Final Sins Read Online Free PDF Page B

more than a man, or perhaps I should say that I was the only true man, the sole man on earth who was at one with his deepest needs and highest passions. Killing Emily Wallace was a religious experience in the truest sense.
    I cannot say how long our liaison lasted. Time had stopped, or, more precisely, it ran on but I had stepped out of its stream, had ceased to be conducted by its flow.
    Some have speculated that I did not mean to kill Emily, that I misjudged, made the noose too tight for too long, broke my toy by playing with it too lustily. This is incorrect. As I have already written, I was in control throughout the exercise.
    I drew the noose tight for the last time, grasping her chin and raising her head to face me. She saw my smile—it must have been radiant—and she knew that there would be no coming back. She did not resist or pull away, but I saw a tear, pearlescent and perfect, expand in the corner of her left eye.
    I knew the exact instant when she died. It was when the teardrop shimmered and broke free of the eye that cupped it, tracking down her cheek. The tear moved, but she did not.
     
    Abby put down the book slowly. This was the man she was working for.
    Well, at least she hadn’t shaken his hand.

4
     
    Peter Faust sat limply in his chair at Cafe Eden, his every muscle relaxed. It was a trick he had mastered long ago, the art of complete ease.
    “That went well,” he said with satisfaction.
    Elise shifted restlessly. She was always moving about, incapable of relaxation. Like most Americans, she had never been schooled in leisure.
    “I don’t know,” she said, biting her lip. “There’s something about her I don’t like. She scares me.”
    “Everything scares you.”
    Elise shot him a darting look, half-timid, half-sly. “You don’t.”
    “And yet I am the one thing you ought to fear.”
    “Do you think she’s scared of you?”
    Faust considered the question. “Yes,” he decided. “But she enjoys the sensation. She thrives on fear. It is mother’s milk to her.”
    “She looked at me like I was ... I don’t know.”
    “Like you were what?”
    “A stupid kid. Like I was ten years old. She feels sorry for me. That’s why she took the job. Out of pity.”
    “And if this is true, what of it?”
    “I just don’t think she should have looked at me that way.”
    “It is of no importance how she feels. If you can use her feelings to your advantage, do so.”
    “Easy for you to say. You don’t give a shit what other people think.”
    He patted her hand sedately. “I am not convinced that other people do think.”
    Not for the first time, Faust asked himself if he loved Elise Vangarten . He could not say. Love, to him, was only a word, like God or virtue , a sound ritually repeated and apparently invested with meaning by his fellow humans, but denoting nothing to him. Still, he had grown attached to her.
    Three years ago they met at a cocktail party hosted by a rising young movie director known for his outré tastes. Faust had provided some uncredited but handsomely remunerated technical assistance on the director’s last film, a study in serial murder. For the most part, Faust got along famously with Hollywood people—they were so refreshingly amoral—and so he accepted an invitation to the soiree.
    Elise, then nineteen and new to L.A., came on the arm of an independent producer who was endeavoring to conceal his homosexuality. Faust met her at the buffet table. She did not know who he was. Even when he introduced himself, she failed to recognize his name. He found her ignorance beguiling. And he was intrigued by her gauntness, the bony outlines of her undernourished figure, the hollows of her cheeks. She might have been a concentration camp survivor.
    At the buffet table she snacked on celery, a food that consumed more calories in digestion than it supplied. A person who dined exclusively on celery would starve to death. Faust was fascinated by her iron self-denial. Wasting away