Chapter 21
Hollywood Reservoir Trail, Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles
With Travis Truman taking the reins in the hunt for Aidan Ward for a while, I have the chance to teach Antoinette some of the basics of serial killing. She’s keen and she’s got a knack for it, that’s for sure, but we cannot have another incident like the Ron Wilde one.
So today is a school day for Antoinette.
It’s another early start and another hiking trail, this time the Hollywood Reservoir.
Full disclosure, even though we pretty much ruled this place out as a potential dumping ground for dead bodies, I wanted to get a better look.
It’s obvious right away that this is not the place for me.
Or Ron Wilde. Too many cameras, too many Labradoodles and absolutely no way of getting near the actual water without ending up on some sort of watch-list. It’s something of a challenge trying to find any corner of this city that isn’t being filmed by either law enforcement or influencers.
I guess I’ll need to keep thinking.
‘The most important thing,’ I say to Antoinette as we do some basic stretches to warm up, ‘is that you’re certain your target deserves it. This means research. And evidence if at all possible. The worst thing you could do is kill a good man. They’re an endangered species as it is.’
‘I did my research with you know who,’ she says. ‘It was widely documented what a POS he was.’
‘I’m not entirely sure tabloid magazines and Reddit count as credible sources,’ I say.
She pulls her left foot up to her bottom, stretching out her quads. ‘There were legal proceedings,’ she says after a moment.
‘Which were dropped,’ I say. ‘He wasn’t charged with anything. In the eyes of the law, Ron Wilde did nothing wrong.’
She changes legs and frowns at me. ‘What about Believe Women?’ she says. ‘Isn’t that proof enough for you?’
She’s got me there.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Ron Wilde was obviously a very bad man and deserved to die. But. Generally, it’s always good to absolutely make sure your target is a terrible man. Making a mistake is the worst thing.’
I should know.
I’ve made two mistakes in my vigilante career.
The first one was my ex-boyfriend, Adam.
I loved him deeply and he betrayed me. Quite brutally.
At first I thought he was cheating on me, but then I discovered that I was actually the other woman.
He and his actual girlfriend were using me for my money and social media profile.
While I didn’t technically kill Adam, I did ruin his life.
I bashed him over the head and left him with locked-in syndrome.
He can only communicate with blinks now.
Adam might not have been a good man, but he didn’t deserve that.
Then there was Ruben Reynolds, whose only crime was looking too much like his sex-pest older brother, Rafe. I mistook him for Rafe on a night out and Ruben played along, even taking me to his brother’s home. He pretended to be Rafe until the moment I cut his throat.
Antoinette knows about both of these men, neither of them predators. She stretches her right arm across her chest now and looks at me. ‘Are you still beating yourself up about Adam and Ruben Reynolds?’ she asks and I nod. ‘I think you should stop.’
‘How can I?’ I say, dropping into a forward fold. ‘They were innocent.’ Antoinette snorts. ‘What?’ I say, standing up and facing her. ‘What was that for?’
‘They were hardly innocent, Kits,’ she says with a small shrug.
‘They weren’t predators,’ I say.
She drops her head to one side and looks at me. ‘Weren’t they?’
‘No …’
Antoinette raises her eyes. ‘So, would you have slept with Adam, would you have had a whole relationship with him if you knew that he actually had a girlfriend and was using you?’
‘No, of course not—’
‘And Ruben. Who was pretending to be someone else, his own famous brother, to get you into bed. You don’t think that’s predatory?’
Oh.
I hadn’t thought of it like that before.
‘It’s sex by deception,’ Antoinette says, fixing me with a hard stare. ‘Which is, legally speaking, rape.’
‘It is?’
‘You’re not giving informed consent,’ Antoinette says. ‘So it’s rape.’ She looks at me for a moment while I digest this. ‘Still think they’re not predatory?’
‘I loved Adam though,’ I say.
‘Yes, but would you ever have got involved with him in the first place if he’d been honest?’
I shake my head.
‘It’s back to the everyday misogyny I’ve been talking about,’ Antoinette continues. ‘Men lie all the time to get women into bed. Isn’t uninformed consent as bad as no consent at all?’
‘I guess,’ I say, feeling shaken and angry by this revelation.
Antoinette puts an arm around my shoulders. ‘I’m just saying,’ she says. ‘Don’t feel too bad about those men. I think they deserved it.’ She gives me a squeeze. ‘So what’s my next lesson?’
As we make our way around the trail, I tell Antoinette about the importance of having a plan for the bodies, even though my mind is still chewing on what she said about sex by deception.
‘The best thing to do is try to get rid of the body completely,’ I tell her. ‘Obviously, in the UK we’ve got access to the abattoirs, so that’s pretty easy to take care of over there.’
‘So what happens if we can’t get rid of a body?’
‘In that case, you have to make it look like an accident,’ I say, even though I’m thinking, Was it sex by deception? Is Adam more of a predator than I realised? Should I have finished the job? Anger starts to fire in the depth of my stomach.
‘And what about your code?’ Antoinette is saying like she didn’t just detonate a bomb in my head. ‘You know, Kitty’s Code.’ Kitty’s Code is the set of rules I made for myself to make sure I only kill the very worst men, the ones who absolutely deserve it.
‘Right, yes,’ I say, trying to pull myself back into the present. ‘So, rule one is No Women. No matter what.’
‘Unless she’s a psycho stalker threatening to unmask you as a serial killer,’ Antoinette says. ‘Like Hen.’
‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘Maybe we should call them guidelines rather than rules.’
I try not to kill women. They’re who I’m protecting. But Hen was an exception.
It was her or me.
I go on to explain the rest of my code to Antoinette, who nods along with a serious expression on her face.
No one innocent.
No one vulnerable.
Don’t get caught.
And most importantly, the kill must serve a purpose.
We’re not basic murderers. We’re doing this for a reason. We’re getting justice for every woman who has felt the weight of male violence hanging over her, for every woman who wasn’t believed, for every woman who was too scared to speak out.
As I speak, the familiar burning in my stomach starts. The faces of all the men I’ve killed before flash through my mind.
One in particular.
Adam.
Adam whom I loved but who was even more predatory than I realised. The burning intensifies. Becomes a white-hot rage.
I turn to Antoinette. ‘Let’s go out tonight,’ I say.
I think it’s time for a practical lesson.
In fact, I’m itching for it.