Dear Killer (17 page)

And I felt like laughing.

Because I was the queen of it all, a queen looking out over her kingdom, because they were all bent to my will and marched to the beat of my murderous drum. And of course they didn’t know it, but I knew it, and that was what mattered—

I felt like laughing. But I had to go.

I pressed myself against the wall next to the door, just inside the office, and soon enough, office workers began to flood down the hallway toward the scene of the crime. As they came inside the room as a frantic, shivering crowd, none of them noticed my presence; and as they all gathered together in panic, I slipped out the door, unnoticed in their midst, one unimportant figure among many.

I left Henry’s office with clicking, confident steps.

And from here on I was safe.

I walked down the hall, head downturned, and took the elevator to the lobby. Outside the building’s glass front doors, the police were already beginning to arrive, but they hadn’t organized themselves yet, and people were still streaming in and out of the building like ants, most of them oblivious to what had happened.

I was exultant.

I tucked my head down into my jacket collar and stared at the ground so no one could see my face. I moved with the flow of the crowd. No one noticed me. The police officers were emerging from their police cars now, looking frantically around, their eyes alighting in horror on the corpse of Henry Morrison a half block from where they had stopped at the curb. One of them had a megaphone and was beginning to shout orders to startled civilians, but no one was really listening. The people along the sidewalk who had realized what had happened all hurried away. They were scared and reluctant to become involved, and I went with them, invisible.

I looked through the gathering crowd for Alex. I didn’t see him, but I was sure he was there. Somewhere. He always was.

I disposed of my gloves and the stolen phone in a Dumpster in a quiet alley not too far from my house, after first destroying the phone by throwing it forcefully against a brick wall where no one was watching. The screen splintered into a thousand pieces. Just for safety. The gloves I managed to rip to shreds, as if a dog had been chewing on them. I targeted the fingertips especially, destroying whatever fingerprints might have been inside.

It was there, in the shadows of small houses, leaning against a tall green Dumpster, that I finally let myself laugh.

And oh, how I laughed—

Nothing could touch me.

Chapter 17

I
wandered the streets the rest of the morning and afternoon and far into the night. I didn’t have anywhere in particular to go, and I didn’t mind. I just wandered, and wandered. I didn’t feel like being home, and I didn’t feel like staying still, so I walked through the streets of London and let the city swallow me up as everything turned from daylight to darkness.

I walked through Chelsea in a black down jacket while the sun still shone—the season was growing cold—and once the sun set, I crossed the spooky nighttime Thames and found myself in Battersea Park for a while. The trees seemed to move around me, like people, reaching in. I walked across the grass, wet with dew, my ankles damp. I saw only one other person clearly, though I saw many silhouettes and shadows—a man, and he passed quickly, with his eyes firmly downcast and his lower lip pouted like a petulant child.

Eventually I left the park and walked along the Thames. London passed me by. My London. The city lights here reflected vibrantly off the water. I passed more people, and avoided all their eyes, and they avoided mine.

I walked a long time. I walked past bridges, across streets, past Waterloo Bridge, through the very heart of London, crowded with tourists, bright and beautiful. I walked until my feet hurt, and then I kept walking, because I was tired but I didn’t want to go home.

And eventually my feet took me where I half expected they would, to Whitevale Tower.

The police were still there, but the firemen and ambulances were gone. Henry’s body was gone too, though a few police officers were gathered where it had fallen. The police flooded though the building—I could see them through windows, all over. And twenty-nine stories up was the shattered window, looking strange and disjointed, and not at all like the scene of a murder, somehow. It looked abnormal; but from far away, like many things, it seemed harmless.

For a moment, instinctively, I wondered if Alex was one of the many men inside the evacuated building, but then I spotted him. He was standing by the front door, aloof from a group of other police officers who were conversing quietly. He bit his thumbnail and looked very old. In his hand, in a plastic bag, he held the letter that had condemned Henry Morrison—I recognized the way it was folded. His hair was uncombed and scraggly and zigzagged wearily down into his eyes. He needed a haircut. His gray suit, in style very like Henry Morrison’s suit, had been worn too many times since it was last cleaned, and there was a stain at the hem of one leg.

Something panged through me—regret, I realized after a moment—not remorse, but regret, because it was my fault that he was this way, tired and beaten. Uniquely and individually my fault. This regret was followed closely by a desperate and selfish prayer, sent silently up to some nameless god—
please please please don’t let him ever know what I am, I don’t want him to know, if he knows he’ll hate me, and I don’t want him to hate me, please, that is the last thing in the world that I want, please please please.

