Dear Killer (2 page)

Chapter 2

T
he sun set over London. The glowing ball sank below the horizon in a stately and mature fashion, sending spangles of blazing red light through the streets. As the city descended into darkness, it called out to me. Wandering my way home, I watched the sunset with one eye.

I remembered my first kill in vivid detail. It was the sort of memory that came up sometimes and could not be ignored or thought about halfheartedly. It had occurred to me a few minutes ago and still occupied my mind, sticking to me like a burr.

I remembered my mother’s shadow standing over me, watching me, teaching me and guiding me. I remembered that I had been only nine years old. I remembered the dead man—almost a boy—on the ground before me, the one she had to help me with because I wasn’t quite strong enough to squeeze all the air out of his throat. It had been in an apartment, late in the afternoon. I remembered he had a red armchair and a small dog that we locked in the kitchen, and I remembered he had been cooking before we came so the whole apartment had smelled of oregano. And I remembered that I had asked my mother if we should use knives instead of hands because I wasn’t strong enough, and she had shouted at me for that, because no, of course, knives were evidence and we couldn’t leave any evidence, could we? Evidence was for amateurs. So we killed him with our bare hands, or rather
I
killed him, because even though she had to help me near the end, she made sure to let go just before the last bit of life drained out of his blue, blue eyes. That first time I didn’t leave a letter, I just killed the man and left the apartment calmly, anticlimactically, without any sense of closure. I wasn’t decided on my trademark then. I hadn’t even
thought
of leaving the letters at that point. That thought would come a few days after, in a burst of morbid inspiration.

It had been an afternoon a bit like this one. Only the red sunset hadn’t been quite as brilliant then. It seemed strange to me, remembering, how horribly I had hated it. Death. Death was natural. I had cried for that boy. God, I had been so young then.

“Welcome home, sweetheart,” my mom said, leaning her head out of the kitchen to watch me as I walked through the four-story town house’s shiny black front door. Her blue eyes, the eyes I had not inherited, sparkled beneath long blond lashes; her hair, which I envied because my hair didn’t dry the same way when it was cut as short as hers, bounced stylishly. She had a chin that looked like it had been cut out of marble. She fit with the house, somehow, our house of white bricks decorated with silver flower boxes and black shutters—they felt the same. Cool. Posh. Luxurious.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Did you have a good time while you were out?”

“I went to check the mail,” I said in reply. She laughed and put her head back in the kitchen, beckoning to me. I followed her into the neatly groomed room. It was decorated in civilized, carefully calculated, quietly expensive neutrals like the rest of the tall house, but right now was filled with steam and smoke that lent it an almost comically mysterious air. She was working over a pan on the stove, and the whole room smelled like food. The recessed lighting lit everything in a muted glow.

“So? Any interesting requests?” she asked, glancing back at me after a moment.

“I haven’t read them yet,” I reminded her. She knew that. Rule one was seeing no wrong and no right. Rule two was to be careful. And reading the letters at the mailbox was not being careful.

“Oh, that’s right.” She smiled, as if she didn’t know, that familiar infuriating look of almost apathy settling on her features. “You should take them up to your room, then. I’m nearly done with dinner.”

She stuck a spoon in the pan and moved it about. For a moment neither of us said anything. I saw her left hand twitching. I could see it there—her longing for cruel power, stuffed beneath a surface of cool glass, shoved away because she no longer had any use for it. Beneath her indifference something dangerous languished.

“All right.” I paused. “Dad’s not home?”

“No, of course not,” she said without any unhappiness in her voice, or at least none that I could hear. I shrugged. I wasn’t surprised.

“I’ll be right back down, then.”

I went out of the kitchen and up the three flights of stairs toward my room. The stairs were steep—usually, when I climbed stairs, I skipped steps and went quickly, but in my own home, I couldn’t do that. It always took me a while to reach the top, and it was never quite as easy as I felt it should be after seven years of doing the same thing.

