Page 24 of Haven't Killed in Years
“Maybe.”
“And maybe I know you,” I said, waiting for her eyes to come back to mine.
“I doubt it.” She grinned and I reciprocated.
Maybe this could be fun after all.
We stared out onto the street. College kids were everywhere, guys lugging cheap thirty-racks, girls moving in groups—still sober enough to make safe choices. Neither of us said anything, a surprisingly comfortable quiet given that we were, by most definitions, still strangers. I went numb for a moment, but the peace didn’t last.
“Holy shit!” someone yelled from behind the curtain.
I clocked Elyse’s reaction. She didn’t seem interested, but a grumbling started inside the apartment that I couldn’t ignore.
“I’m going to…” I pointed inside like I needed permission to leave.
“Yeah, yeah.” She waved me off like I had disappointed her. She had a clear disdain for the things that brought excitement to the morbid people inside, herfriends.
I would make it up to her later—prove I, too, was above it allbecause we were the real deal, not like these posers, but right now I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. I was only human.
- - - - -
I climbed through thewindow to find a bunch of the guys huddled around another of their kind who had gotten a laptop from somewhere. More were reading and scrolling on their phones. Jake was tearing up couch cushions looking for the remote. I found Porter in the second layer of people around the laptop.
“What’s going on?” I said quietly so as to only draw his attention.
“They found one of the bodies. One of the arm guys.”
“Which one?” I asked, like it mattered.
“Oswald Shields.”
I sighed, actually relieved it wasn’t James. I hadn’t really known Oswald. “Where?”
“The river. By the science museum. Washed up on shore.” The Charles River. I had gone with my father to dump many things in there, but never a body. He was not into disposing of bodies. He wanted people to see what he had done, and if he didn’t, he made it look like an accident. He told me missing person cases were trouble for people like us. They let things linger, overlap, correlate.
The energy in the apartment was electric—a horde of dudes, euphoric from substances, horny for a dead body. It was like I was on the floor of some NSA facility the way they were all searching for information, shouting things out as they discovered them.
Did they suspect it had to do with my father like Dominic did? These were Dominic’s friends and he was pretty adamant he was the only one who had figured out the connection to Oswald. It must have just been the body, confirmation of a murderer in their city, that was getting them all hot and bothered. It was gross fanaticism. Idoubted any of these people had what it took to ever take matters into their own hands. They were the couch coaches of murder.
Or did that make them all the more likely? Obsession taking over like an addiction, the need to escalate to find the same high? In one breath I could convince myself there was no way it was one of these dudes. In the next I was sure it was.
I had to get out of there.
Thirteen
It was getting harderto focus at work now that there was a body. Even though I wasn’t surprised, the news still landed differently. Oswald had been shot in the head sometime after his arm was removed. That was all it said. That was a quick death. That was a hit, not a hobby. There was a reason to kill him and that reason was me.
The killing was eliciting a stronger reaction than a couple of arms, and I was struggling to dissociate. A game I was playing in the shadows was following me into the daylight. It would probably have been easier to manage if I’d had a decent night of sleep, but I was acting recklessly and had gone to a house party on a Sunday night even though Gwen Tanner had to be at work on Monday morning.
My office no longer felt immune to Marin Haggerty. The comfort I used to find in the high security of the building diminished once I started worrying my stalker might have the same laminated badge that I did. I stood up in my cubicle, like at that precise moment I would catch him or her across the bullpen, sawing through an elbow. All I saw were the tops of three heads and I sat back down.
Could it be someone I’ve worked with for years?I’d had two interviews before I got the job, but it had been Karen Gloss who’d pulled me in. I met her at one of those college mixers.Did she seek me out?I was the only person in the whole office with a patchwork degree from a community college. Maybe she was privy to my actual résumé? Karen was gossipy. Loose-lipped. I couldn’t imagine she could keep even a small secret. Plus, she didn’t sign my birthday card last year. There’s no way that whoever was doing this to me would miss that opportunity. Obsession needs to be fed, even with crumbs.
Is a fresh face more likely?Their newfound proximity to me kicking off the chain of events?There were six new hires that quarter.Which one would it be if I had to guess? Right now. Off the top of my head…Sam Nelson. Why? Why did I pick him?It was that day in the elevator. He worked on the fifteenth floor, but he didn’t get off there. He stayed on and got off on the seventeenth with me.Why did he do that?
Or what about Henry Fowler?He was a managing director and had no real obligation to attend more than two or three recruiting events a year, but he was always a little too eager to volunteer.Why was he always showing up?Meh, free alcohol and college girls. Thinking he was there to stalk me was giving Henry way too much credit.
This was paranoia. Plain and simple and probably the point. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Then I counted the keys across the top row of my keyboard. My father used to say that paranoia was the crutch of a feeble mind. There was little consistency with how his zealous statements were delivered to me. He could be holding my hand, my school backpack over his shoulder as he walked me home from the bus, mumbling. Or we could be in a stranger’s home, a body behind him on the floor as he crouched down to my eye level, pinching my cheeks, drilling the words into me, neither of us daring to blink. “You cannot assume everyone is out to get you;youhave toassume they want something from you,” he would say. “And their want is their weakness.”
