable. After a while, and some trial and error, he finally settled on a combination he thought was perfect - a blend of Amanda Collins' no-nonsense prose, his translation of Bible, and the straightforward but engaging language of the news shows he liked to watch in his cell.
He always started his writing sessions by reading a chapter from his Bible, after which he would leaf through it until he found a juicy quote to open the next section of his book with. A favorite find of his, stumbled across while documenting his mother's ramblings about sin, was I Corinthians 6:19 - "...do you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?"
The next step would be to look through Amanda Collins' book and choose a serial killer to read about - he really liked her way of being able to just pick apart how the crazy bastards' minds worked. His favorite so far was Ed Gein - the man had literally turned murder into art, making mobiles from body parts, lampshades and trash cans from human skin, and using human skulls as dinnerware.
Once he had started writing his book, Daryl Lee had felt an inescapable compulsion to reveal the whole and complex truth about his life and his childhood. He'd already done as much for Amanda Collins during their sessions - he could talk to that woman for hours and hours and hours - but she'd only given him a few lousy pages at the end of her book. When he'd asked her about that, she'd explained that he hadn't come to trial yet and the fact that she was a primary witness for the prosecution limited what she could include.
He'd accepted the excuse, though he hadn't quite believed it - refusing to accept it would mean looking at why it had pissed him off so much to begin with, and that was a can of worms best left unopened. See, underneath the repentant, born-again persona, Daryl Lee hadn't really changed much at all - he desperately wanted to get his favorite knife back and use it to carve some pretty patterns into Amanda Collins' perfect skin.
If Daryl Lee was being completely truthful - which he generally was not - he very much wanted to have Amanda Collins all to himself for a weekend in some quiet place where no one would find them until he was ready to be found. That desire - that need to show the good doctor firsthand what really made him tick - was what had gotten him into trouble at Berkeley, and he was still kicking himself for not being more careful.
Over this last year of imprisonment, his obsession with Amanda Collins had also expanded to include taking his revenge on her for being put here. It was an impossible dream he was dreaming, but one he'd find some way to realize: one day, he'd bust out of here, out of San Quentin, and go find the one woman truly worthy of his attention anymore...
{*****}
It was 7:30 in the evening, and Peter Foley had just completed his weekly scrubbing of his house - precisely as his mother had taught him. Feeling he had earned a respite after so conscientiously meeting his obligations, Peter immediately retreated to his basement.
The basement was quiet and dim - he had turned off all the lights except the one directly above where he sat, and most of the electronics he'd brought down there were either powered off or sitting dormant. The remaining noise was exactly the correct amount and composition to function as white noise.
Peter was actually enjoying the respite from sensory input - ever since he'd past through the first, or aura phase, of his development as a killer, he'd found that all his senses had become unusually heightened. Colors were sharper, time moved oddly, his skin was more sensitive to the touch - even his hearing had become sharper, and he could easily have broken down and isolated the various noises around him had he wanted to.
He was between kills just now, and needed the peace and quiet to counterbalance the post-kill depression that had already begun to creep in, and that would only grow steadily worse until the next kill. There had been a gap of several weeks between his first and second kills, and the depression had been almost crippling - he'd decided then not to wait so long between kills, even if it meant a little extra work in the planning stages.
He'd known that it was time to change patterns after the final Boston Strangler recreation just by the way he'd still felt slightly hollow inside even under the rush of near-perfection. He'd mastered one model, it was time to move on to the next - deciding on the Hillside Strangler had been easy enough, though switching had also meant extra time spent on planning and setup, especially in this case.
It had payed off well - he'd felt that same sense of completion with just the one kill, his recreation had been so perfect - but he was already itching to move on to the next model. He'd actually already chosen the next model and begun his planning, though he was still debating himself over whether it was safe to act again so soon.
In the interim, though, it wouldn't hurt to start preparing - he hadn't been able to sleep for than two or three hours a night lately, anyway. Tonight's task would keep him well-occupied, he decided after reading over the list of things to obtain: bullets, music, gas for his car, ink to print up a note for Amanda Collins...
