Excerpt of Lady Killer by Meryl Sawyer

Chapter One

Damn, was he good—or what?

Troy Avery stood in front of the penthouse window, gazing
at the skyline glittering in the darkness. A bleached
white skull of a moon sulked above the Golden Gate Bridge,
hidden on and off by wind-whipped clouds.

He was still breathing heavily, panting with exertion and
the bone-deep satisfaction of another job well planned.

Executed to perfection.

Troy was good because he was so smart. Brilliant,
actually. More intelligent than any of the other
scholarship students who had attended Stanford with him.

Troy had been clever enough to drop out and devote himself
to an invention guaranteed to change the world.

“I’m much more intelligent than you are,” he said over his
shoulder to the dead woman sprawled, legs splayed wide, on
the marble floor behind him. A feminazi if there ever was
one.

“Final call,” he had told Francine Yellen as he’d
strangled her with the telephone cord.

Hearing the well-known phrase, Francine had stared at him
for one—long—frozen second. Then her eyeballs had popped
out of her head in sheer terror. For once the renowned
psychiatrist, who so glibly gave advice on television, was
at a complete loss for words. She’d been a fighter.

He’d grant her that much. She bucked and kicked and
thrashed for a full minute at least. Then she’d gone limp,
the air in her lungs exhausted. The capillaries in her
eyes had burst from lack of oxygen until the white
surrounding those famous eyes became vampire red.

The San Francisco Herald had dubbed Troy the Final Call
Killer because he strangled his victims with a telephone
cord. He preferred his own term.

Lady Killer.

It fit better because these women thought they were
ladies. He knew the truth. They were feminazis who
deserved to die.

“Lady Killer. Lady Killer.”

He whispered the words under his breath until they
thundered through his head, becoming louder and louder and
louder. A second later, he realized he was shouting the
term repeatedly like a mantra.

LadyKillerLadyKillerLadyKillerLadyKillerLadyKiller
LadyKiller . . .