Kill the Next One

by Federico Axat

  “Who called you?” Ted suddenly asked. He took a few steps forward.

  “Marcus Grant, the head of C wing. There was an emergency with one of the patients.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s all.”

  “What sort of emergency? You were talking to him for a long time.”

  They were close enough now that he could reach her in two or three strides.

  “They know, don’t they, Laura?”

  She frowned. She had to regain control somehow.

  “I stopped in the room where you keep the folders. I’ve been looking at them. That’s what took me so long.”

  “So you know what I’ve done,” he muttered.

  Ted looked up, as if alarmed by a noise. Then he lowered his eyes and stared for a long time at a corner of the room. He seemed to have forgotten where he was.

  “Ted, please. I’m afraid things are a little more complicated than you think they are.”

  “Get out,” he said. He turned around and headed for the basement.

  “I’m going with you,” she announced.

  He replied without turning around.

  “You know very well what will happen if you do.”

  Even so, she went after him. Halfway down the basement stairs, she smelled the unmistakable odor of gasoline.

  78

  Present day

  Laura saw at least five jerricans lying around the bottom of the stairs. She and Ted made their way along a junk-lined corridor until they got to an old sofa next to a trapdoor and a jumble of antique typewriters. The empty shelf gave Laura a fairly exact idea of what had happened here. Looking more attentively, she noticed fresh blood by the open hole in the floor, but no guard.

  “Where is Lee?”

  “Back there,” Ted replied listlessly. He pointed at a piece of office furniture a few yards from where they stood. It was three or four feet tall and had sliding doors in front. Like everything else in the basement, it was utterly devoid of modern design sense, and it must have weighed a ton. The guard’s boots stuck out one end of it.

  Ted knelt down to fish something out of the hole. Laura caught sight of a metal box.

  “What are you planning to do, Ted?”

  He didn’t reply. Laura took advantage of this reflective pause to pull two dusty chairs closer and sit in one of them.

  “I want us to have our last session,” she announced.

  Ted turned around and looked at the empty chair, and then at Laura.

  “Are they on their way?”

  She nodded.

  “How much time do we have?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe an hour.”

  Ted sat.

  “This is a good idea. I want you to talk to Holly. People are going to say lots of awful things, most of them true, and I wouldn’t blame her if she chose to hate me…”

  “I will talk to her, I promise you.”

  “And if you want to write about this, you have my permission. Not that you need it, I know.”

  Laura didn’t think she had mentioned that possibility to Ted.

  “I realize my case has been important to you,” Ted said, smiling sadly. “You’ve done your work well. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here, and my whole filthy past would still be buried.”

  “Ted, as I told you earlier, I don’t think things are that simple.”

  “Yes, they are. I killed those women.” Ted fell into a sort of dream state.

  A rat ran swiftly past them, making Laura jump. Rats were everywhere; apparently the smell of gas alarmed them.

  “Ted, I want us to talk about Blaine.”

  He nodded.

  “Do you remember him now?”

  “Blaine is my brother. But I hadn’t thought about him until you mentioned him. Everything’s coming back, Laura. It’s as if I could look inside my head with a flashlight…It was all dark before, and now I can see.”

  “That is very good.”

  Ted didn’t agree at all.

  “Did you know all this time? That Blaine was my brother, I mean.”

  “No. The police just made the connection.”

  “The police…” Ted said to himself.

  Laura was sorry she had said it. She needed to keep Ted focused on the therapy; she had enough trouble with this unconventional setting without having to struggle with discussing the authorities and the future of his case.

  “I found out when I was a freshman in college,” Ted said. “At the time, my father was making sporadic attempts to get closer to me. He’d try to reconnect through my aunt Audrey, who always cared for me and deserved better than the brother she got. I met with him reluctantly and he told me about Blaine. He even showed me a photograph of him.”

  “Why did he do that? At that particular moment, I mean.”

  Ted shrugged.

  “He told me some nonsense about how I should really get to know Blaine and that Blaine shouldn’t have to pay for the bad relationship between him and me.”

  “That sounds sensible enough.”

  “Of course it does. My father always sounded like the most sensible bastard in the world. But you’re right: Why exactly then? I was at college and Blaine was in high school. The truth is, Laura, that my father decided to fuck me up, and he latched on to the first thing that occurred to him. It’s that simple. The only thing that bastard cared about was covering his own ass. He didn’t care if his sons got to build a relationship with each other. You can be sure of that.”

  “And did you?”

  “Build a relationship with Blaine? Of course not. I got into an argument with my father that day, like always, and I left. I didn’t have the slightest intention of meeting my brother.”

  “But you thought about it? Your father was right, in that it wasn’t the boy’s fault. Or yours, either. Why deny yourself the chance to meet him?”

  “I didn’t really analyze it. That was a messed-up year at college. I guess getting to know Blaine would have meant never really breaking ties with my father. It would have been one more way of letting him into my life. Seeing how things turned out, I was better off not meeting him. Blaine was as big a son of a bitch as our father.”

  Ted fell silent and looked down. Laura knew what he was thinking. She reached out and grasped him under his chin.

