“I told him, ‘You don’t even know what it’s like to kill somebody properly.’ He stared at me, as if he was struggling so hard to understand what was going on. I could see the drugs were still in his system. I said, ‘When you kill her, you need to kill her clean and make sure that she dies.’ At that, his sister started yelling at him to not listen to me and that I was evil and to stop me. But it was funny, like watching a video. He looked at that knife in his hand, and he held it against her neck, as she started screaming and screaming. He freaked out a little, saying, ‘Shut the fuck up, just shut the fuck up. I can’t think!’ And before he knew it, he’d sliced her throat.”
“And yet there was a gouge,” she noted.
“Yeah, there was. I added that later. Just to make it look a little better.” And then he smiled.
“So, Rick did kill his sister.”
“He probably doesn’t have a clue how it all happened, and I know he’s terrified, and he has no idea what part I played in it at all. You can bet he’ll never talk.”
“But he confessed, just like a good boy.”
He laughed. “That was the best part. That and watching my wife have no clue what was going on.”
“And you really hate your wife that much?”
“She’s completely useless,” he noted.
“And yet she’s been a patsy for you all this time. She’s been your alibi all these years.”
“Of course. She has to have some purpose. Even now, she has taken her drugs because she gave me mine.”
“And yet you didn’t take them, did you?”
“No, hell no. I only make it look that way. I give myself a chance to rest up in between my sessions, and then I’m up all night. It makes me dopey all day. And I can save my drugs for my experiments.” He gave her a big fat ugly smile and added, “Works out really well.”
“Jesus Christ.” Kate stepped back. “I’m tempted to just blow you away now.”
He shrugged. “Go ahead. You know something? It’d be good for you. Then there would be no difference at all between us. You high and mighty folks, you think you’re so perfect. You’re really not. You’re just as twisted and sick on the inside as I am.”
“No,” she argued, “I’m not, but I’m glad to hear you know what a sick bastard you are.”
“Nope, I’m not,” he stated simply, “but I’ve listened to enough of my dear stepson’s therapy sessions to realize that’s what they’ll think.”
“What started you on this path?”
“Actually it was the woman I took home. I met her on the street. I didn’t bring her home in order to kill somebody,” he stated. “She was the first, but only because she pissed me off. I mean, she just pissed me off.”
“In what way? Were you fighting with her?”
“No, she was a hooker,” he explained, “and she’d gotten noisy and then mad because I’d kept her there. But I hadn’t intended to kill her, at least not yet,” he added. “Then I just killed her real quick because she was just in the way at that point because I had to deal with my holier-than-thou daughter.”
Kate shook her head. “Wow, so you killed a hooker because she was in the way, and you killed your daughter because she was in the way too.”
“Do you need a better reason to kill?” he asked, twisting his head. “Look at you. I’m in your way, and you just want me out of your way.”
“Only to rid the world of evil,” she replied quietly. “But I sure as hell have absolutely no wish to kill anybody else.”
“Yeah, you do,” he said. “You just won’t be honest about it. Everybody wants to kill. Everybody wants to know what it’s like to kill,” he noted, with a half-smile. “But everybody is too scared to do it. Once you’ve done it, it’s a piece of cake. All I wanted to do was make them pay.”
“Why? Why do you hate women so much?” And then she looked at him. “Your mother, I suppose.”
“Yeah, my mother was a bitch.”
“And was your mother the first one you killed?”
“No, I already told you the hooker was my first one. My mother died before I could get there. I think I’ve been trying to kill her ever since.”
That was as good of an explanation as anything she’d ever heard. And explained his chosen “type.”