His eyes were deep and dark and dreaming. He didn’t see what was in front of him.

He didn’t see much of anything.

Oh! And what shadows lurked behind him he couldn’t know. He was a gleaming spot of light in a vast darkness. Alex, always Alex, always so pure and righteous. But he couldn’t see the shadows, no matter how he tried, and that was his most important flaw.

I was standing just behind a lamppost, and the light didn’t quite reach me.

For an insane moment I imagined going to him. Simply walking across the street to meet him. Talking to him. Engaging him. It would be lovely to hear his voice, to stand by his side. I might even be able to make the night a little less dark for him. Poor Alex, sometimes I just felt so sorry. I only wanted to help him, to speak to him, to be near him. . . .

But of course I couldn’t. What time was it now? Midnight? Two in the morning? If I went to talk to him, he would have so many questions, about why I was out and why I was here, of all places, and questions were dangerous. No, I couldn’t go to him. The savage night was an animal all its own, and even I dared not disturb it.

My phone, set on vibrate, buzzed quietly in my pocket. I turned away from Alex, so he couldn’t see my face if he happened to glance in my direction. I picked up the call without looking at who was calling.

“Hello.”

“Where are you?” my mom snapped at the other end of the line.

“I’m out.”

“Why the hell are you out? Where? It’s four in the morning, Kit.”

Four, was that the time? I had been walking awhile.

“I wanted to be out.”

“Well, come home.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? I’m your mother. It’s four in the morning. Don’t ask stupid questions. I know what you’re feeling, I really do, but you can’t just stand there and gloat.”

I leaned against the lamppost, my back edging into the light.

“I don’t want to come home.”

There was a sigh, and then a silence.

“Kit, please,” she said, but as always, there was a sharp edge to it.

She was grasping for the control she no longer held.

I turned back, looked at Alex again. He hadn’t moved an inch. He was a statue. The cops near him glanced at him carefully, one by one, but he didn’t notice.

“Fine, I’ll come home,” I said. I was doing her a favor. She needed me to obey. She needed just that much, just that small kindness, and I granted it to her because it meant nothing to me.

I hung up the phone.

The walk to Whitevale Tower had been almost magical, in a way, but the walk back home was boring and lifeless. The streetlights reflecting on the water were just streetlights, and Battersea Park was no longer a forest of dancing shadows. I went home to my upstairs bedroom. Downstairs my mother was listening to Cherry Rose. The curtains were red, and the sky outside was dark and everything was pale, muted, almost like a painting.

“Oh my God, we’re going to get soaked!” Maggie laughed, standing with me beneath an awning outside a deli with forget-me-nots painted in the bottom corner of the window, both of us wrapped in my black raincoat. It wasn’t enough to keep us dry if we came out from beneath the awning. Neither of us had expected it to rain quite this much, and we had both forgotten umbrellas.

Rain pattered steadily over the asphalt, across the windshields of cars, dripping through the corners of the awning we were beneath. It was a cold, cold rain.

I laughed in agreement. Yes, we were going to be wet. We both had things to do, and we couldn’t wait for the rain to stop to return home. We had to go out. It was going to be cold.

“I should have brought that umbrella. I was thinking about it, but then I decided against it, stupid me,” Maggie groused, running her fingers through her hair.

“Stupid,” I agreed, looking distractedly up at the clouds sitting overhead, stubborn and unmoving. They were a flat sheet of dark gray. They weren’t going anywhere.

“Do you think we have time to go find an umbrella to buy or something?”

I shook my head. “No, I’ve got to get home. I guess you could go find an umbrella alone, if you wanted.”

“I’ll stay with you,” Maggie said. “Oh God, I don’t want to get wet!”

“We don’t much have much choice, do we?”

She laughed freely. “I guess not.”

I leaned forward and peeked out up at the sky again, a few drops of water landing along the bridge of my nose.

“Winter’s coming, I guess.” I shrugged.

“Think there will be snow?”

“I hope so. I like snow. There’s got to be at least some.”

“I’m actually really excited for it. I really hope it snows.” Maggie giggled. “I want to go everywhere when it snows, to all the tourist spots and everything. I want to be a tourist in my own city, you know? Because everything looks different in the snow.” She was only half aware of what she was saying; her eyes stared off into nowhere, into the rain. Her words sounded pretty to me. Almost poetry.

“We’re putting this off,” I said.