  “Look at me, Ted.”

  “I guess I couldn’t escape it, either,” he said.

  Laura didn’t let go of his chin.

  “I don’t want us to talk about you—not yet. And not about your father, either. I want us to talk about Blaine.”

  Laura pulled her hand away and settled back gently in her chair.

  “What do you want to know?” Ted asked.

  “We know you were at his house. Can you remember why?”

  Ted seemed not to remember very clearly.

  “When I saw the news about his girlfriend’s murder, I knew he was my brother. All I had ever seen was that one photo of him, years before, but his face was etched in my mind. He had some of my father’s features, especially around here.” Ted pointed to his forehead. “But I was absolutely certain when I saw footage of him out in the street, trying to get away from a reporter. His walk was exactly like my father’s, bent slightly forward, with his arms straight by his sides. I’ve never seen anyone else walk like that—not swinging his arms.”

  “What did you think when you saw him?”

  “I don’t know. That he was guilty, I guess. I really can’t remember.”

  “Tell me what you think now. About Blaine.”

  “Do I have to?”

  Laura nodded.

  “Blaine is my brother. I guess there’s something in our DNA. Something wrong with us inside.”

  “And thinking that makes you feel better?”

  “To tell you the truth, yes, it does.”

  “You told me before that you learned about Blaine during your first year at college, but you hardly had time to think about him because it was a messed-up year. What did you mean by that?
”

  Laura already knew, but she wanted Ted to be the one to tell her.

  “That year, I killed a man. His name was Thomas Tyler. He was a professor at MSU. The guy was having an affair with my girlfriend at the time, Georgia. He’s the man I saw in the yard at Lavender.”

  A rat’s shrill screech lent emphasis to his words. Another rat responded from across the room.

  “How did you do it?” Laura asked.

  “They used to meet at night behind the library. I waited until Georgia left and I snuck up on him from behind. I slit his throat and ran away. There was an investigation but it never amounted to anything.”

  It was odd how mechanically Ted retold the events from that year.

  “It’s strange. In the folders you have upstairs, I only saw women.”

  “This was a…personal matter.”

  “Were you very close to Georgia?”

  The question took Ted by surprise. He’d often thought of Georgia over the years, but always as a bit player, never as someone important in her own right. The fact was, he could barely recall her face.

  “We didn’t have much in common. I think we had drifted apart a little, and afterwards we really never saw each other again.”

  “But even so, you killed the professor.”

  “Laura, what’s the point of all this?”

  “We’ve been trying all along to undo a complicated knot. Every time we managed to loosen it a little, we’ve pulled too hard and taken a big step backwards. It’s time to pull on all the loose ends, Ted. Your brother, Blaine, is one loose end. Tyler’s murder is another. And all those dead women, the same. There’s something we’ve been missing all along: the connecting thread. And the only way we’ll see it is by looking deeper into your past and bringing it out into the light.”

  “I understand what you mean, but does it really matter? The result will still be the same.”

  “It might make a huge difference to Holly and the girls.”

  “What else did you want to know?”

  “I want you to tell me how you killed the first woman, Ted,” Laura said, looking him straight in the eyes. “And I want you to tell me all the details, everything you can remember. Her name was Elizabeth Garth, right?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  Ted thought it over for a second; his eyes went glassy. His voice sounded as monotone as before.

  “Elizabeth Garth was a young single mother. She was barely twenty and worked at the movie theater in Harperfield, a small town not far from where I grew up. Her son was two. He lived with his grandparents somewhere in New Hampshire, though I only learned that later. She wasn’t a bad mother; she hoped to get ahead and start raising her son herself. It wasn’t that her parents didn’t let her see him or anything like that, just that they didn’t think she was in a position to raise him properly, so they took him in. The boy’s father was the most opposed to this arrangement. He and the mother were hardly on speaking terms. The guy always blamed her for getting pregnant, and even after the murder, when they were still looking for the killer, there was a sense that he was pointing fingers at her, like Elizabeth had been asking for it. Or, worse, like she deserved it.”

  Ted shook his head.

  “But she hadn’t asked for it. She was blond, very thin. Frail. Like the others. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She shared an apartment with two other girls who worked at the same theater. They weren’t friends and weren’t on very good terms with each other. She couldn’t have imagined bringing the boy to live in that tiny apartment, so at the time all she ever thought about was moving. She had posted little handwritten flyers in the theater and in the stores around there: ‘Mature, responsible woman available to do housecleaning and chores, also elder care, in exchange for an acceptable wage and a room for myself and my young son.’ It was signed ‘Elly.’”

  “So you called and offered her a place to live.”

  “Exactly. It was too easy. Because the girl was desperate to get out of that apartment and bring her kid with her. Under other circumstances, she probably wouldn’t have agreed to meet a stranger in such an out-of-the-way place. I picked out a practically deserted road outside of town where the horsey crowd have their mansions and told her to meet me there. I parked my car by the side of the road. She showed up driving an old rust bucket just after the sun had set. The route got complicated after that, so we had to go together. That wasn’t really true, of course; there wasn’t anything at all there for her to see. She left her car and we went in mine. She had just finished a double shift at work and was exhausted. I told her I was a widower with a seven-year-old son and a big, empty house. She talked to me about the father of her boy. Some young slacker who was never there for her. I quickly won her confidence.

