Dear Killer (6 page)

“You’re never going to solve it,” I muttered.

“What?”

“It’s nothing.”

“But it’s interesting. He’s a strange serial killer. Most serial killers have a way of doing things, a way they murder all their victims. But the Perfect Killer’s modus operandi is different every time. The only similarities the murders have are their perfection and the letters.”

“But they’re all too perfect to be a series of copycats.”

“Exactly.”

I was silent for a moment. I couldn’t tell him the answer to his very legitimate question. I wished I could. I knew I couldn’t make him understand, but it might be interesting to try. It was because I wasn’t psychotic or bloodthirsty, didn’t depend on a consistent modus operandi to keep my sanity. It was because I treated murder as a job.

“What did the letter say?” I asked curiously.

“Something about blackmail and her fiancé hating her. I haven’t read the whole thing, I haven’t had a chance yet.”

“Poor girl,” I said. “And poor bastard who wrote it.”

Alex tilted his head and sighed.

“Most of the time I find the Perfect Killer disgusting,” he said, and continued in a breathy voice that he let only me hear, though the room was swarming with police officers. “But other times I wonder why we aren’t congratulating him.”

Chapter 7

M
aggie and I walked into my house to the smell of something cooking in the kitchen.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, closing the door behind us. “I’ve brought company.”

From the kitchen, my mom laughed cheerfully. No trace of the morning’s tired melancholy was left in her voice; she was bright and beautiful now, just like usual, having had a day’s rest.

“Finally. You’re beginning to be like me,” she chirped.

“Hello,” Maggie replied meekly.

Maggie and I walked to the kitchen door and looked inside to see her surrounded in smoke that billowed around her head as she cooked something on the grill part of the stove.

“Mom, this is Maggie. Maggie, this is my mom.”

My mom stepped away from the stove and held out a hand to shake, which Maggie took lamely.

“Hello, Maggie.”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Ward.”

“Lovely to meet you as well. I’m glad you’ve become friends with Kit. She doesn’t often bring people over.”

“Ah . . . thank you.”

Maggie stood gawkily for a moment before I realized that I should take charge of the situation again.

“Oh.” I laughed. “Maggie, let’s go to my room. It’s way up on the top floor. Don’t know why I picked it, but I like it.”

“Okay,” Maggie said with an agreeable smile.

The two of us started out of the room toward the stairs, Maggie going first.

“Kit, can I talk to you alone for a moment?” my mom called after me. I stopped and walked back into the kitchen as Maggie waited, looking rather lost, sinking deep into the Turkish rug at the bottom of the stairs. My mom beckoned to me, telling me to come closer, closer, closer, until our faces were only about a foot away and I could see the tiny, near-invisible flecks of brown in her intensely blue eyes.

“Are you going to kill her?” she asked, expression utterly cold and unfeeling.

I paused.

“Yes,” I said.

She looked at me carefully, warningly.
Be careful,
she was saying silently.

“Don’t get too close,” she whispered.

“I know.” I smiled.

“Kit, I mean it. I—” She paused and continued in an even quieter voice, barely loud enough for me to hear. “Why is she here?”

“It’s good to know what you’re up against, right?”

“I . . .” She hesitated.

She was so concerned. Her eyes glistened sharply out of the smoke, and her slender fingers quivered. The sharp curve of her jawline was a strangely angled shadow.

“It’s fine. I’ll be fine—you don’t have to worry,” I said to her comfortingly, and she was uncertain for a moment, but then she softened. She remembered my precision, my carefulness, my fastidious organization.

She smiled back, reassured that I knew what I was doing and hadn’t forgotten how to keep myself safe. She tossed her arms around my shoulders quickly, her breath wafting across my neck.

“Just be careful,” she sighed tenderly. She let me go.

Before I went back to Maggie, I flashed my mother a cocky, vibrant grin. She really didn’t have to worry about me.

She returned the smile with a motherly, reassuring, thoughtful, vaguely uncertain nod of the head.

Maggie and I lay on our backs on the floor in a pile of pillows, looking at the pale cream ceiling.

We were tired—since it was a school day that day and a school day the next as well, we should probably already be asleep. But we were teenage girls. And teenage girls never go to bed on time. We kept ourselves awake by talking. Our voices sounded sleepy.

“I can’t believe you know policemen. Like, actually know them, are actually friends with them. That’s crazy. You just went into a crime scene, no big deal.” Maggie yawned. She was more talkative when she was tired, apparently. My mother was that way as well.

