Chapter Fifty-Six #2
He wanted me to think using Dominic had been so calculated, but I suspected it was something simpler. Talking to my father was not for the faint of heart. Especially if he had murdered your loved ones in cold blood.
“Once I found you,” he continued, “I couldn’t just bump into you on the street.
You would have been too suspicious of me.
I needed a trail you could follow; I needed you to think you were making the decisions.
I knew once I left you those arms, you would think your father was involved.
You would look into it and that would lead you right to Dominic.
I didn’t know you two would become Sherlock and Watson, but I thought you’d do some digging on him and figure out he knew Elyse.
At that point, you wouldn’t be able to resist getting to know all of us.
“It was hard to figure you out.” He smiled.
“I wanted to take everything from you, but how could I do that when you had nothing to take?” He chuckled like he’d told a joke instead of an astute, depressing summarization of my existence.
“A guy you went on a couple dates with? I probably would have been doing you a favor to kill that dud. You’re going to laugh… ”
I was not.
“But I actually considered calling in a health code violation on that sandwich place you go to every day of your life. Absurd, I know, but I was still workshopping everything back then. It was a struggle to ascertain anything I could really use from just watching you in the shadows. Well,” he scoffed, “until I realized someone else was already watching you in the shadows.”
I could tell he loved delivering that turn of phrase and I hated him so much. He was the same little asshole he’d been when I’d bashed his skull in. Clearly, part of his master plan didn’t involve inspiring remorse in any way.
“That girl…” he continued. “She was nuts. I think she might have tried to poison me with soup at one point. I didn’t dare eat it—I could see there was a weird powder floating around in it—but I pretended it made me sick so she would feel bad…or happy, not exactly sure.”
“What did she even have to do with anything?” I asked, protective of Natalie, not caring for the way he was talking about her. “You didn’t have to involve her. She had no idea who you were or who I really was.”
“She was a curveball,” he admitted, “but she was exactly what I was looking for. Turns out you two went way back. Well, not as far back as me and you, but school chums!”
I made a point to turn my head and stare out the window as if everything he was saying wasn’t devastating, made all the worse by how dumb he sounded performing for me like a total clown.
“My first instinct was to just kill her, get her out of my way. But, of course, I was curious about who she was and why she was watching you all the time. She had all these notebooks in her apartment. Crazytown. Page after page of nonsense. A real slog to get through, but then I saw her for what she was finally: someone I could really use.”
I would have had a million questions, but I’d read her journal too, so I said nothing.
He didn’t care for my simulated apathy and tried harder to get a rise out of me.
“Her life was so insular, I knew I just had to penetrate her bubble. It didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it might.
” He shook his head. “Sad, sad lady. I crafted an alter ego, moved in next door, got in her space, played house for a few weeks. One night”—he paused to snicker—“when I knew she was watching, I pretended to fall and pass out. She snuck into my house and rubbed my face. Creepy, but I knew then I had her on the hook. Once I knew she was comfortable with me, or at least fixated on me, then I spun my story and put her to work.”
He glanced back at me in the rearview, but I refused to turn away from the window until I thought of something worth saying.
“But then you lost control of her,” I said. “You didn’t want her to do that video.”
“She told you that?” he asked.
“She didn’t have to.” Technically that was true, but I was trying to come across more as having a gift for reading people like my father and less as caring about the semantics of her having written it in her journal instead of telling me directly.
“Look,” he said. “I knew working with her had its risks. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t pivot around.”
“Whatever you need to tell yourself,” I said, finally finding something to enjoy in this conversation.
“Does it look like I’ve lost control of the situation?” he asked.
“Depends what your definition of control is.”
He looked at me through the mirror. “How about who’s in the handcuffs and who has the key?”
“Wow,” I said. “A real mastermind.”
“Stop,” he said. “I know what you’re doing. Just shut up and wait. You won’t be so cocky once we get there.”
“Can’t wait,” I said, going back to the window.
I bookmarked that little back-and-forth.
Undermining what your enemy takes great pride in can sometimes be a more effective weapon than anything you can shove into your sweatshirt pocket.
“Why didn’t you just kill her then?” I asked. “When she did that?”
“Meh,” he said. “I still wanted to use her for this next part, but then you went and showed up.”
I didn’t love what he was insinuating there.
If I hadn’t gone to her, she would still be alive.
Even if it wouldn’t have been for much longer, there would have been a chance.
And hats off to him; it would have been a real dagger to have no idea of Natalie’s involvement until the moment he brought me back to the Abbington house and slit her throat right in front of me.
It would have seemed so random, so nonsensical, so unnecessarily cruel that my brain may have exploded on the spot.
“So I had to go ahead and kill her,” he said, shrugging.
I had spent my whole life callous toward life and death, but I still hated the way he was so carefree about murdering Natalie and the others. Mostly because he had gotten the better of me. Mostly because I was embarrassed.
“So this is all for revenge?” I asked, hoping he could wrap it up.
“I like to call it closure,” he said, challenging the connotation.
“What kind of closure are you going to get from this? You killed…” I added them up on my fingers: Oswald, James, Reanne, Natalie. I paused the count. “Did you kill John?”
“What?” he scoffed. “No.”
“You killed four people,” I continued. “You cut up bodies and delivered me their arms. You don’t need closure; you need to be in a mental hospital.”
“Probably,” he said. “Maybe we could get a group rate.”