She groaned. “Oh God. Can’t we keep putting it off?”

I laughed and hooked my arm through hers, pulling my raincoat up so it covered us as much as it possibly could. She shifted her weight comfortably.

“No,” I said cheerfully.

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes.”

“I don’t want to—”

Laughing, I pulled her out into the rain, and we were instantly soaked through, our hair and our arms and our legs, and the raincoat did nothing, but we kept holding it up. We laughed like little girls as we ran down the sidewalk through the downpour, alongside shop windows and taxis and buses and people huddled underneath umbrellas. We skipped across puddles. We were the best of friends.

But still, as much as she was my friend, Maggie was my enemy. I held that fact close to my heart, never forgetting it, never forgetting what she meant to me, what I was and who she was meant to be. She was a victim. She would die by my hand—I had decided to kill her, and so I would. I couldn’t let myself forget that. And so that darkness blossomed, growing ever larger, ever more prominent, waiting for the day when it would become too large for me to ignore.

Maggie mimed a scream as she stepped ankle-deep into a dark puddle, and I laughed.

Chapter 18

A
few days after the murder on the twenty-ninth floor, at five thirty in the evening, Alex came to visit.

It was an unannounced visit. My mother was standing silently at the stove, hovering over a pot of pasta, the steam wafting near her face. I imagined that the heat wasn’t comfortable. I was at the kitchen table, observing her.

There was a quiet knock on the door, not even the doorbell. I heard it, but my mom didn’t. For a moment, I thought I had imagined it. But then the knock came again, a bit louder, still timid and echoing, and I stood.

“What is it?” my mom said, speaking to me as if I were a silly child. I grasped the edge of the table tightly, restraining myself. I hated her when she treated me like this.

“Knock on the door,” I replied shortly. She nodded. As if she knew that already, before I told her, and she was just asking to make sure I could give her the right answer. She wanted to feel superior. I hadn’t seen through her before. I saw through her now. She was transparent.

I went to the door and opened it, and was surprised to find Alex outside, dressed casually and standing stiffly. I was momentarily taken aback, both by the fact that he was here unexpectedly and the fact that his presence, even when I was expecting it, threw me a little off-kilter, changed the feeling in the air.

And God, he really was attractive. I mean, I knew that already, but as I looked at him there on the steps, the fact hit me like a ton of bricks.

I honestly hadn’t expected him. We had met many times in coffee shops and bistros and police stations, but he hadn’t been to the house since we’d first met.

“Hello,” he said, smiling cordially.

“Hello. What brings you here?” I replied, making my voice as friendly as I could manage. Despite my excitement about his sudden arrival, I was still seething a bit about my mom’s condescending demeanor. But of course it wasn’t Alex’s fault—I should calm down, and I shouldn’t take it out on him. He didn’t deserve that sort of thing; he was too good for that. He looked uncertain, standing on the front step. He stared at his feet.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. Obviously something was. He looked startled.

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“I can read you like a book, stupid. What’s wrong?”

He shook his head. “Nothing’s wrong.”

I bit my lip. Oh well, he would tell me eventually. He always did.

“Come in,” I said, stepping aside. He moved through the door on wavering feet.

“It’s Alex,” I called to my mom, and there was no reply. I turned again to Alex.

“Would you like some tea?” I offered.

“Ah—no, thank you.”

“Oh, come on. I’ll get you some tea,” I said with a laugh.

We walked into the kitchen. Standing halfway in front of the refrigerator, my mother was very calmly turning off the stove, not glancing my direction. Wordlessly, she picked up the pot. Her ankles, pressed tightly together, quivered silently, and her eyes were unreadable. Trying to escape notice, she smiled an easy smile and poured the pasta into a strainer set in the bottom of the sink.

“Sit down at the table. I’ll be right with you,” I said to Alex, heading for the kettle, looking at my mother curiously. I took the kettle, which was sitting on the stove near the pot, and began to fill it with water. Alex stared at the table and into space.

“What are you doing?” I muttered to my mother, who still wasn’t meeting my eyes.

She smiled inscrutably and brushed her hands against her skirt as if they were dirty. She whirled as I set the kettle on the stove and turned on the heat.

“I’m going out,” she announced grandly, taking off her red apron and putting it atop a bar stool. She laughed. “I won’t be long. Just running down to the grocery store on the corner. I wanted to put Parmesan on the pasta, but I forgot to get any, I just realized.”