So I went up slowly. Like always, I looked around at the photographs on the walls as I rose through the house. We had a nice photography collection—my mother liked collections. So we had a collection of fine china, a collection of old records, a collection of photographs, and collections of a dozen other kinds of things. I liked the photographs best. They were expensive, naturally, and most of them quite old. A picture of the blurry sun over New York. A picture of cracking ice. A picture of a violinist with his eyes closed, enraptured. All of them were lined up neatly alongside the staircase, in perfect black frames, matted with white paper. They demanded attention, contrasted as they were with the pale tan uninspiring walls.

My room was the one farthest away from the front door.

I wasn’t quite sure why I had chosen it when we had moved into the house seven years ago; climbing so many stairs so often was simply a pain, but what was done was done, and I wasn’t about to move at this point. My mother had allowed me to decorate it however I wanted to, and it was too perfectly done for me to leave it now.

I walked in and closed the door behind me. It was the only room in the house not decorated in brown, tan, navy, white, gray, or black. It was decorated in cream and scarlet, with rich fabrics and an antique sort of elegance—thick, heavy curtains, crushed-velvet pillows like old paper, a towering four-poster bed with carvings that looked oddly like Monet’s irises, heavy floral potpourri in a glass dish on top of my dresser. Everything was neat, in its place. I liked to keep things neat.

“Your room is like an old lady room,” my mother had said to me once, sighing about the disparity between my room’s decoration and the decoration in the rest of the house. I couldn’t really deny it.

Somewhere, a dog barked.

I set the bag of letters down next to my bed and took the latex gloves out of my pocket. I wrapped them in a piece of printer paper, crumpled the paper to look like a discarded piece of scrap, and dropped the ball into the wastebasket next to my desk. I didn’t need any curious eyes wondering why I had gloves in my wastebasket. We had maids who came three times a week to clean, because God forbid my mother should do any cleaning. She had her hands full with cooking, and that was about the extent of her domestic duties. The maids helped, and my mother was thankful for the fact that she never had to clean anything, but to be honest, their presence made me nervous. Of course I hid my unused letters—I never threw away a single letter; it felt inconsiderate, somehow—and other things as well, beneath false bottoms of drawers and in other such secret hiding places, but it wasn’t much comfort. I wondered if the maids would be nervous too if they knew they were cleaning the house of murderers.

I waltzed back downstairs and found my mom in the dining room, laying out three place settings at the table, forks and knives and spoons positioned precisely on blue placemats. I looked at her curiously.

“I thought you said Dad wasn’t home.”

“He’s not. Sorry, I’ve forgotten to tell you—we have company. What you’re wearing is fine, so don’t worry about changing.”

“Company?” I asked, grinning. “What kind of company?”

Whenever my mom had company, it was interesting. Sometimes she had affairs her husband was too detached to notice, and invited the men in question over for dinner; sometimes the people she invited were important people she felt would be advantageous to have as friends, and sometimes they were just interesting people she had met and taken a liking to.

She had a skill for making friends, and she spent much of her time doing just that. Aided by her businessman husband’s earnings and nearly constant absence, she had gone into the business of entertaining and being entertained. Endless parties, elaborate adventures. Jaunts to Rome, Vienna, even New York on occasion. She often showed up in the front hallway in the mornings, a bag packed, about to run off on another adventure without warning. My father didn’t know much about it, or at least didn’t care enough to mention any of it, and I didn’t resent it—she did what she had to in order to remain sane. She was no longer the woman she had once been; she couldn’t be. I understood that. She moved to avoid the uncomfortable stillness that her lack of murder created.

She was perpetually surrounded by activity.

Surrounded, that was, until she came home in the evenings. The moment she came through the front door and we were alone, something always seemed to just
slip
from her. The smile faded, the high heels were removed, and she hung her white jacket by the door, entering into a place where she no longer needed to run wild in the same way to be content. At home, I was there. And as long as I was there, she had a piece of her justice to hold on to. Knowing that I killed in her way, I believed, was enough for her—she felt freedom through me. She was quietest and happiest at home, when we kept each other company.

