Page 80 of Investigate Away
“Is that why you smashed her face in?” Bile smacked the back of Callie’s throat. Her stomach churned.
Kara reached out, smacking Callie across the cheek.
Callie’s head snapped, crash-landing against the window with a thud. She groaned. Probably not a good idea to fire back with sarcasm. Duly noted.
“Don’t make me do that again,” Kara said.
Callie lifted her bound hands and rubbed the side of her face. “Okay. So how did my sister find out your identity?” she asked as calmly as possible.
“She found an old picture that I kept. And in true Stephanie form, she confronted me on it, and she didn’t let up. Nope. She had to turn into a little Nancy Fucking Drew like you. If she told you who I was, you and that idiot boyfriend of yours would have figured it out.” Kara glanced in Callie’s direction. “Why the fuck did we have to come back here? Why did you make me do this all over again? It’s your fault. Just like it was Renee’s. If I had never come back to this godforsaken place, I could have tamed the beast.”
That circled Callie back to an onslaught of other questions she needed answered. She clutched her chest. Images of her and her sister bombarded her mind. But it was her sister’s voice tickling her ear, telling her to find out everything so that no victim would die in vain.
“What does that mean?” Callie asked.
“Wow. You really are a dumb fuck.” Kara pulled into a side street that looped toward the water. She stopped in front of a boarded-up small house. Or maybe a shed. “It’s amazing you and Jag got anywhere without me.”
Callie glanced to the left. “That’s funny because looking back, once you entered the picture, you directed my reporting. It was subtle, but I can see how as soon as I started opening up, you just twisted it, and I let you, and I, in turn, used it on Jag. You even went as far as to use your own mother to plant evidence and change the DNA samples so that Jag would catch Adam. Why’d you do that?”
Kara rammed the gearshift into park. “Because I planned on leaving Seattle with Stephanie. If we had a killer wrapped up nice and neat, it would be easy to leave, especially for her since she worried so much about you. But no, she had to go find my secret, and then my stupid bitch mother had to gain a conscience and mislabel one of the samples on purpose. She wanted to get caught, but before she could confess what she’d done and rat me out, I—”
“You killed her.”
“Well, would you look at that, Callie girl grew a fucking brain.”
Callie let out a dry laugh. “And you killed Adam Wanton.”
“Of course I did. I needed him to disappear so people might still believe he was the killer even if my mom fucked all that up and your stupid boyfriend jumped the gun on the arrest.” Kara reached over and opened the vehicle door. “Get out.”
On wobbly legs, Callie stepped from the car. She scanned the area but wasn’t exactly sure where she was. She and Jag had spent some time on the island when they’d been dating, but they always liked Fort Casey over any other place. “Why’d you kill your college roommate?” She needed to focus on the patterns and motives of the murders. The psychology behind it. She had to understand more about how Kara thought and felt about her actions if she was going to figure out how to get out of this situation alive.
And if she wound up dead.
At least she’d know the truth before she went six feet under.
Someone had to.
“She wasn’t Tina.”
“Your stepmother,” Callie said matter-of-factly. “Why the mood ring?”
“Because that’s the very first gift that Tina ever bought me. I was shocked when she didn’t tell the cops that. It was the first moment I knew I could get away with it. Not that I thought I wanted to at the time.” Kara shoved Callie against the hood of the sedan before reaching in and opening the glove box. She pulled out a gun before leaning against the car. She folded her one hand across her middle but made sure the other one pointed the weapon right at Callie. “I was sick to my stomach for days over what I had done. It was like an out-of-body experience. I was bending over the body, pounding her face with some snow globe or something when I realized what I’d done. I quickly got up, cleaned off all the blood, changed my clothes, and ran off down the hallway screaming like a madwoman.”
“But you killed again. And all women who looked like Tina.”
Kara nodded. “We all have a type. I like women with long blond hair who are tall and slender and smart. That often gets me in trouble. I can’t tell you how many women I have dated that I’ve had to kill because they figure it out.”
Callie swallowed. “But you don’t just kill gays.”
“Nope. Sometimes I kill because I have to. I kill friends or colleagues or hookers because I get the hankering.”
“But you had a fourteen-year gap when you left Seattle.”
Kara shook her head. “Actually, I didn’t. When I left here the first time, I went to Vermont, and I met a lovely woman by the name of Heidi. We were madly in love, until she decided the fun was over. She thought I stifled her. That I was too jealous of her other friends.”
“So you killed her.” Callie let out an exasperated sigh. “How many women did you kill in Vermont?”
“Only six. And since I know what the next question is, I’ll answer it for you. I left them all with a pillow.”