I smiled so no one could see, because, in a strange way, I was proud of her. She saw it. She saw that she would only be a third wheel. Not in a romantic sense, of course, but a third wheel in the sense that Alex and I had a . . . rapport, perhaps, that she could never share. She was not a part of us. She realized that, and would leave.

“Oh, really?” Alex said distractedly. She nodded and made sure the apron wouldn’t fall off the bar stool.

“I have some errands to run.”

“I’ll take care of you, don’t you worry,” I said to Alex jokingly. He smiled very slightly; the crookedness of the smile was endearing.

She left us quickly. As we heard the front door slam, I leaned against the stove, waiting for the kettle to boil.

“Is it the Perfect Killer case?” I ventured. Alex didn’t reply, just ran his fingers wearily through his hair. Even though he looked vaguely depressed, his movements were still captivating to watch, I realized—sharp and insistent and at the same time inherently graceful.

“Well, is it ever anything else?” I said wryly, looking away from him.

I don’t think he heard me, and if he did, he didn’t reply.

He breathed deeply, thinking deeply, hunched over at the kitchen table like he was holding the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“Don’t you ever consider just giving up?” I asked.

He breathed out jaggedly. It took me a moment to realize that he was laughing.

“Never,” he said.

“It’s never crossed your mind?”

“Never.”

“It would be easier.”

“I don’t care.”

“You wouldn’t have to worry so much.”

“I don’t care.”

Silence.

“God, you’re not in a talkative mood today at all, are you?” I said, joking, of course, but with an edge to it. I realized suddenly, unpleasantly, that I sounded almost like my mother at her worst.

I didn’t want to be like that, not with him, him of all people. I wanted him to think well of me.

He was silent. The kettle whistled.

I made us each a cup of tea, struggling to find a cup or mug that had been washed recently and didn’t have the remnants of my father’s coffee painted on the ceramic. I remembered that Alex didn’t take any milk with his, but he took sugar. The cups steamed cozily as I set them down on the kitchen table.

“Thank you,” he said, taking a long sip. I sat down opposite him and drank too, looking curiously at him from beneath my eyelashes.

“You really don’t ever think about it?”

“Giving up?”

“Yeah.”

Slowly he shook his head.

“It’s really never occurred to me. I’m not like that.”

“I admire you for that.”

“Thank you, I suppose.”

“You’re welcome, I suppose.” I smiled faintly. “You look tired, though. You should get more sleep.”

“Maybe.” He stared off into space.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Yes, I’m listening.”

I took another long sip of my tea, tasting the faint bitterness beneath the sweetness of sugar, and leaned back in my chair. I observed him. He remained quiet.

“How’ve you been?” he said suddenly, meeting my eyes. And again, there it was—that sudden electricity in the air.

“I’ve been fine.”

“You’ve been . . . school?”

“Oh, yes. School and homework, school and homework.”

“That’s good.”

“It is.”

“That’s good . . . ,” he said again, his voice barely above a whisper. He stopped talking, done with attempting conversation; he didn’t seem to be capable of it today. I wasn’t quite done with
him
yet, though. I didn’t like silence, especially with only two people in a room; it made me uncomfortable.

“Why did you come here?” I asked, as casually as I could manage. He didn’t like the question; he suddenly looked as if he were sitting on a thumbtack.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s something. Alex, what the hell is going on?”

No reply.

His expression was dark, and his eyes were half closed and tired. Dark circles lined them, I noticed. His mouth hung distractedly half open. He wasn’t entirely here.

“Seriously, are you stressing about the Perfect Killer case? Because I know the murderer’s back, pushed a guy out of the window—it was in the newspapers.”

No reply.

“Alex, just tell me. Do you need moral support? Are you about to break down or something? Do you need help?”

No reply.

“I’ll get you more tea,” I said, picking up his teacup, which was empty now, moving toward the kettle again. I put more water in it—there wasn’t enough left for another cup of tea—and set it on the stove, watching the flames flickering beneath it. I didn’t want any more myself.

“You can talk to me about anything, you know.”

He stood suddenly. I turned to look at him. He stared back at me, mouth open as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t. The words were stuck.

The look in his eyes made me sad, and I didn’t know why.

“I should go.”

He was wearing a long coat, and as he turned to leave, it swished rather dramatically around his legs. I was so confused. What was wrong, what was wrong? I was always so good at reading people, and Alex in particular had always been rather see-through. But today, he was impossible to understand. It wasn’t just the Perfect Killer’s reemergence; it was something more.

