Dear Killer (4 page)

I looked at her hesitantly.

She was a bit like a caricature of a person, I thought. Exaggerated. Like something out of a children’s cartoon, or a bad movie. The thought was funny to me, and I resisted the urge to laugh.

“Okay, Dr. Marcell,” I said. I didn’t mean it.

She sighed.

“I mean it, Kit. You’re more intelligent than this.”

She had no idea.

“I’ll keep your suggestions in mind.” I smiled blandly. She stared at me for another few moments, sighed again, gave me a slight, unenthusiastic smile, and waved her hand to let me know I could leave.

I nodded and left the classroom.

It was lunch. I wandered through the hallways, following the crowd toward the cafeteria, deep in thought. It was conversations like the one with Dr. Marcell that made me feel like an outsider. Unless I was actually in the midst of murder, I usually could make myself feel normal. I could think of murder as a hobby, as an extracurricular. In the same way some girls did gymnastics or watercolors, I killed.

But when I had to make excuses for myself or pretend, like I had to pretend in philosophy, and especially when I was called out on it, I couldn’t feel normal. And I liked to feel normal. At least sometimes.

I woke myself up out of my thoughts as I wandered into the cafeteria. I had a job to do, I reminded myself. I had responsibilities. I couldn’t just drift off into my own thoughts.

I looked across the sea of white plastic tables and clean food counters, searching for Maggie. The roar of conversation was deafening, and everything smelled like antiseptic; the school administration was anal about cleaning. After a few seconds, I saw her in the far left corner of the room. She was staring at the scratched plastic table beneath her folded fingers. I began to make my way through the maze of people and chairs and tables, heading toward her. I bumped past other students, muttering halfhearted apologies, until I finally made it to her.

“Hello.” I smiled, putting my hands down on the plastic just in front of hers. She looked up at me, surprised, and strangely enough, almost scared, like a deer stuck in headlights.

“Oh, Kit. You scared me,” she said, with relief clear in her voice. I sat down across from her and noticed she wasn’t eating anything.

“You’re not going to eat?” I asked. She shook her head morosely.

“No.” She offered no explanation.

“Why not?”

“Don’t feel like it,” she muttered.

“I know the feeling. They make me feel a bit sick, too,” I said, waving in the direction of the other kids in the cafeteria. She gaped, looking as surprised as if I had just told her I was a time traveler or an alien.

“You don’t say that
out loud
,” she whispered furtively, absurdly, looking around to see if anyone had heard. No one had, of course. No one was paying attention to the two of us in the slightest.

“Why not? None of them like you anymore, anyway. And I don’t care if they like me.”

She winced a bit, then looked at me curiously. “You look like such a goody-two-shoes.”

I laughed. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well . . . you talk like such a rebel. But you look stuck-up and . . . prissy.”

“Do I?” I asked, dismayed. “Sorry.”

She shrugged blandly and went back to staring at the table.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone staring at us from across the room. I looked away from Maggie momentarily, focusing in on that someone. It was Michael. Quiet, still, eyes narrowed. That was interesting.

I smiled my most infuriating smile in his direction, and my attention went back to Maggie. He wasn’t my concern at the moment.

“So, since we’re apparently both stuck-up and unlikable, we should be friends,” I said jauntily. “We have something in common.”

“What?”

“Well, you need a friend, and I don’t particularly care if I have friends, but I’ll seem like a complete arse without any. So we should stick together—what do you say?”

She looked a bit overwhelmed.

“You’re sure? Everyone hates me; you’re right. No one really thinks you’re stuck-up, even though you look like it. Everyone’s sort of fine with you.”

I looked up, pretending to think.

“Why exactly do they hate you? I know your friends all sort of abandoned you. Sorry, that’s harsh. But why exactly did that happen?” I asked with an apologetic grimace. I did want to know her side of the story.

She hesitated and looked at me tiredly. “I rejected Michael when he asked me out,” she admitted quietly. She looked uncomfortable, as if that simplistic explanation didn’t quite cover everything, as if that were just the neatest answer and the one she had grown accustomed to giving, even if it wasn’t quite true. I raised my eyebrows.

