Alice saw no reason to lie, “Yes.” She tensed to hear Kathy’s condemnation.
“Good!” Kathy said vehemently surprising them both.
Alice looked at her wife in astonishment but considering what had been done to her perhaps this wasn’t so much of a surprise.
“When I heard what had been done to those men…” she began but Alice interrupted her.
“You didn’t see anything when they led you out?”
Kathy glanced up and then down quickly looking at the braided rug on the wood floor, “I tried not to look around when they took me out of there, I was in shock. The doctor’s slowly prepared me for what the F.B.I. would ask, some of their questions…” She shook her head remembering the fear, the guilt at feeling glad over the many deaths. One of the doctors had obviously been horrified when she confided her feelings. Others had told her that this was natural; still others admonished her with their judgments. So many doctors, so many agents, so many questions. Kathy realized Alice had never judged her. Even when she read of her relief over their deaths in the diary… “I was so glad that I felt guilty for feeling that way, does that make sense?” She looked up to see a short nod from Alice and quickly looked back down as her face flushed. “To know they would never hurt anyone else…”
Alice was fighting herself from sitting next to Kathy on the bed and taking her into her arms. She knew it was the wrong time. In some ways Kathy was in shock, this would all have to be processed and she didn’t know it all yet.
Kathy suddenly realized something as she looked up and asked, “How did you do it? Did you hire mercenaries or something?”
Alice shook her head as she stood there waiting for Kathy to ask her questions. “I did it myself,” she said modestly but inside the kernel of indefinable something was opening and making her remember the adrenalin rush, the anger deep inside at what they had done to her wife. The satisfaction of seeing them die at her hands, of making them pay!
“But how?” Kathy was perplexed; Alice was not a large woman. She was small, slim, blonde, and unassuming; except for her eyes there was nothing extraordinary about her. She was pretty, very pretty, but only on occasion could she be called beautiful. How did someone of Alice’s stature kill those men? Some of those men had a lot of brawn on them.
“I used knives,” Alice answered.
“Knives?”
Alice nodded. “It’s silent, it’s deadly, and in the right hand very affective.”
Kathy couldn’t see it. Her wife was just not the type, or was she? It had been her at the compound, of that Kathy was sure, but then her brain hadn’t worked normally since she had been raped repeatedly. Her mind wasn’t what it was, it tended to drift, to compartmentalize, to forget something’s easily. Was this a joke of some kind?
“I could show you sometime,” Alice offered.
“How?” Kathy was curious. She wanted to believe Alice and at the same time as she realized the enormity of what she wanted to believe, she didn’t.
Alice glanced out the window, it was far too dark outside to play with knives and she hadn’t brought any sets with her to the island, she wouldn’t need them here. She remembered though that she did have one of her special belts in her suitcase, one that would pass inspection in customs and had many times. She went to the closet in answer to Kathy’s question and fetched one of her suitcases and unzipped it.
Kathy was surprised to see Alice pull out a metal belt, one of those she rarely wore but Kathy had seen on several occasions over the years. It really wasn’t her ‘style’ and she was surprised Alice still had it; she was so much classier than the tacky belt with the metal clips. She watched as Alice put it on over her shorts, pulling it through the belt loops until it was secure.
Looking around the room Alice eyed a faux bamboo pole that was used as decoration on the corner leading to the master bathroom. She looked to see if Kathy as watching and verifying that her eyes were on her she reached down and with a sleight of hand she began to palm the ‘links’ in the belt that came off one by one turning into ‘star’ knives.
Kathy watched astonished as one by one half a dozen knives appeared out of the belt and were soon embedded in the corner post near the bathroom. It was obviously done with skill too as they were too accurate and too precisely spaced. “You throw knives?” she asked incredulously at what she was seeing.
Alice nodded not saying a word, just watching her wife and her reactions. She didn’t want to brag, these ‘toys’ that she picked up in the import district in downtown Los Angeles and filed down to razor sharpness on her sharpener in the house in the Valley were mere surprise trinkets, deadly and effective, but nothing like the knives she could have thrown or the darts she had developed with the small hand-held crossbows she had used at the compound.
Kathy got up from the bed to look closer at the six stars arrayed on the bamboo. Reaching up she pulled one with difficulty, it had been thrown hard enough to embed quite deeply in the wood. She looked at it in awe. It was sharp, even she could see that. She barely touched the edge with her finger and pulled back as it sliced her skin effortlessly.
Alice saw her reach out to the star and tried to stop her feeling the razor edge but couldn’t stop her in time before she cut herself.
“Ouch,” Kathy exclaimed as she dropped it and narrowly missed impaling her own toe in the sandals she was still wearing.
“You okay?” Alice asked as she grabbed the Kleenex box off her the dresser and handed it to her wife. She would have touched her but wasn’t certain this was the time.
Kathy appreciated the gesture as she plucked a tissue and wrapped her finger in it. The cut wasn’t deep but it was bleeding. She leaned down and examined the star a little closer seeing it had a dull side she picked it up with her other hand. Gingerly she handled it looking at it closer before handing it back to Alice who adeptly handled it and inserted it back into her belt making it look like a ‘link’ in the belt. She watched as she returned the other five knives to the belt, hiding their deadly sharp edges within the belt making it part of the design. “Did you make that yourself?” she asked surprised, it had never occurred to her that her wife was ‘crafty.’