  “But at some point Elizabeth realized that there were no houses in the direction we were going, and no opportunities for her or her son. She jumped from the car and ran for the woods as fast as she could. I followed her easily enough to a clearing. She was weak and hardly put up any resistance.”

  “Did you kill her with a knife?” Laura asked, as if it were the most natural question in the world. “Did you slit her throat, like you did Tyler’s?”

  Ted seemed genuinely repentant; in fact, he was about to cry.

  He silently nodded.

  “In the clippings I saw before I came here, it said she was also stabbed in the chest about ten times,” Laura said. “Did you also stab her ten times in the chest, Ted?”

  Again, Ted nodded.

  “Can I ask you one more question?” Laura continued without the slightest hesitation. “If you made all those arrangements with her after reading her flyer and talking to her in one phone call, how did you know what she looked like? How did you know she would serve your purposes?”

  Ted shook his head, more and more upset.

  “I don’t know, Laura—maybe I saw her putting up one of her flyers? Do you think it matters?”

  “Yes, Ted, it does matter. Because most of the facts you’ve told me about Elizabeth Garth come straight from the clippings I read upstairs just now.”

  “It really happened.”

  “What I saw in that room,” Laura said, pointing upstairs, “was no collection of ghastly mementos, Ted. It was an investigation.”

  Ted looked at her, flustered. Laura went on.

  “Elizabeth Garth died in nineteen eighty-three. You were seven years old, Ted. Seven.”

  Even the rats stopped skittering as she spoke.

  “You didn’t kill Elizabeth Garth, or any of those other women. You didn’t kill Thomas Tyler, either. You didn’t kill anyone! Can’t you see the connecting thread now?”

  79

  1983

  Ted was lying on the worn carpet in his bedroom and studying a small portable chessboard the first time he heard his mother scream. He remained very quiet, waiting to see if another shout would follow, and almost without thinking about it he slid into the space under his bed, which offered him, through the crack under the door, a view of the light in the hallway. If Mommy came, he’d be able to see her. Daddy wasn’t home.

  Next to the chessboard was an old pamphlet of Bobby Fischer games, a gift from a neighbor that had become his only source of knowledge. Soon enough he would learn all these games by heart, but for now this pamphlet was his great treasure. The chessboard with its thirty-one pieces was also a gift, from an unknown congregant at church. Mommy had made a pawn of aluminum foil to replace the missing piece. Mommy could do the most amazing things—so long as she took her medicine.

  And today she hadn’t taken it—Ted was sure. Lately Daddy had to force her to take her pills. If he wasn’t home, she’d forget, or choose not to, and then her head would start playing tricks on her. Like Bobby Fischer when he made moves to trick his opponents and hide his real plans.

  Ted was scared. He’d stayed inside all day, shut up in his room, passing the time with Bobby’s games, and now he realized he might have made a serious mist
ake. Mommy hadn’t made dinner, hadn’t said one word to him all day, and he himself hadn’t even gone downstairs for a glass of water. He hadn’t gone to the bathroom all day! And if Mommy wasn’t worried about him, it meant her head was playing tricks on her. Maybe if he had tried talking to her earlier, he could have convinced her to take her pills. But now he knew it would be impossible. Worst of all, the only person who could fix things was Daddy. As Daddy had explained to Ted so often. The problem was that lately their fights had been getting worse and worse. Daddy even had to hit her to get her to understand.

  “Teddy!”

  Mommy’s unmistakable scream.

  What should he do? What if something really had happened to her? His friend Richie’s grandmother once slipped in the bathtub and they didn’t find her till two days later. Mommy wasn’t an old lady, but she could still trip over something, Ted thought. He was upset with himself for not going to help right away.

  He came out from under his bed with all the resolve he could muster, unsure whether he wanted his mother to call him again or not. He didn’t want her to break her head like his friend Richie’s grandmother, of course, but he also knew how confused Mommy got sometimes. He grabbed the doorknob and softly turned it.

  No more shouts came, and in the hush of the upstairs hallway, the silence was definitely worse.

  Ted crept down the first steps and peered over the landing. He could see the living room between the slats in the wooden railing, and he immediately spotted the graying hair of Kristen McKay behind the sofa. This wasn’t the first time Ted had seen her sitting on the floor, leaning against the back of the sofa, stretching her feet until they touched the wall; for some reason she found this space comforting. He came down and slowly approached her.

  “Mommy?”

  Kristen turned. In her eyes, Ted saw all he needed to know. They were filled with confusion and desperation.

  “Hide!” Kristen grabbed him by the hand and yanked him to the floor. Ted plunked down beside her.

  “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

  “Strangers in the house,” she whispered.

  Months ago, Ted would have tried his hardest to believe her. It’s Mommy—something inside him told him he had to believe her. But deep down he knew they were alone.