“Why did you say no? He’s cute,” I said.

“He’s dangerous,” she muttered bitterly, as if she were remembering something she couldn’t explain. “He’s pretty, yeah, but he’s a bastard. I swear.”

“What happened between you two? It sounds like there’s some history there.”

She hesitated.

“He hurt me once,” she murmured, so quietly that I could barely hear her.

That was interesting.

“Want to talk about it?” I asked, with perhaps a bit too much cheer.

She shook her head. “No.”

I shrugged. I didn’t really need to hear it from her to imagine what had happened. He’d probably hit her—there were rumors he’d beaten up at least three people from various schools across London, though there was no way of definitively knowing which, if any, of those rumors were true. They’d all gotten blown up to a point where it was impossible to distinguish fiction from fact.

Strangely enough, people didn’t really seem to mind all that. Michael was charming, so everyone continued to like him; mostly, people just ignored the rumors or dismissed them as fiction. He did have a bit of a crazy reputation, though, depending on who you talked to, and of course, I had never liked him myself.

“Fair enough. We’re friends, then?”

She smiled a soft smile, ever so slightly.

“Yeah. Friends.”

My stomach churned a bit.

No, I reminded myself. I could do this. There was no morality. I could not doubt that, or doubt myself. No good would come of it. No good at all.

As the end-of-day bells rang and the students left the building, I stood in a bathroom stall on the third floor and looked thoughtfully down at the letter in my hand, scrawled in hasty, angry letters on lined paper ripped out of a notebook. I read it, considering the words.

Dear Killer,

Kill Maggie Bauer.

We used to be friends—we were friends for a long time. I thought she was different from the rest. I thought I saw something in her—something beautiful. She was everything to me. I depended on her. I thought we were the same, or at least we could be the same. I thought she saw the world like I saw it, and could understand what I meant if I chose to talk about it with her. I thought she saw the way that nothing has hope, the way everything in the world is dark, and the way that you must understand that to have any hold on reality at all.

You understand what I’m talking about, don’t you? You must. Considering what you do.

But she refused me. She let me down. When I needed her, she went away. One day she was there, the next day she had vanished from me. I’ve realized that she’s just like the rest. Just vapid and useless. Just absolutely nothing. She can’t understand anything you want to tell her—she pretends to understand, but when you really need her to understand, she just runs away like nobody matters but her.

I still want her to understand. I still want her to be with me, I still want her love, her everything, but—it can’t be, can it? No. You must understand. I can no longer go on, so long as she’s alive to taunt me with her existence.

I’ve realized that she’s a superficial idiot. She’s disgusting. I am so alone. I hate her.

She broke my heart, and she deserves to die.

I didn’t know exactly what to make of the letter.

The writer had to be Michael. That was interesting. It was all interesting, actually.

Kill Maggie Bauer? Fine. I could do that. But he would pay for his request. He would pay, like they all did. I would leave Maggie dead with his letter on her body. That was my price. They paid with their freedom. They would never be able to forget what they had done, because no one else would forget. It would follow them all the days of their lives.

For a long time it had seemed so strange to me that they would keep coming when I incriminated them so obviously. It took me a while to realize why, exactly, they kept coming, but when I realized, it all made sense, and it made me a little proud. And a little sickened.

They all called on me because I was the best. I always got it right. And calling on me instead of someone else made them feel better about wishing for murder—there was an element of chance about it. Sometimes I killed, sometimes I didn’t, and that uncertainty made people feel less responsible.

I held them captive.

They were tied to me; their letters tied them to me. If I was ever caught, arrested, I could incriminate them, explain everything to the police, prove that they had all in fact hired a murderer. I kept a silent hold on them, always.

I was sure that fact, more than anything, bothered them the most.

I folded up the letter and put it away. I had to get going if I wanted to make it back to Chelsea in time to make a quick social call.

