Dear Killer (19 page)

“Hello,” I said flatly.

A voice I had not been expecting replied.

“Vienna?” My mom’s name.

It was my dad. I hesitated, stunned, before answering.

“No . . . it’s Kit.”

“Oh.” There was a silence. “Is your mom home?”

“No.”

I hadn’t talked to him properly in months, I realized. I didn’t even know where he was now. America, China, Spain, Portugal, Germany? He was gone so often so long that I sometimes forgot to wonder. It was strange to hear his voice.

“Oh, well, deliver a message to her, will you?”

“Sure.”

“I won’t make it home for Christmas this year, sorry. I’ve got business.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I’m sorry. I really tried to change it, but I have to be in New York the whole week before Christmas,” he said, with a lame attempt at apology. “I know it’s terrible. I should be home, I shouldn’t be away, but I have to be. I really feel bad about it.”

“It’s fine,” I replied.

“I’ll get back home soon. Not before Christmas, unfortunately, but soon after. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You two will be fine alone for Christmas?”

I smiled. I didn’t know why—he couldn’t see me or anything.

“Oh, sure. Don’t even worry.”

“I’m sorry for missing it.”

Missing it
again
.

This absence was unusually bold, though. Usually he showed up for at least part of the time. A complete absence hadn’t happened before. He really did sound sorry, though, which was strange. He rarely betrayed emotion.

Not for the first time, I hopefully wondered if he actually did care. But it was a sad hopefulness, the kind of hopefulness that has little point. Even if he did care, he wasn’t around enough for it to matter.

“We’ll be fine,” I assured him. “Don’t worry.”

“I’ll see you in January.”

He meant “I’ll see you in January, maybe.”

But he didn’t say it.

“Okay,” I said, as if I believed him.

“Bye.”

“Good-bye.”

As I said good-bye, I got the strangest feeling that I was saying something more than that. Something final. Something larger than the word good-bye. The feeling hung over me, and I couldn’t put it into words.

He hung up, but I still felt as if his voice lingered in the air.

As I put the phone back into the receiver, I suddenly felt very small.

Blood seeped over the asphalt, too close to the tips of my toes. I stepped backward, and as I exhaled, my white breath rolled upward toward the sun. The sky was clear today. No birds disturbed the air, and the clouds like melted glass were still.

I looked impassively down at the man at my feet, whose neck was striped black and blue from where my hands had clutched him so tightly as I bashed his head again and again against the ground until it cracked like an egg into a frying pan. I had long fingers and made big handprints, like a man’s. He was tall, with wide shoulders, which had posed a challenge at first. He had knocked me about a bit against a nearby Dumpster and across the alleyway before I gained control—but once I had swept him off his feet and onto the ground, he had been mine. His eyes were glazed over and open. His hands, too, were open and turned up toward the sky as if waiting to hold something.

I took the letter out of my pocket and folded it into his left hand, curling his stiffening fingers around the paper so it wouldn’t fly away.

Dear Killer,

My family has hit hard times. It’s getting worse. We can barely keep our flat. My husband has a nice job, and I work too, but my father recently died and left us with a lot of debt, so we’re still having trouble. And it’s hard on us all. I love my husband. I really do.

But I want you to kill him.

I’m not doing this because I hate him. I’m doing this because I love my children. He has life insurance that could create a better life for us—don’t you see? And I don’t think he’d really be mad if he knew I was writing this letter. God, that sounds strange, but he loves us so much. He would do anything for us. Including die, I think. I love him too. With all my heart. But I need the best for my children.

His name is William Cole, and he works at the Harton Finance office in Chelsea. I don’t want to tell you where I live.

I removed my gloves, tucked them into my pocket, and rubbed my hands together and shoved them under my armpits for warmth. Twenty feet down the alley, cars and people moved along obliviously. Snow fell down through the dark alley. A car honked. Above, the latticed shadows of fire escapes crisscrossed like jail bars.

