“No,” she replied, “it’s a taste of your own medicine.” She quickly holstered her weapon and pulled out her handcuffs. Keeping a close eye on him, knowing he was a tricky bastard even now, she quickly moved around behind him, then pulled his arms back and handcuffed him. Feeling better about that, she quickly disarmed him, removing a knife, screwdrivers, scissors, pliers, and some other tool that she didn’t recognize, until she realized it was something for cutting off fingers.
She swore as she stacked his stash off to the side and then pulled out her phone and called for backup. “Now your wife will have the worst day of her life.”
“Not yet,” he said. “Not yet.”
“She will when she finds out that you did all these murders,” she argued.
“She doesn’t want to know. I used to beat her up all the time,” he explained. “I’m the one who put her in the hospital when we were in Alberta. I needed her out of the way, so I could go murder a couple more women.”
“Why murder them?” Simon asked.
The guy looked over at him. “You don’t really understand how much fun it is to torture and murder until you actually get a chance to do it,” he explained. “We’re built, taught by society, not to do these things, that they’re wrong and that they’re painful and that they hurt. But they don’t hurt us, they only hurt the victims. And, by the time you get dulled to their cries, you actually start to miss it,” he shared in a conversational tone. “You just don’t understand until you’ve been there.”
“And is that what you did to all your victims? You just missed those feelings, so you had to keep doing more and more murders? I get the last one died on you too fast, so you had to pick our poor girl here to continue your sick hobby,” she noted. “But what about your stepdaughter?”
“That stupid bitch,” he muttered. “That was a sad deal. I didn’t mean for her to die that way. But she caught me with somebody else, so there wasn’t anything I could do. I had to take her out. I had been experimenting, you see, on the best ways to keep them alive and to extend the pain. I mean, this latest bitch here is a good example.” He pointed at her. “I’ve kept her alive for a long time. I mean, you should be thanking me.”
“Really?” she asked. “That’s actually not what I was thinking.” She stepped over to look at the woman on the table, both ankles and both wrists broken, with slices across her chest and her belly. Kate reached out and touched the woman’s neck, checking for her pulse.
“I’m here,” she whispered, “please don’t take your eyes off him.”
“I blew his knee apart,” she told her quietly, “and I’ll take out the other one if he moves a muscle. Don’t you worry. This asshole isn’t going anywhere but jail.”
The woman then started to cry in earnest.
Kate looked over at Simon and said, “Keep an eye on her. Help is on the way.”
He nodded, and she could see he was already administering first aid. She turned back to the killer. “And your son, what about him?”
“He’s built of stronger stuff,” he replied. “He helped me with his sister.”
She stopped and stared, the sickness inside her coalescing, as she realized that her fears were being proven. “I was afraid of that. He was on drugs, wasn’t he?”
He nodded. “He came home, high as a kite.”
“But you guys were supposed to be on a holiday.”
“Yeah, my wife and I got in a fight. I beat the crap out of her, and I told her that I needed a few days to cool off. She never said a word to anybody and came home meek and mild as always.” He sneered. “In the meantime, I picked up a victim, and I kept her at the house, thinking it was safe, but it was just temporary. I just had her there for a day or so. I didn’t think about my stepdaughter, but there she was, and she saw me with the other girl. And, after that, all hell broke loose.”
“What happened to the other girl?”
“Well, I had to kill her and fast, so that really pissed me off. Then I decided that the stepdaughter had to go because she’d seen too much and would tell,” he explained. “So, as much as I was sad about that, it was a pretty obvious answer.”
She stared at him in shock. “That was a daughter you had raised.”
“Yep, it was,” he snapped, “and the bitch should have kept her mouth shut.”
“You didn’t give her a chance to keep her mouth shut,” Kate argued. “You tortured her.”
“She kept saying that she would tell, and that somebody would find out, that somebody would help her, and that she would make sure I went to prison. She was always one of those do-gooder people. You know? The holier-than-thou type, always right, while everybody else was wrong. She kept calling me a sinner. I told her that she was a sinner and that she would go to hell.”
“And Rick?”
“Rick came home stoned and drunk one day. She was already tied up in the basement, crying and screaming for help. He went down there, and I followed him, and he had a knife in his hand, and he was trying to cut her loose.”
“And I said, ‘Jesus Christ, boy! What did you do?’ He just stopped and stared at me and started yelling, ‘I didn’t do anything.’ He cried out, ‘I didn’t. I didn’t.’ Meanwhile I just poured it on, saying, ‘You stinking drunk. You’re stoned out of your head. Look what you did to your sister.’” The stepfather chuckled, as if delighted with himself.
“Go on,” Kate said.