Chapter 4

L
ondon was unusually hot that afternoon. As I walked through the streets, I felt heat bearing down on my back and remembered another heat, a long time ago. The train of thought that had occupied me after I went to pick up my letters was still lingering.

I remembered being in a never-used guest bedroom on the second floor of our old town house, converted by my mother and me into something all our own—small and stuffy, because we had to keep the curtains drawn and the door locked. The air-conditioning had been turned on, but it had only wheezed through the vent and hadn’t really cooled anything down. Gymnastics mats carpeted the floor. I remembered what we wore more vividly than anything else, though; I had been in gym shorts that hung down nearly past my knees, a tank top, and tennis shoes with laces that were too long. Ragged black hand wraps had been twisted around my hands like a second skin. My mother, across the room, stylishly dressed as usual, had stood silently in white jeans and a gray shirt, cool and quiet and joyous and beautiful, with eyes like glass.

There were many of these days, but as I wandered through the streets that afternoon, I remembered one in particular. A day that had meant something.

I remembered gray skies, muggy air, darkness fading over everything. I had crouched down in the corner, near the brass hinges of the door. Panting. Eight years old. Sweat. Exhaustion. My mother standing over me, determined, pale hair swept back into a high ponytail, weight balanced evenly on both legs.

She had been so dazzling then! Back in the days when she had held a more secure role in my killings. It was only when I reached back into the past that I realized how much she had lost. Today, she was still partially the woman she had been in that room—but the measured cleverness in her eyes, the fight in her stance, her clipped tones had faded away into quiet stillness as I pulled away from her and became my own force. A force she could touch but could no longer guide or hold like she wanted to.

“I’m tired,” I had said that day. “Can I be done for today?”

At that point we had been training for the past year or so. Martial arts, strategy, acting, anything that could ever be useful. We sparred, did drills, played dangerous games, and both of us sustained more bruises than we could count. We hid them all beneath scarves and jackets and gloves; once, I accidentally gave my mother a long gash down her cheek by shoving her into the windowsill. She had congratulated me for the move that did it, and told all her friends that she had fallen against the edge of a sharp picture frame.

The injuries we sustained there were good injuries. They bespoke hard work.

Both of us knew that room was
our
place. When I came home from school, I always changed and went there for hours on end, not eating until we stopped late in the evening so I wouldn’t be training when and if my father returned home. Every night I trained until every muscle in my body ached.

I had been her dutiful student, never questioning. I suppose others might have said that it was a cruel way to treat such a small child—but it had never seemed cruel to me. It was a necessity in my eyes. I had grown up knowing I would be a killer. My mother, perched on the edge of my bed before I went to sleep each night, my blue-eyed guardian, had told me stories. She had told me of what it felt like to kill. She had told me that it was my duty. She had told me that there was no right and no wrong, and that I shouldn’t believe anyone who said there was. I had never known anything else.

Hearing my question that day, she had hesitated strangely.

“No,” she said eventually, drawing one hand across her cheekbone, tucking a stray piece of blond hair behind her ear.

Shivering in the corner, I clenched my teeth. She was being unreasonable. I was physically incapable of obeying her. Usually when I told her I was done, she listened—I had never been the type to exaggerate my tiredness.

“Tomorrow. I can’t do any more today. I’m going to fall.”

We had been practicing boxing all afternoon, and I was still on my feet only because I was leaning against the wall.

She looked down at me expressionlessly.

“Again,” she said, inviting me to punch the mitt she held in her right hand.

Struggling to stand—wavering—crumpling back against the wall, breaths short and aching.

“Not today,” I pleaded. The air felt like I was standing in the center of the sun, and it bore down on me, crushing—

I felt fuzzy. In that room, in that moment, I felt sick, and dizzy, and not entirely present, as if I were watching things from the outside.

“No,” she said.

“Please—”

She held up the mitt.

“Again.”

Again I tried to stand on my own, and again I failed. This time the attempt unbalanced me enough that I could no longer even lean against the wall. I crumpled to my knees.

