When the door opened, and the owner walked in, he took one look at them, and the smile dropped from his face. Aaron turned, and he booked it.
Kate took up the chase. She heard the kid yelling behind them. But she didn’t stop. With Rodney on her heels, the two of them split, Kate going one way around the block, and Rodney going the other, and, by the time she came out on the far side, she saw the owner racing toward a vehicle. He was frantically punching a key fob to get it to start. She tackled him at the car, and he slammed her cheek into the sidewalk, grazing it over the concrete into a nice road rash. But she had him.
He immediately screamed, “Police brutality, police brutality!”
She quickly handcuffed him and pulled him to his feet. “Really? And what about all those kids you killed?” Aaron stared at her. “You know the ones, and the guy who needed glasses… the one you killed… for Pamela.”
Aaron didn’t say anything.
“But you liked it, didn’t you?”
“What’s not to like,” he said calmly.
“Yeah, you’re in control, right? You get to say who lives and who dies.”
He shrugged. “I had a list.” He glared at her.
“And was Pamela the one who started it?”
“Yep, I’d thought about it before. I mean, I really did think about the whole revenge angle, but I didn’t get past that. Until she contacted me, and then I was just like,She’s right, and we have to do something.”
“What about all the others?”
“What others?” he asked.
“These last two at the intersection, for starters—Candy and Sally.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“The two females who were just killed days apart?”
Aaron shrugged. “No, that wasn’t me.”
Kate stared at him hard but believed him.Brandon.She turned and looked at Rodney.
His eyebrows were up, as he studied the shop owner. “How many did you kill?” Rodney asked.
“There was another recent accident here a few blocks away, and that person is in the hospital right now,” he said.
“And why him?”
“Because he’s a pedophile.” Aaron shrugged. “Why the hell should he live?”
“So, you used your vehicle in order to take down somebody else?”
“That’s the thing. Once you start down this pathway, you realize just how much you can clean up in the world,” he said enthusiastically. “That’s a reward all in itself.”
“And how many other bike accidents did you and your vehicle have a part in?”
“Well, first, for five years now, I tried hard to make it look like the city needed to fix the traffic pattern. So, in memory of my sister, I killed someone near the university annually. But that didn’t work out because the city refused. Then later, when I found out Pamela was reaching out, suggesting doing more, I contacted her. We met a few times. It was a fluke that we happened to be there at Sally’s accident scene. Besides I had this list and worked my way through it. And since then, slowly I’ve been picking off various people.”
Kate still didn’t have the killer who took Candy’s and Sally’s lives, the one they’d been looking for this past week or so. Instead she found Aaron, who had killed multiple others annually. She shook her head. “How do you choose your victims?”
“Some are related to other accidents. And some are related to just being shits.”
“You said you didn’t kill Candy or Sally, the last two at the intersection.”
“No, I didn’t. I honestly watched those two happen, but something was weird about them.”