“Alex,” I called after him, darting into the hallway behind him as he made a beeline for the door. He stopped, hands folded in front of him, quiet, as if he was waiting desperately for me to say something.

I looked at him, and then around the hallway, even up at the ceiling, looking for something to say to make things less uncomfortable before he left.

And then I happened to glance back behind me, into the kitchen, at the kitchen table, and with an almost physical shock, realizing what was bothering him, I understood. My arrogance, my pride vanished. I felt something else. Fear.

“Oh,” I breathed and slowly, very slowly, looked once again at Alex.

“Oh,” I repeated, louder. He visibly shrank two inches, wanting to disappear. Understandably. Oh, Alex.

“You took my teacup,” I said, just to hear it out loud and make sure he understood that I knew.

“It wasn’t my idea,” he said, trying to defend himself, but there was no defense for this sort of thing.

I couldn’t say a word. And this time it was Alex who tried to fill in the silence with speech. He turned to face me helplessly, turning the teacup over in his hands, making sure not to touch the rim. Of course, of course.

I had no right at all to feel betrayed, but I felt betrayed anyway.

“It was the higher-ups. I’m investigating this case, but technically I still take orders, I’m still low-ranked. They’re getting desperate, you know, they need a lead, and you’re not a lead, not really, but you’re the closest thing to a lead they’ve got, what with you being there at that kid’s murder scene—and they found a bit of DNA at the crime scene at Whitevale Tower, and all they wanted was a bit of yours, to make sure it wasn’t a match—I’m so sorry, Kit, really I am, I can’t even say . . .”

He was sorry too. Honestly and truly. His upstanding heart couldn’t handle this sort of thing, this trickery, and it was killing him to see the shock in my eyes. I was sure I looked pitiful. I felt pitiful. But I had no right.

“Oh, Alex.”

He didn’t know—he couldn’t know—how important that cup was. It was small and white, and as he turned it over and over in his hands, I couldn’t move my eyes from it. That cup, the DNA from my lips on its rim, was my death, my downfall. And he didn’t even know.

“You could have asked,” I told him. “You didn’t have to steal.”

“God, Kit, I’m sorry, I just didn’t want you to know, and worry about it—it’s not like you’re a suspect; they’re just grasping at straws here.”

“Is this even legal? Don’t you need a warrant for this sort of thing?”

“You do.”

“You’re breaking the law, Alex.”

“I know. But I have to follow orders,” he said softly, and he was practically breaking in half. For someone like him, this sort of thing was unthinkable. Going against the law violated every rule he had ever set for himself. The only thing that could override his yearning to follow the law was his need to follow orders, and that hierarchy was a very close thing.

Not to mention the fact that he was betraying a friend.

This internal conflict was why he had come here of all places, I realized. We had lunch so often, and coming here was so unusual—he was setting me up to be suspicious and setting himself up to be caught. He was smart—he could do better than this. He could have very easily stolen a fork from the side of a lunch plate without me noticing. But he wanted to be caught. He wanted to be called out for his trickery, wanted to be punished for his dishonesty.

“I could have you arrested. Fired. You’d never be a policeman again.” It wasn’t a threat, just a fact. The look in his eyes was excruciating to see. I knew I should be cunning, I knew I should figure out a way to slither out of this. But somehow, somehow, I simply couldn’t. My mind was blank. My heartbeat was slow.

I was just as heartbroken as he was. He had been trying to trick me, ruin me, go behind my back. It startled me to realize how much I cared. If it were anyone else, I could trick him out of the cup, or even force it away from him, but things were different with Alex. I felt an abiding sadness as I looked down the hallway at him, watched him turn the cup over and over and over.

“Are you going to take it?” I asked. “Are you going to leave and take it with you?”

“It doesn’t really matter to you, the cup, does it? It’s not going to incriminate you. It doesn’t matter.” He avoided the question pleadingly. His eyes begged. I wouldn’t let him have the cup.

“That’s not the point.”

“God, Kit, I’m so sorry I tried to just steal it, but can I . . . oh God, I’m being horrible, aren’t I? But can I take it, Kit, please? It doesn’t mean anything to you. I’ll return it once they’re done. I’ll make sure I get it back. It’s not going to be a match.”

And then, with a sudden snapping feeling in my chest, I truly understood the danger I was in. I would go to jail. There was no death penalty, but I would spend a lifetime in a cell, perhaps in solitary, wasting away, if I let the man in front of me walk away through my front door. I was angry with myself. What DNA had I left? A hair, a bit of blood from some cut I had gotten from the broken glass?