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Three years, two months, and thirteen days. That was how long Kagome had been chasing her. Her kills were precise, and clean: rooms scrubbed down save for the bodies laying decoratively out for the police to find. The killer’s love letter.
It had taken an entire year for Kagome and her team to realize that they were looking for a woman, because her colleagues (mostly men) were convinced that there was no way a woman could enact such violence onto a body. But to Kagome, there was always something intimate about it.
The choice of victim was the last clue. It was personal, but it was also random. The men were always high status, and they always had a trail of abuse and violence against women and children dragging behind them. Sometimes it was the public airing of messy divorce proceedings, sometimes it was a not guilty verdict from courthouse records, and in one instance, it tracked back to a Youtube video.
The killer killed awful men.
And they had a single video, from the apartment complex of one of the posher victims, of an extremely well-dressed woman with straight black hair and blood red lips and the willowy build of a ballerina. That was how she earned the nickname The Killer Doll.
She was… well, Kagome couldn’t keep her eyes off of her. Maybe that was why she’d begged to be made lead of the case when it was available: because she wanted to know the woman who hunted awful men. Maybe that was why she always brought home the Killer Doll’s files, instead of all the rest of the cases she was supposed to be paging through, going over it all with a fine-tooth comb, to find the things that everyone else had missed (bloody hell, until she got there, they’d missed that the Killer Doll was a woman.)
Now finally, Agent Higurashi had her. Because Kagome had the address of the next victim. A Renkotsu Shichin: a business man with a dark side—one that involved a lot of buyouts of famous Youtubers, usually young women. A real treat, Kagome groaned. She’d found the teary-eyed confession of one of the young women by mistake, and in reading the comments, realized that someone was very interested in that man… interested enough that it pricked Kagome’s intuition.
The person’s avatar was… a doll, with straight black hair, pouting cherry lips, and a haunting eye that made the doll look dead inside. And Kagome couldn’t believe it was a coincidence.
The Killer Doll was playing with them, playing with her.
But that wasn’t going to keep Kagome from doing her job. It was the first time ever that she had a lead on the victim before the murder took place. And she would not stand by and let this man (however awful) be hunted and killed as some sick form of vigilante justice.
So Kagome grabbed her jacket and her phone, and she hopped into her car. She knew from the previous killings that the Killer Doll would be stalking him, charting his movements, making sure that when the time came, she had enough time to play. It gave Kagome approximately 24 hours to warn him. And that would be enough time, she hoped, to get him to call the police and get a protective detail.
She finally had her!
Kagome would finally be able to unmask the Killer Doll!
Kagome was almost too excited to think about it.
As she raced down the street in her forest green Honda, toward the man’s apartment, she wondered whether the Killer Doll had always left clues like that in the past, or if she was getting bolder, because, in all honesty, the FBI really didn’t have any clue how to find and catch her. But it didn’t matter, because even as the FBI were clueless and sloppy, Kagome was detailed and unrelenting. And she was about to break the case wide open.
She’d call her office as soon as she talked to Renkotsu, as soon as she made him understand that he was being hunted. (And, who was she kidding? Getting to see the fear in his eyes knowing that a woman was after him for what he had done to those girls was… icing on the cake.)
Kagome pulled into the parking lot below Renkotsu’s building, then followed someone into the elevator. She could have been buzzed in, but right now, since she had a suspicion that Renkotsu was being hunted, she wanted to stay under the radar as much as she could. It would be better to come casually, figure out a plan, and then tip the Killer Doll off that the FBI was onto her by guarding her next desired victim.
Would the Killer Doll move on?
Kagome didn’t think so. The woman had chosen her prey and she would hunt it until she killed it. So Kagome had the advantage right now. Because Kagome knew the identity of the prey.
Kagome strolled up to the apartment that she knew to be Renkotsu’s: Apartment 1313. She looked both ways down the hall, making sure nothing felt out of place, and then knocked.
“Door’s open.”
Leave it to a man to believe that he was so invincible that he’d just let anyone in. Well, Kagome was going to be knocking some sense into him.
So Kagome opened the door and walked through it.
The apartment was mostly dark, with one light on toward the back. She could hear Miles Davis playing from whatever room had the light on. But something about the way her footfalls echoed through the place, and the way that even though she swore she heard someone’s voice welcome her in, the place felt menacingly empty, to the degree that her instincts begged her to turn around and run out of that room.