I giggled. “I have my mom to thank for that. She invited him over for dinner. I told you she’s got a habit of inviting random people over. And, you know, we became friends.”

“Oh, so
that’s
what she meant earlier about inviting people over.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“That’s cool. I’d like that. You know, if my family did that. You’ve got a nice house. You’re right to invite people to such a nice house.”

“Your family doesn’t do company much?”

“Nah. We don’t do much of anything . . . much. My immediate family, at least. My extended family’s the only exciting part. They’re nice,” Maggie said softly.

The room went quiet.

“Nothing at all? That must be boring,” I said, laughing, trying to lighten the mood.

“Nothing, really. My parents are . . . I don’t know, quiet, don’t bother me much. They’re out of town a lot. And I’m an only child, so home is just boring.”

“Look at the bright side. Freedom, right?”

“Freedom is just another word for no one cares,” she said, and laughed breathily.

I didn’t know what to say to that. But I had to say something, so—

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t?”

“Freedom is freedom, right? For whatever reason, you can do what you want, right?”

“I suppose.”

“If you’ve got freedom and no one cares, you should be having more fun,” I said jauntily.

“Like what?”

“Strike out. Do something crazy. Dye your hair pink or something, at least.”

“That’s against uniform regulations at school.”

“Who
cares
?”

“I care.”

“Why? It’s not like you want to be a Nobel Prize winner or anything. You can take all those hard classes and stuff, but you can’t fool me. You’re a little rebel on the inside, just like me.”

“I’m not,” she said flatly. “I’m good. I stick to the status quo. And how do you know I don’t want to win a Nobel Prize?”

“Because I can see right through you, that’s how. Beneath that timid exterior is a . . . I don’t know. A tiger or something. Waiting to break free. And Jesus, what’s so good about the status quo?”

“You say that. But you stick to it too. You wear preppy clothes and don’t cause trouble. You’re just an upper-middle-class kid with her own agenda and a few nice pairs of shoes like the rest of us.”

I grinned, still tired, but behind that wooziness, my heart was beating quickly.

“I stick to the status quo because what I like
is
the status quo.”

Well, not entirely true. Murder wasn’t the status quo. But true enough. There was enough truth in it so I didn’t feel like I was lying. One-half of me was the status quo, at least—the half of me that went to school and went to cafés and ate lunch in the cafeteria. The half of me that murdered was absolutely separate from all that, another being entirely.

“And hey, befriending you wasn’t the status quo, was it? You were a friendless loser and I befriended you. That’s not what normal people do,” I added.

“You say that, but in the end, you’re just like everyone else, including me. You’d ditch that rebellious attitude the moment it endangered your social status.”

I stood up suddenly, smiling a wild, wicked grin.

“You sure about that?”

“Yes,” Maggie said, undaunted.

I walked across the room to the window and flung it open. The night air hit my face like a cold sheet, washing over me. Outside, I heard the soft call of London, the swish of cars passing in the distance down King’s Road.

I put one foot on the low windowsill.

“Jumping out of windows isn’t the status quo,” I said loudly.

She gasped and shot up into a sitting position, eyes wide, mouth gaping like a fish.

“Don’t do it, Kit!”

I laughed heavily, the sound coming from deep within my stomach.

“Don’t worry. I’ve done this before, when I was younger. Accidentally, then, but I figure the same sort of thing would happen if I did it again. There’s some nice bushes at the bottom that stop my fall. I’d come to school with scratches on Monday and I’d have to answer the questions, wouldn’t I? Don’t you think word would get around that I jumped out a window? Wouldn’t that be breaking the status quo? Should I do it to prove a point?” I put my other foot on the windowsill, so I was crouching in the window frame, holding the bottom of it with both hands, the drop looming below me.

“Don’t do it—I get it already, I get it!”

I smiled. I stepped backward out of the window frame.

“I won’t do it,” I said, looking back over my shoulder toward her. “Don’t worry.”

She sighed but kept staring anxiously at me.

“The point is,” I said, “don’t stick to the status quo. Live wildly. You’ve got your freedom—now do something with it, for God’s sake.”

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“I know.”

“But you’re the most honest friend I’ve had in a long time.”

I hesitated. I bit my tongue gently.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

“No problem.”

A few days passed innocently like that, with no change in Maggie’s behavior or mine. I began to plot my next murder—a young lawyer who apparently cheated a divorcing couple out of their money—and I did well in school, especially in philosophy, where I excelled. I tried to take to heart Dr. Marcell’s suggestion of sharing more of my thoughts, but it really was quite hard when most of my thoughts were of murder.

