Page 25 of Twelve
“I need to watch,” Dean said, his words echoing my thoughts almost exactly. “The last moments…the decisions…”
“How do you know?” I asked again, the question catching my throat. “How did you know those teens were going to jump? Why were you there?”
To watch.The answer to the second question drowned out all possible responses to the first.To mourn.
Typically, any indicators of mourning—flowers, dressing the victim, covering the face—were signs that an UNSUB felt some degree of remorse. The posthumous honoring of a victim was an expression of complex emotion, one that allowed a killer to simultaneously make amends and retell the story of the death in their own head.
“You didn’t kill the first two,” I said, feeling Dean’s presence on the other end of the phone line, as surely as if he’d been there in person. “They killed themselves. They jumped.”
“Kelley didn’t,” Dean said, his voice throaty and low. “She didn’t jump.”
“You didn’t mark her body.” Those two facts were enough of a divergence from the voyeur’s MO that I should have wondered if we were talking about two different people.
But the alternative was that we were dealing with escalation.
You’re the watcher. You serve as witness. But Kelley didn’t go over the edge of her own volition.
“What if she was supposed to?” I asked suddenly. “What if Kelley was supposed to jump?”
I’d wondered earlier what the killer had seen in Kelley.
“She was vulnerable,” I told Dean. I closed my eyes for a moment, then shifted to Kelley’s perspective. “Iwas vulnerable. I climbed the steeple willingly. I just…Ihurt.”
Despite Kelley’s father’s objections to the contrary, he’d believed she’d killed herself.
“You were in pain,” Dean said simply, “and now you’re not.”
Maybe I’d been looking at the markers—ivy, stone—all wrong. Maybe they weren’t signs of mourning—or remorse.
Maybe they were symbols of honor.Release.
“I trusted you,” I said, still trying to view this from Kelley’s perspective. “I either told you what I was planning…”
“Or,” Dean replied softly, “it was my idea.”
How could an UNSUB have known in advance that two teens were going to kill themselves?Either they told you—or it was your idea.
Standing outside the church, looking up, it was too easy to picture Kelley up there, staring down.
“I didn’t jump,” I said, speaking on her behalf. “Maybe I wanted to. Maybe I thought about it. But it didn’t feel right.” I’d recognized earlier that Kelley wouldn’t have wanted a death that would mangle her body beyond recognition. Was that what she’d realized, up on the steeple? “I didn’t jump,” I said fiercely. “I didn’t want to.”
“You were in pain,” Dean repeated what he’d said earlier. “And now you’re not.”
“Is that what you think this is?” I asked. “Not murder, but mercy?”
“There’s something holy about what I do,” Dean replied steadily.
I couldn’t stay in Kelley’s perspective any longer. “Something holy,” I echoed Dean, “about the height and the fall.”
If jumping to her deathhadn’tbeen Kelley’s idea, if someone had pushed her toward it, that suggested the manner of death held significance to the UNSUB instead.You planted the idea in her head. You encouraged it. And when she couldn’t do it…
“It’s a sacrament,” Dean said. “A rite.”
I thought of Kelley, looking down at the world from high up on a church. She hadn’t wanted to do it. She’dchosennot to.
“Kelley didn’t want your mercy,” I said lowly, addressing the nameless, faceless killer with that much more vehemence than before.
“But,” Dean countered, “she needed it.” For the longest time, he was silent on the other end of the line, and I stood outside the church, my face chapped from wind, my limbs like deadweight on my body as I sorted through all I knew.