“Mr. Shichin?” Kagome called. “FBI.”
Nothing.
“Renkotsu?” Kagome called more loudly, maybe he hadn’t heard her the first time…
…But that didn’t make sense. Because he’d definitely heard her knock…
“Hello Kagome,” the voice came from the door. It was feminine, deep, like that of a jazz singer straight out of the Miles Davis album that was still playing softly in the background.
Kagome spun around and came face-to-face, not with the man this apartment was supposed to belong to, but with a woman. The simple mermaid-cut black dress that she wore hugged her figure, accentuating the fact that her legs were long and perfectly sculpted, like a ballerina. Her lips were blood red, turned up in a subtle, predatory smile. Her pin-straight bangs lined her porcelain forehead with the rest of her hair falling cleanly down her back. Then finally, her eyes. They were a stormy gray that reminded Kagome of the color storms turned just before they became violent, like the woman herself. Kagome was currently face-to-face with the Killer Doll.
Shit.
Kagome didn’t have her gun. She took a rapid survey of the rest of the apartment. The kitchen was to her left, but she didn’t think she’d be able to run, find a weapon, and strike before she herself was taken down. So her choices were to create a diversion and flee, take her chances that she’d be able to improvise something into a weapon somewhere farther into the apartment, or… talk.
“Did you—” Kagome asked, trying to catch her breath. This was bad, really really bad.
“He was gone before I got here. Guess one of those girls he molested has a pretty mean daddy with ties to even meaner daddies.” the Killer Doll answered, thoroughly amused. “He would’ve been fun too.” Kagome eyed a lamp only about eight feet from her. Could she? “Oh, and stop. It’s a little embarrassing. If I wanted to kill you, this would be over already. And gouging out those pretty eyes of yours would be such a waste.”
Nothing in the Killer Doll’s file said anything about killing women, or even killing those who investigated her. But, none have ever gotten as close as Kagome.
“Are you planning on killing me?” Kagome breathed logic back into her fight-or-flight brain. The Killer Doll was right, Kagome was trapped. Kagome charged into the situation without thinking, without backup. She—she’d been played.
“No.” the Killer Doll said, then started slowly but deliberately moving toward Kagome, who stayed frozen in place. Backing away would show fear. Backing away would trap her further back into the apartment. Backing away would give the Killer Doll the upper hand (as if she didn’t already have that…) Kagome had one option: talk.
“Then why did you lure me here,” Kagome huffed, “if not to kill me?”
“For the person smart enough to profile me you’re pretty stupid,” the Killer Doll chortled. “Killing you would be such a waste.”
Before Kagome knew what was happening, she was pressed up against the wall, looking up into the eyes of the woman she hunted. Her skin was as unblemished up close as Kagome had imagined from the photographs, and radiated vitality. Her lips were full and red, curled into a smile. But her stormy gray eyes were all Kagome could bring herself to look at. There was a tender wildness to them, same as to the woman herself, who smelled faintly of lilac.
“Then…” Kagome had trouble breathing, but it wasn’t being so close to such a dangerous killer that had her heart beating out of her chest. It was the tickle of the woman’s breath, and the warmth of her body as she pressed her possessively against the wall. “...why?”
“So I could tell you my name,” the Killer Doll whispered, before leaning her face down toward Kagome’s and claiming a kiss.
Kagome should have stopped this, should have pushed the Killer Doll away, or used this momentary weakness to try to subdue her and catch her. But… no. Instead, Kagome found herself opening her mouth and welcoming the killer’s tongue in to dance with hers. Instead, she let her hands find the back of the killer’s smooth neck so that she could deepen the kiss.
It was not like any kiss Kagome had ever experienced.
It was as dangerous and wild as the woman herself.
And Kagome wanted more.
Artwork commission by zeirahh
But before she had time to process the kiss, to process what it meant that Kagome desperately wanted to keep kissing the killer, she was alone against the wall again, watching the sleek black hair of her assailant recede away.
“It’s Kikyō.” the Killer Doll said, and before Kagome could regain her composure, the woman was gone, back out the door of Renkotsu’s apartment.
“Kikyō.” Kagome breathed.
She had the name of the Killer Doll. That was a game changer.
But, then again, after tonight, Kagome’s hunt for the killer doll was a completely different game