I looked down at him a moment longer, and then I walked up the alleyway, back toward the rest of civilization. The crowds were large enough that I could slip back out onto the street without raising suspicion from onlookers, and the entrance of the alley was hidden from surveillance camera view behind a tall newspaper stand. I’d chosen this place carefully. I’d just watched him for a few days, mapping his route home from work, the timing, the places, figuring out when and where I needed to be to intercept him. He’d been so willing to come with me when I’d told him I worked nearby and needed some help with heavy lifting; he had been the kind of person, I supposed, who had loved to help.

This was a familiar neighborhood. The Chelsea Police Station was only a few blocks away, and the bistro I had met Alex in so long ago and a few times since, with its bird-patterned wallpaper and fraying wicker chairs, was directly across the street. I paused on the sidewalk in the midst of the crowd, staring at it, remembering the first time we had eaten together. Remembering how weak he had been as he told me he was afraid, remembering his handsome face torn with fear. I had been weak then too. The bistro had white shutters and pots of plastic orange flowers on the steps out front. They looked strange and unnatural in the snow.

I was just standing there when the door of the bistro swung open and Alex came out into the cold.

Oh God! He could see me, I was sure. But no, he wasn’t looking in my direction, not yet. If he saw me, he would call out to me. He was alone and was looking up, memorizing the sky. He was wearing work clothes—he must have come here for his lunch break, stupid, stupid, shouldn’t I have taken that possibility into consideration? This was unspeakably dangerous. There were people on the sidewalk, but not enough of them to hide behind.

And worst of all, to get back to the police station, I knew, Alex had to walk across the street and pass where I was. I couldn’t be caught at another crime scene, not now, not now, I didn’t have an excuse.

I gasped, inhaling a mouthful of snowflakes. I coughed as they turned to ice water in my mouth. The thick wooden newspaper stand that hid the entrance to the alleyway was a few feet away. I hid anxiously behind the right side of it, looking across the street to see where Alex was and decide what angle I needed to stand at to conceal myself from him. The owner of the newspaper stand, blessedly, didn’t notice me. He was reading a magazine, turning the pages with lazy fingers. I breathed quickly in and out. My breath clouded the air.

Oh God.

It occurred to me briefly that maybe I should have just made a run for it, but it was too late for that now, wasn’t it? But it was fine. I would be fine. I was always fine, and would always be fine. I looked carefully around the corner of the newspaper stand, searching for Alex.

He was crossing the street. And now he had reached my side of the street, and was turning toward me, and he was walking, and he was drawing closer. He looked around at everything around him, noticing everything, like he always did.

Oh God!

The stand would hide me for now. But when he came down the street and passed it, he would see me, standing suspiciously on the side of the stand where there were no magazines, a recently dead body in the alleyway to my right. I couldn’t even slip around all the way to the other side of the stand to escape his eyes; it was crowded there, and the only space available was too close to the street. The cars were moving too fast to stop for me if I fell off the curb. I pulled my hood up around my chin and forehead and looked at my feet, as if that would help.

He was so close. Only ten feet away now.

There was a woman, I noticed suddenly, walking toward me, groceries balanced on the arm closest to the curb, closest to me, holding on to her son’s hand with the other hand. Her son was a pretty little boy, cherubic, joyful looking, but his mouth was open and he was screaming deafeningly and pointing at something across the street that excited him. She was looking at him in the way only an exasperated mother can look at a child; intensely lovingly, with an undercurrent of irritation and resentment. She readjusted her groceries, a heavy bag filled to the brim with bread and sardines and cheese and apples—

Apples.
Red and round. Yes, apples.

He would be here soon. My heartbeat quickened.

The woman was next to me and she was glaring at her son, and she didn’t see me as I reached out and carefully, carefully, roughly jostled the shopping bag with my elbow as I pretended to get something out of the inside of my jacket.

“Hey!” the woman yelped, letting go of her child to grasp at her groceries as they cascaded out of the bag onto the pavement. Tomatoes exploded on impact, a sardine tin sustained a dented corner. And yes, the apples spilled too, red and fake-looking and lush, just like blood.