“Please.”

“No. Get up. Again.”

It was cruel! What was she doing, how could she be doing this—she wasn’t usually this cruel, what was wrong, why was she so cruel today?

“I can’t,” I moaned, collapsing into tired sobs.

She watched me in silence. I imagined looking up into her eyes, seeing for myself the dissatisfaction there. I couldn’t even muster the energy to look up, though. I just stared impassively at the blue mat between my knees and cried.

And eventually my tears stopped, faded away, and I was just left in silence.

“Again,” my mother said quietly.

And then something snapped. Head jerking upward, I spoke sharply, each word biting angrily through the air.

“We are
done
for today,” I barked. “And I don’t care what you want.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I winced and anticipated her anger.

My mother was momentarily expressionless.

Then—

“Okay,” she said.

And slowly, slowly, she smiled and walked over to me. She knelt on the sweaty mats; and then she wrapped her arms around my shoulders and held me tight. And my anger was suddenly gone.

“Good girl. I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“What?”

“You learned it.”

“What?” I said again, dumbly.

“What I was trying to teach you. It’s not something I can just tell you. You have to learn through experience. You have to see for yourself. Some things are like that. The important things.”

“I don’t think I’ve learned anything,” I protested limply.

“Challenge everything,” she breathed. “Challenge everything, even me. If you don’t, you’ll get pushed around. Take what you want. Don’t take no for an answer. It’s important.”

“Oh.”

And I had a moment when it rushed through me, her lesson, every part of it, and I realized that everything she did, she did with purpose.

And with that she swept me tenderly up in her arms and unlocked the door, climbed the stairs, and brought me to my bedroom, where she peeled back the sheets and gingerly set me down in my bed.

I fell asleep almost instantly. But in those brief moments before sleep came, I felt my mother sitting beside me, stroking my hair with warm, gentle, familiar hands.

Beneath those hands, I felt safe, and grateful, and home.

She was softly singing a nursery rhyme.

“Three blind mice, three blind mice . . .”

I walked into the Chelsea Police Station bearing pastries and a smile.

It was a heavy-looking redbrick building, very official, with no hint of humor within its thick walls. There was a small stone statue of a dog outside the front door, a dog sitting with its mouth gleefully open and one paw raised as if it wanted to break free from the stone and play. It fascinated me for a moment. But then I moved on.

I was thinking I would have to
ask
for Alex, which could have been awkward, but luck was on my side. As I walked in, he was walking out. He saw me and froze for half a second, before giving me an uncomfortable smile. He stood with most of his weight on one foot, graceful and tall, but he wasn’t relaxed. His deep eyes, murky beneath long lashes, studied me carefully. For a moment, I was frozen in his gaze. Then he blinked, and I remembered to breathe.

I lifted the bag of pastries in my hand, waving them, smelling suddenly the wafting scent of sugar. I gave him a sweet, almost saccharine smile.

“Hello,” I said.

“Ah . . . hello.”

“I’ve brought pastries. They’re quite good. They’re from a café a ways down King’s Road.”

“That’s . . . nice.”

I noticed a few police officers looking at me, the girl in the school uniform, and looking at him. I pretended not to notice.

“What are you doing here, Kit?”

“Well, I thought it was a nice thing to do, stopping by and all,” I said, looking innocent. He sighed.

“Let’s go talk somewhere else,” he muttered, and ushered me out the door.

We walked about half a block until we found a bench and sat down. He sat as far away from me as possible and looked me suspiciously. As ingenuously as I could, I held the bag of pastries out toward him. Not taking his eyes off me, he reached inside and took out a lemon scone.

“Those are good. Good choice,” I told him. He glared.

“What exactly do you
want
from me?” he asked after a moment.

“What?”

“You’re a kid. Why are you following me to work? You want something, I can tell, but I don’t know what that is. Last night, too, I saw it. . . .”

“Ah . . . well . . .” I laughed nervously.

He really was born to be an inspector. His instinct was fantastic. I was a good actress, but he saw right through me. Time to change tactics. Innocent and stupid weren’t working on him.