First, though, he had an email he wanted to finish - he'd enjoyed reaching out to send Amanda that link to his video, and wanted to do it again. He was still trying to work out what to say, so he got up and walked over to the large gray footlocker sitting out on a nearby workspace.
Inside the footlocker were a quartet of smaller covered plastic containers about the size of a shoe box - jokingly referred to by Peter as Pandora's Boxes, each box contained mementos and souvenirs of his kills. The idea of keeping trophies wouldn't have occurred to Peter spontaneously, but Amanda had been quite thorough in outlining the practice in her book and the notion had caught his fancy.
Each of the boxes held the small treasures he'd stolen from his previous four victims, and Peter had found that handling them could ease the lingering malaise he felt between kills. They were all just tiny things for all that they held so much power to sooth him - a tube of lipstick or a compact, maybe a bottle of perfume or a small piece of jewelry. The primary criteria was that they were small enough to easily fit in a pocket - which also meant that they were so small no one except his victim would ever even notice their absence.
Even so, he treated them with a care and dignity bordering on reverence - the same sort of reverence given ancient artifacts of great historical importance. That was part of Peter's particular vision - that he'd be so famous that these trophies he'd collected would end up on display in some great museum somewhere as part of some macabre but well-known wing detailing famous serial killers.
Tonight, though, those small boxes held only minor interest for him - he checked only that the contents of each box were in order before setting the box aside. Once all four boxes were removed, they revealed a larger, shallower covered box underneath - the kind you'd put your out-of-season clothes in to pack them away until it was time to wear them again.
The lid of this particular box had a richly detailed painting of Helen of Troy, scanned out of a book on Greek mythology and printed specifically for this purpose. There was also another printout containing several lines from Frederich Schiller's poem 'The Feast Of Victory.' Peter knew them by heart and couldn't help reciting them aloud.
...The Spartan eyes his Helen's charms,
by the best blood of Greece recaptured;
round that fair form his arms
(a second bridal) wreath, enraptured.
Woe waits the work of evil birth,
revenge to deeds unblessed is given!
For watchful o'er the things of earth,
the eternal council halls of Heaven.
Yes, ill shall ever ill repay;
Jove to the impious hands that stain
the alter of man's heart
again the doomer's doom shall weigh!
Somehow, in all his many readings of the poem, and the myth that it referred to, Peter had gotten that particular section's meaning all tangled up in his head. In his mind, the world itself was cruel and evil and unjust, and in dire need of punishment. He himself had been born to be its judge and avenger, and he alone was due fair Helen - Amanda Collins - as his victory prize.
Removing the lid from the box - which held the most sacred of all his sacred momentoes - he picked up and examined every token of Amanda Collins that he'd been able to collect. The very top layer was composed of all the photographs he'd managed to take of Amanda in her apartment, including a few with the young woman he understood to be her foster daughter. The layer underneath that consisted of various CDs and DVDs - one of them, the one he lingered on longest, was labeled 'Berkeley'.
The bottom-most layer consisted of various file folders and printouts, some of them clearly original school papers. These were all kept neatly and meticulously stacked at the bottom of the box to keep them safe - his collection of Amanda's articles and reports and schoolwork had required great effort to build, and was nearly as precious to him as his signed copy of her book, which was also in this box.
For this very reason, a small flash drive had its own place of honor in one corner. He'd spent many happy hours scanning and otherwise copying everything in that box that he possibly could, placing it all on a tiny drive that would serve as some measure of consolation and replacement if anything happened to his originals.
Peter reached for the small plastic drive, pondering if he should perhaps stash it somewhere separate to maximize its chances of survival in case of emergency or disaster. He didn't like the idea of it being apart from his other mementos of Amanda Collins, though - perhaps he could create a second backup on another drive?
Before he could ponder that further, however, his fingers brushed up against the cool plastic protecting the silk cloth that had been placed underneath the drive itself. The bit of black silk in that bag was a woman's slip, carefully folded and sealed in a plastic bag, and the only item of clothing to have made it into Peter's collection of trophies.