I mouthed indistinct words of apology, looking down so she couldn’t see and remember my face, and she put her hands on her hips. She took one off to grab at her son, who was about to run off in some strange direction now that he was suddenly free.

I could pick out Alex’s footsteps from the crowd now.

Still hidden behind the newspaper stand, I kneeled down, pulled my turtleneck sleeves up over my hands so I wouldn’t leave fingerprints, and grabbed for her groceries, mumbling apologies up at her so my voice wouldn’t be loud enough for Alex to recognize. She smelled like cheap perfume, and the hems of her black jeans were the frayed product of a bad tailoring job. I put her things back in the bag, which she had dropped next to my feet. Sardines, bananas, a package of vanilla yogurt.

“For God’s sake,” she yelled at her son, and rubbed her false eyelashes.

I put one apple in her bag. I made a big show of grabbing for a third behind her feet.

Alex was only a few feet away, and out of the corner of my I eye I could see he was still looking around, at the newspapers and the man selling them, at the sky, glancing almost uninterestedly at the moment I was having with this tired mother, and in seconds he would be on my side of the newspaper stand and he would be looking around and he would see me and even with my face staring at the pavement he would still recognize me and I swear to God my heartbeat was so loud that other people could hear it—

Alex came close. Closer, closer. As the woman yelled words I wasn’t listening to, my hand found the third apple behind her ankles. I gripped it tight. My aim had to be perfect. I had to be perfect. I had to—

And he walked in front of me.

With a flick of my wrist, as the child screamed a shrill, high note, I released the apple, pretending to the mother that it was simply slipping accidentally out of my clumsy grasp. For a moment it wobbled because of its uneven shape and I didn’t think it would make it to where I needed it to be, and I begged it inwardly, pleaded, to spin just right.

And it did.

It was perfect. The apple rolled tremulously over Alex’s left foot as he was just about to walk into my line of sight and I was just about to come into his. I froze.

Alex looked down as he felt it pass over his feet, just brushing them slightly, and then with great speed rolled over and past them down the alley. He followed the red bouncing apple with curious eyes, and I bit my lip, anxiety alighting in me again after a brief moment of exaltation. Please, please. He had to notice. He had to notice the shadow of a body before he looked back to see who had thrown the apple and noticed me.

His head tilted slightly down toward me, knowing that some silly girl had accidentally let an apple slip away, instinctively wanting to see her face. But he was still halfway following the path of the apple, like I needed him to. And a breath caught in my throat; was I caught?

But then, like a miracle, the apple bounced down the alley and hit the poor crushed head of the dead man, and Alex, still halfway watching the apple, saw him with a jolt. And of course, then he was running down the alley, just like he was supposed to, feet whirling and breath steaming. I slid my turtleneck sleeve back down onto my wrist. I watched as he shouted into the radio clipped to his collar, calling the rest of the police force. He stood over the body for a moment, just staring down, and then he began to pace. The woman nudged my shoulder roughly, wanting to know why I had stopped working. I put a box of cereal in the bag as her son groaned and moaned and fell to his knees dramatically and began to cry.

I knew Alex was thinking, and I knew he would realize soon that the body was still warm and that the murderer couldn’t have gone far. He would begin searching soon. I had to leave before then. But quietly.

With machinelike efficiency, I finished putting the groceries back in the bag, and after a bit of shouting and grousing the mother and child went away.

I stood, narrowing my eyes, and looked around for my escape. It took me a moment to find it. But then there it was, a large group of twentysomethings moving down the sidewalk in an awkward clump. I could hear their voices from far away, and I studied them for a moment and then sighed, telling myself that I needed to be calm. The worst was over, anyway. Alex was occupied.

As the twentysomethings passed, I adjusted my hood again; I attached myself to the back of their pack so I wouldn’t stand out from the crowd when the police looked at the video of people walking up and down the street. The group didn’t notice me. As I walked away I looked down the alley at Alex one more time, at the pacing silhouette, and I had to feel sorry for him, because he was chasing me, and it was futile.