Despite my attempts to keep my face blank and unreadable, a very faint smile tinged the edge of my lips. Alex was more interesting than I had given him credit for at first.

“Fine,” I said, putting the bag down on the bench between us. My eyes sharpened. I let myself look clever, dropped my bovine facade, showed him my slyness. “You’re right. I want something.”

He looked at me, waiting, a faint satisfied smile lighting up his face in a way that made me distracted for a moment.

I sighed.

“I want to know about the Perfect Killer.”

He chuckled. “That’s not kid stuff.”

“I’m not a kid.”

“Yes, you are.”

“You’re barely older than me,” I said accusingly. “And I’m smart.”

“Smart has nothing to do with it. Murder is brutal, horrible—too much for you to handle.”

I resisted the urge to laugh.

“I can deal with it,” I scoffed stubbornly.

“Your mom invited me over because you’re nosy, didn’t she?” he said, shaking his head, looking vaguely amused.

I laughed quietly. “Yes, something like that.”

“Sorry. I can’t help you. It’s against the rules, anyway.”

He stood up, pushing the bag back toward me. He took a bite of the scone.

“It’s good.” He smiled. “Sorry I couldn’t give you what you wanted. You should forget about this. Although it looks like you’ve got a good head on your shoulders, so maybe I shouldn’t worry too much about you, eh?”

“I like to think so,” I said.

He waved slightly to me and took a few steps backward.

“If you ever want to work for the police when you’re older, give me a call.”

“I don’t have your number,” I pointed out petulantly.

“Oh.” He paused, sighed like an indulgent older brother, and walked back toward me. Digging out a piece of paper and a pen from the black bag hanging at his side, he scrawled down his number and handed over the paper.

“Give me a call in a few years or so,” he said with a lukewarm smile. He didn’t really mean it.

I frowned at the paper. This was something, but it wasn’t good enough. I had to keep him close. I was beginning to see. I couldn’t just know my enemy. I had to be closer than that.

I had to control my enemy.

“It was nice meeting you, Kit.”

He waved politely to me and turned his back, walking away down the sidewalk.

I had to take a risk if I wanted to gain his trust. I stood and took a deep breath.

“The Perfect Killer is based in Chelsea and is a student,” I said loudly.

My heart beat quickly. I had to do it. I was afraid. But I had to make him trust me. My mind whirled, my thoughts anxious and out of order. But I had to do it.

He stopped and turned to face me again.

“What?” he said quietly.

“Based in Chelsea and a student.”

Slowly, he walked back over to me.

“How do you know that?”

“The—the reports. In the papers. It was easy enough to figure out.”

“What do you mean?” he said, a bit louder than before, his eyes a little too wide—

“You . . . didn’t know that,” I realized with a touch of despair. I had said too much. I had assumed I was just giving him facts that the public wasn’t supposed to know but the police had figured out through logic—the necessary information was staring them in the face, anyway. I only wanted to prove my cleverness to him, seemingly using information that was public property. But instead I had given him new clues that could lead to me. I had over-estimated the police’s intelligence.

Shit.

“I know the killer is based in Chelsea. The murders are widespread, but a larger-than-normal portion of the murders take place in Chelsea,” he said. “But how did you know he—or she, I suppose—is a student?”

“The . . . times of death.”

“What was that? I couldn’t hear.”

“The—ah—times of death. In the newspapers, they always say the times of death of the victims. All the weekday murders happened in the late afternoon or night, except for two that happened on school holidays at around midday.”

Those two kills had been mistakes. Too much of a clue. I had been younger then. I had assumed the police had made those connections by now. But I suppose not.

He looked at me, shock in his eyes, staring.

I grinned slyly.

Oh well. I had sacrificed a clue for an advantage. Now I had his trust. That, I thought, could be helpful later. Perhaps even necessary.

“Alex,” I said amusedly.

“You
are
smart,” he murmured. His eyes softened, just a bit, just enough.