Sometimes I got the fleeting feeling that it wasn’t
quite
enough, though, that she was screaming silently from underneath her skin. But most of the time she was fine, when we were together and at peace.

But of course, company was nice too. It was variety. Something different. We enjoyed each other’s company, but even we could get bored.

As I watched her set the table, I thought, not for the first time, about the fact that she had a sort of
pull
that I lacked. I wish I had it. She drew people in, made them trust her. If she hadn’t been a murderer in her day, she would have made a good politician. As it stood, she had too many secrets that could be unearthed.

“He’s a young policeman, very accomplished, well regarded at Scotland Yard,” she said with a smile. I looked at her, even more confused than before.

“You’re inviting the
police
to our
house
?”

“Don’t sound so stunned. He’s a nice man. He’s—he’s the man unofficially in charge of the Perfect Killer case.”

I gaped.

“And you’ve just invited him over?”

“I went to a cocktail party the other day, since your dad couldn’t make it. Went in his place, you know. He was there. We got to talking, and I figured that we should have him over for dinner.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

She looked up from the table and met my eyes pointedly.

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, Kit.”

Such a cliché.

The doorbell rang, chiming like a music box.

“And that’s him!” my mom exclaimed happily. “I’ll get the door, you wait here. Actually, you can start serving the food. It’s in the warmer. Relax, Kit. It’ll be fine.”

She bombed off toward the door as I looked blankly after her. I tensed.
Relax.
That was easy for her to say. Her days as a murderer were over, and she hadn’t killed as much as me or been as famous as me.

I heard the door open and then muffled voices.

And now the man who was in charge of hunting me down was in my house.

I walked quietly over to the warmer and pulled out the steak and mashed potatoes my mom had made. I picked up a set of tongs. I put a steak on each of the three plates my mom had set out, and then ladled mashed potatoes onto each. Step by step, methodical. I listened to the voices in the hallway, trying to hear what they were saying. But I couldn’t. The voices grew louder, and I strained to hear them even more, but still, no luck. I walked over to the mahogany table and put the dishes down crookedly; I was distracted now and couldn’t be bothered to straighten them. I turned around.

And he was walking into the kitchen.

He was young. Younger than I had expected. Much younger, in fact. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five or thirty. I remembered that my mom had said he was only unofficially in charge of the investigation. He looked like the law, through and through. Order personified.

Tallish, with light-brown hair and hazel eyes that were cold and steely and a little bit angry, if a little young. But he was smiling. And also, strangely, he had a bit of a studious feel to him, as if he were a professor or some other scholar. Not in the eyes so much, but in the cut of his jaw, and in the way he held his shoulders. His posture was remarkably graceful. He was slim and wiry, but I could see quiet strength in the way he stood—he was vaguely catlike. He was wearing gray slacks and a white-collared shirt, as if he had just come out of a meeting and had taken off his tie and jacket, and his thumbs were hooked in his pants pockets.

He was attractive. Surprisingly so.

Not that it particularly mattered, I reminded myself. He was the enemy.

I felt uncomfortable. Not afraid, exactly, because I knew he wouldn’t suspect me, but definitely very uncomfortable. As if I were standing beneath an air vent that was too cold or too hot. He and my mom stopped near the doorway to the kitchen.

I forced myself to smile pleasantly, trying to make myself look a little dull around the edges. No one suspected stupid people.

“Alex, this is my daughter,” my mom said energetically, gesturing to me.

“Hello. I’m Kit,” I chirped, adding a silly giggle to the end of my name. He looked in my direction and smiled patronizingly.

“I’m Alex. Nice to meet you,” he said.

“I heard you’re an inspector.”

My mom’s eyes narrowed with amusement. I suppose it was funny for her, seeing me wear this mask of innocence and stupidity.

“I’m still just a sergeant,” he replied flatly.

“Oh, but aren’t you, you know, in charge of investigating that murder? Or murders, whatever?”