Daddy's Adorable Assassin (Daddy's Little Deviants)

“What is it?”

I walked around him and stumbled to a halt. A corpse was sitting at the dinner table, a hole blown in his head. A swarm of flies flew up from the open mouth. From the green pallor and the dried bloody foam around the orifices, the body had been dead for some time.

“It’s him,” Knight said. “We’ve found Virgil Manning.”

“Suicide?” I asked what we were both thinking as he slipped on a pair of gloves and picked his way around the body to study the gun that was on the floor. “Why commit suicide now?”

“Hmm. This complicates matters. With him dead, there’s no one else but Cosmo to give us his version of events. Doesn’t that feel a little convenient to you?”

“I know just about as much as you, Knight.”

Footsteps approached, and both Knight and I raised our guns but lowered them when an agent entered.

“Sir, you’ll want to look at this. No one else is here except for us.”

We followed him along the hall to a den, the lock on the door busted, probably from forcing their way in. Photos adorned the walls—photos of a little boy, the man whose body we’d found in the kitchen, and a stern-looking woman who didn’t smile in any of the photos. The little boy was Cosmo. In each of the photos, whether he appeared alone or with his family, he had on dresses or skirts, heels, and wore makeup. He looked like a human-sized doll. The dresses got more elegant the older he seemed. In one, his waist was cinched so tight I winced just looking at it.

Who the hell were these people?

Knight went over to the computer desk, and I slipped on a pair of gloves and examined the television that sat in an entertainment center. Cosmo had said they didn’t own a TV. Had he lied to me, or hadn’t he known about it? The door seemed to have been kept locked.

I took up the remote and turned on the television. It asked for a disc. I stooped before the DVD player and pressed the power button. It whirred to life. Then a list of tracks appeared on the television. I selected the first one and frowned as a bedroom came into view—a child’s princess-themed bedroom, in an abundance of pink. Was this some sort of surveillance tape?

I skipped forward and paused as an image popped up on the screen. I went back a few seconds, then pressed Play. A man entered the room, a grown Cosmo clutched to his side like a baby. He carried Cosmo over to the bed and placed the boy down. Though bizarre in appearance, it seemed innocent enough, a Daddy putting his son to bed. I fast-forwarded the video to the moment the man walked out, but the tape continued and showed a sleeping Cosmo. The door opened, and the man came back into the room and watched Cosmo sleep.

Fuck no. No, not this.

As the boy slept, the man pulled the blanket down and revealed the boy’s onesie. Then he shoved his hand down his pants. I slammed my finger on the Pause button. I couldn’t watch anymore.

“Neely, you find anything?” Knight called to me.

I sucked in several deep breaths, then said over my shoulder, “Surveillance tapes.”

“Of what?”

“Cosmo, being watched when he was sleeping.”

“What do you mean, watched?”

Knight stalked over to me and took the remote from my hand. I stepped past him, averting my eyes from the TV, and crouched by a shelf with rows and rows of CDs.

“What the fuck have we walked into?” Knight snapped.

I thumbed through the CDs and found they were organized according to the year.

“We’re going to need all this as potential evidence,” I said. Something didn’t add up. Cosmo had said his Daddy told him sex was bad and that he shouldn’t let anyone one touch him. Did that include himself? How did the mother fit into this scenario?

“Sir, look at this.”

Knight walked over to the agent who called his attention. Nothing else in this room seemed noteworthy, and I had no interest in watching all the videos to find out just what Cosmo had endured in this house.

“I’m going to check another room,” I said. “Someone called the crime scene investigator?”

“I did,” Knight replied. “Be careful.”

I nodded and left the room. A door to the right led to a bedroom, but it wasn’t the one I sought, so I closed the door again. I finally found it at the end of the hall. The bedroom had no door, no sense of privacy. The room looked the same as in the video, with rainbows and flowers painted on the ceiling and walls. If I hadn’t seen that video first, I might have thought it was the room of a spoiled and pampered child. Somewhere in this room was a camera that had documented everything that Cosmo had done in this room.

On a high shelf, I found several popular kids’ books but also textbooks for all age ranges: history books, language books, and several on science. A bound book with no subject caught my attention. I pulled it out and opened it. A picture of Cosmo as a little boy no more than four but already in makeup graced the inside cover. I flipped the pages. List of foods and dates. What the hell? This looked like an intense diet plan for Cosmo. Every single day, there were entries of what he ate three times a day, the portion, and how many calories it contained. At the end of each week, his weight had been noted.