I began to gather strange, hostile glances from Michael. Beginning on Wednesday, in the early morning, in homeroom, he was silent in my presence. I caught him sneaking glances over his shoulder at me when he thought I wasn’t looking, his eyes almost accusing, somehow, as if he knew my secrets. He made me sick.

And then, in philosophy, the only class we shared, he made a point of antagonizing me during discussion. Dr. Marcell praised him for arguing, of course, saying it was adding to the conversation. It wasn’t. But I bit my lip and said nothing. I left the classroom quickly after the bell rang. And then in hallways, between classes and after school, I saw him lurking, watching me. I was sure he was watching Maggie too. This continued throughout the week, and I wondered what his problem was. I really wondered.

As the week went on, my vague curiosity turned sharper and sharper—and on Thursday, it reached a breaking point.

I hadn’t planned on following him home after school. I did it on a whim.

It was fairly stupid. But it wasn’t doing any harm, was it? If I got caught, I could just laugh it off, say I was walking toward the Thames and only happened to be walking just behind him—that was where he lived, just on the other side of the Thames, across Waterloo Bridge. It was about a twenty-minute walk. I’m not really sure what I was trying to accomplish. But whatever my reasoning, in the end, I did end up following him home on Thursday afternoon.

It wasn’t too hard to escape notice. He took busy streets; it was easy to hide myself behind mothers with strollers and sickeningly sweet couples and other members of the scenery as I lingered about twenty feet behind him. I kept my eyes on his head as it bobbed along. His hair did this silly little bouncing thing with every step.

Strangely enough, I felt almost horrible about following him, now that I was doing it.

I knew I shouldn’t feel bad. I knew moral nihilism—nothing right, nothing wrong. Though it didn’t feel
wrong
to follow him so much as it just felt
uncomfortable
; so perhaps moral nihilism didn’t exactly apply. As I followed him through the crowd, as cars drove past and people nearby sold newspapers and went into shops to buy earrings and groceries and whatever else, I felt somehow as if I were violating him. Robbing him. Watching with purpose, I supposed, might not have been so bad, but I was watching him for no reason. Senselessly. Invading.

He was just going about his business. He pushed past a group of women and looked absently into a store window, and he didn’t know I was there. Someone had spilled their soda—he jumped to avoid it. I watched him. I kept following. As I kept following, I almost began to feel sorry for doing it. But not quite sorry enough to turn away.

After a while my mind and eyes began to wander, though I still kept him in the corner of my vision. The Thames and the Waterloo Bridge were discernible in the distance now. The sky was blue; there were birds winging over the rooftops, unconcerned with anything below; my hair was in my eyes, and I brushed it away, and it flopped back down again. I smelled oranges.

And then, suddenly, there was a crashing sound about twenty feet ahead.

I jumped, startled. I hadn’t seen what happened. It took me a few moments to process the details. A bicycle had somehow fallen in the middle of the sidewalk, taking three people down with it: its rider—a red-faced and apologetic brunette kid in a yellow dress—a stately looking housewife type, and Michael.

I almost laughed. There they were. They looked ridiculous, the three of them tangled up in the middle of the sidewalk. It seemed like something out of a comedy sketch. The brunette girl’s dress was ripped up the side—why was she wearing a dress on a bicycle anyway? The housewife had lost both of her pink kitten heels. One was in the gutter, and the other had gotten wedged between the spokes of the bicycle’s front wheel. And Michael—

Michael.

Michael was
glaring
.

Or maybe not glaring, exactly, because glaring implies that you’re looking angrily at one thing in particular. Michael wasn’t looking at anything. He was staring out into space. His eyes were unfocused and narrowed—he was looking indistinctly in the direction of the bright sky, and he couldn’t keep them open all the way.

And, oh, the anger in those eyes.

The scene wasn’t funny any longer.

I didn’t understand. This was a bicycle crash. Maybe a few scrapes, but no real harm done. Why was there so much anger? Sure, the housewife was yelling and irritated, but she was already on her feet, and a few other people were helping the girl in yellow disentangle herself from the handlebars. No one helped Michael. They all saw the same thing I did, and they were afraid. As they should be.

Because I was afraid too. And I was a serial killer. I was not often afraid.

There was something in those eyes. An empty hatred, hatred with nowhere to go, nothing to be directed at. Hatred that let him blend in with the world for the most part, except when it grew too large for him to hold it in all the way. Hatred that bubbled to the surface but didn’t quite overflow. Hatred that led him to wish for his former friend’s death but wouldn’t let him kill her himself.