He'd stolen that slip from Amanda Collins' own bedroom. He resisted the urge to remove it from the bag and hold it to his nose, but he knew the scent of her perfume would still be strong if he were to do so. Just the mere thought of that night brought the rush of it all back, and Peter closed his eyes as he let himself replay it all.
He'd snuck into the apartment through a security flaw no one had noticed, waiting in a dark corner of the loft until she'd wandered upstairs. She'd sensed him at some point, somehow, and called out for someone - he hadn't been sure if it was for her daughter, or if she had a lover he somehow didn't know about.
Standing there in the dark, listening to her call out a man's name in that honeyed voice of hers, it had been hard not to answer her. He'd longed so badly to go to her, to soothe her loneliness even as he drank in her fear - the picture in his mind of his hands wrapped around her neck, her skin soft under his fingertips, had been almost more than he could stand in silence.
He'd made himself stay hidden, though, keeping to the dark, quiet lower floor of the apartment as he explored Amanda Collins' private sanctuary. It was hard to see much detail in the little light he'd had available, but he'd seen enough to know that she had the exquisite taste he'd expected she would - and seen enough to know that she shared his love of the electronic and mechanical.
That sudden flash of kinship receded to the background as he heard the shower start running upstairs. That prompted a new image - one of pale perfect skin wet with water and blood. He'd actually made it up the stairs and into her bedroom, driven by pure need and instinct, before he managed to pull himself back and calm himself again.
The opportunity to search her bedroom - her sanctum sanctorum, if he understood anything at all about women - was impossible to resist, because of the risk rather than in spite of it. He lingered at her vanity for several minutes, looking through makeup and perfume and hairpins before he decided there was too much risk of something being missed.
Taking one last look around the room - he didn't have much time, not that any amount of time would have truly been sufficient to worship at this particular shrine - he'd noticed the clothes laid out on the bed. He'd tried to picture Amanda getting dressed - the panties first, then the bra, then the crisp white shirt and black slacks - then frowned at what should have been an altogether pleasant image.
After a heartbeat or two as he stood staring at the offending garments, he realized the problem. The outfit Amanda had picked just wasn't the one she should be wearing - she'd look lovely enough, to be sure, but she should be wearing a dress, not slacks, and a vivid red instead of the somber white and black she'd chosen.
Snatching up the clothes, he'd quickly returned them to the closet. He'd started looking around for something that fit his mental image of Amanda's ideal wardrobe, and couldn't believe his blind, dumb luck when he found not just any any red dress, but *the* red dress - the one she'd worn that day at Berkeley.
Knowing he couldn't have much more time at all before he was discovered - and deciding he was not yet ready for that - Peter had quickly grabbed the dress and a completely different set of lingerie he thought better suited to it. The black silk slip had fallen to the closet floor during his rummaging - it had smelled of her perfume, and he'd been unable to resist the impulse to take it after being unable to take anything from the vanity.
It had taken incredible self control to tuck the undergarment away to preserve that scent, but he couldn't bear the thought of it fading away. He'd tried and tried since then, but had yet to locate her specific perfume - none of the names he'd seen on her vanity had been right so far.
Inspiration struck Peter as he imagined Amanda clad in only that slip, the black silk hardly hiding anything as it skimmed her body from shoulder to mid-thigh. The idea wasn't tied to that image itself, necessarily, but Amanda had always been a muse to him and the special magic only she possessed had filled him once again.
Forcing himself to very carefully repack and replace the boxes and the footlocker containing them - exceedingly difficult, given his current excitement, but very necessary - Peter sat back down at his computer and opened the folder where he stored all of his pictures. After a quick peek into several subfolders to confirm that he did indeed have the images he wanted, he opened his copy of Photoshop and used it to load the base image he wanted to start from.
It would delay his other errands, but he was fine with that - creating the perfect present for Amanda that he'd just envisioned was worth the wait.