Chapter 41
Richard Stone’s mansion, The Bird Streets, Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles
He’s staring at us, his stupid brain unable to properly fathom what’s happening to him.
That he’s bleeding out over his own Poltrona Frau sofa.
That he’s not the predator.
We are.
He’s unable to say anything apart from wet gurgles but his eyes are asking that all-important question, why?
I’m more than happy to fill him in on that.
‘Did you think you were going to get away with it forever?’ I ask him as he weakly clutches at his neck. ‘We know exactly what you’ve been doing. Why you get young women to your home. So I’ll ask you again. Did you think you were going to get away with it forever?’
He still doesn’t answer, mostly because he can’t, but I’m not accepting that. I kick him in the groin and he slides off the couch and onto the floor.
‘That’s becoming like your signature move, Kits,’ Antoinette says as she delivers her own blow to his most sensitive parts.
I suppose it is.
I crouch down so my eyes are level with Richard Stone’s and I slowly and excruciatingly pull the ice pick out of his neck.
It glides through his jugular like it’s butter.
And then the damn bursts. Blood spurts hard and fast from the now-open wound, gushing out like it’s escaping.
The redness of the blood still fascinates me even after all this time and …
hmm, not quite sure how many kills it is now.
The brightness surprises me, almost like I expect something else to run through his veins. Something black and toxic, like oil.
It’s actually a shame that I can’t take my time with this one. The thought of torturing him and making him suffer. The idea of killing him slowly, more of a death-by-a-thousand-cuts kind of approach. I wish I could savour this kill and make him fully regret every single one of his crimes.
But time is something we don’t have on our side right now.
He gurgles something but it’s too late for final words.
He had his chance.
When Richard Stone is dead, I look around at the blood-soaked living area.
Fuck.
How are we going to clean this up?
Usually the post-murder clean-up is one of the things I like most of all.
There’s something almost meditative about it, about the mental checklist where I can mark off everything I need to do.
The cleaning, the disposal of anything I’ve touched, the routine to it is comforting.
But it soon becomes clear that it’s cleaning up alone that has always made it so meditative.
It’s not the same almost spiritual experience with a twenty-year-old who was raised by YouTube.
‘Get ready with us as we clean up a murder scene,’ Antoinette chirps into her phone. She sees me watching her and winks.
‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ I say, lunging for the phone.
She rolls her eyes and holds it out of my reach. ‘Chill Bill. I’m obviously not really recording, am I?’
‘You’re twisted,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I take after my big sister.’
I can’t argue with her on that one.
‘Seriously though,’ I say. ‘How are we going to clean this mess up? There’s no way we’re going to be able to get all that blood off. There’s not enough bicarbonate of soda in the world.’
We stare at the pool of blood that has spread like an angry oil slick over the couch and walnut floor.
‘Cleaning’s not really my thing,’ Antoinette muses.
No.
She prefers to leave that part to me.
‘Well, we can’t stage a suicide, for obvious reasons.’
We stare at the gaping hole in Richard Stone’s neck.
‘We’re going to have to make it look like an accident,’ Antoinette says.
‘What? He accidentally skewered himself through the throat? With an ice pick?’
She shrugs. ‘He could have fallen on it,’ she says. ‘Everyone knows the home is the most dangerous place in the world.’
‘Hmm. A freak accident in the home.’ It could work.
I just need to think with the creative part of my brain.
I walk over to the bar area and am impressed by the size of it. It’s got everything. Including a dishwasher.
A story I read online recently pops into my head.
A news feature about a man who’d fallen in his kitchen and accidentally impaled himself on a knife that was blade up in the cutlery bit of the dishwasher.
I look around the bar. There are knives here, ones he obviously used to cut up the lemon earlier. A plan forms in my brain.
‘Antoinette,’ I say, ‘bring the ice pick over here.’
She does as she’s told and I use my shirt to wipe it clean. No blood, no fingerprints. Then I open the dishwasher, which is full of dirty glasses and cutlery, and pop the ice pick in, sharp side facing up. I add the knife he used as well.
‘Okay,’ I say, ‘now we need to drag his body over here.’
He’s not the lightest man in the world but we are able to drag him across the smooth flooring without too much trouble.
‘Right,’ I say, ‘now we need to flip him over and get the ice pick in his neck hole.’
Trying to manoeuvre the body of a grown man onto such a precise point isn’t the easiest thing but after some ‘to me, to you’-style back-and-forthing we manage it.
‘There we go,’ I say to Antoinette.
‘Ooh, wait,’ she says and, covering her hand, knocks a bottle of vodka over so all the liquid trickles onto the floor.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask her.
‘Making the floor slippery,’ she says. ‘So dangerous in here.’
Not bad.
I stand back and admire our handiwork.
‘So he was in the bar fixing himself a drink, slipped and impaled himself on the ice pick that was perilously placed in the dishwasher.’
‘Perfect,’ Antoinette says. ‘Now all we need to do is clean up the blood on the sofa?’
I’d forgotten about that.
It takes us another hour or so to scrub the living area clean. Then we have to wipe our prints off everything we touched.
‘We need to do something about the security footage as well,’ I say. Fuck’s sake. It feels never-ending.
‘Say less,’ Antoinette chirps and disappears off.
I look at our crime scene again.
It’s actually not bad.
I go and take another look at Richard Stone’s dead body.
Yep. It looks pretty convincing.
I feel my stomach churn and something wet and slick rises up my throat.
Oh God, no.
I can’t be sick here.
Far too much DNA.
I crouch down and put my head between my knees, taking some deep breaths.
Thankfully the urge to purge passes just as Antoinette comes back in.
‘I’ve wiped all the footage,’ she says. ‘No one will know we’ve been here.’
‘Are you sure? How did you do that?’
‘I’m Gen Z,’ she says by way of explanation. I’m not going to argue with that.
I take one last look around to make sure we haven’t missed anything before we let ourselves out.
‘The home is such a dangerous place,’ I say as we leave.