Alice nodded. “It allows me to have a last course of defense in an emergency.”
“Did you use that up at the compound?” Kathy asked curiously. She realized she wasn’t shocked anymore. She accepted it and that should alone shock her. Her voice had returned to normal, no anger, no hissing, and no surprise.
Alice shook her head watching her wife carefully. “I made some arrows for some crossbows I found.”
“Crossbows!” Kathy was impressed having seen something on some television show at some point about them.
Alice nodded, “I modified the arrows to fly harder and on shorter shafts with the edges filed like these.” She gestured to her belt.
Kathy glanced at the tissue with only a bit of blood still seeping into it and imagined how effective something like that would be. “But there were so many of them, did you hire someone to help you? Won’t they talk or did you get rid of them too?”
Alice slowly shook her head, she didn’t know how Kathy would react to any more of this information but she wanted to tell her now, she wanted to be honest with her, she had come this far. “I had the element of surprise on my side and I took my time, one at a time.”
Kathy absorbed this information realizing how much patience that must have taken, how much Alice must have planned it out. She realized her own anguish though and blurted, “You could have taken me out of there sooner!”
Alice shook her head as she stepped back to begin taking off the belt and putting it away. “I had to leave you there, as much as that killed me to do.”
“They could have come back and hurt me some more,” Kathy said in an anguished voice remembering the horrors of what had been done to her.
Alice tucked away the belt and zipped the suitcase closed as she moved it back to the closet. “I could have but then you needed t
o be found with the rest of them. I needed an alibi, and I certainly couldn’t help you at that point. You needed to be rescued by the professionals. I wanted to take you,” she turned to look at her wife and Kathy could see the angst in her eyes. “I wanted you back more than anything. Seeing you in that room and realizing what I had seen and what they had done,” she shook her head. “I wanted to kill them again.”
“You killed them?” Kathy asked again. “You killed them all?”
Alice nodded as she sat down on the bed. “I did,” she verified wondering if her marriage was over at this point.
Kathy still had a hard time realizing what Alice was saying. There had been so many of them and her wife was such a small woman. She was a brilliant investor; she wasn’t this, this murderer! At the same time Kathy couldn’t refute her skill with her knives. Why would she take credit for killing all those people if she hadn’t done it? She too sat down on the bed at the foot of it and swallowed. “Have you killed before?” she asked.
Alice looked at her and when Kathy looked up she nodded, once, twice, that was all as she looked into Kathy’s eyes for understanding.
“You have?” Kathy asked in surprise, she had wondered if it had been a one-time thing, if perhaps Alice had ‘cracked’ under the pressure of raising the kids alone, what she had found out from the bugs she had planted, the information she found.
Again Alice nodded, waiting patiently for her wife to ask other questions.
“Why didn’t you go to the authorities?” As any sane person would have?
Alice sighed; logically this was a good question. “They wouldn’t have believed me. I handed them information before in the past and they did nothing. The people got away from them. Including Dan and Bonnie.”
The mention of those two names and what they nearly did to Kit had Kathy’s own eyes narrowing in anger. “Why didn’t you kill them?” she asked in honest anger.
Alice grinned ruefully; she had asked herself the same thing many times. “I wanted to, I will now that the authorities botched catching them.” She said it succinctly and Kathy believed her.
“Can I help?” she surprised them both by asking.
Alice looked at her for a long moment weighing what her wife had just asked her. “You don’t know what you are saying…” she began but Kathy interrupted her.
“They set me up, they were setting up my daughter!” she said in righteous anger.
Alice had to agree with her there. “Maybe I should turn over what I know to the F.B.I.”
“And give them the chance to lose them again? They deserve to die for what they did to me!”
She agreed with her but Alice had never seen this side of her wife and frankly it surprised her. “You don’t know what you are asking…” She didn’t want to turn her wife into the killer she knew she was.
“Yes I do!” Kathy pleaded. “I want to see them die, maybe by my own hands for what they did to me, what they caused to those other women. They won’t get justice; they would what, go to jail for life for what they did if they are found?”
Alice had to admit that Kathy did have valid points. They might end up on death row if enough of the evidence came to light. She had enough of it herself to judge them and find them guilty. Prison wasn’t good enough for the likes of them.
“Alice,” she pleaded her voice changing. “I’m not asking you to teach me to do that,” her head nodded at the bamboo where the marks would forever be imbedded in the wood from the stars she had thrown. “I just want to be there when they meet their fate,” she said quietly.
Alice looked at her speculatively and nodded once. “I’ll think about it,” she agreed non-commitally.
Kathy released a breath she hadn’t known she was even holding. Thinking for a moment she asked, “What about the others you said you took care of?”
“They have gone missing,” Alice told her without going into detail, she wasn’t going to brag; she wasn’t going to volunteer things that might send her wife screaming out into the night at the horrors.
“No one can trace it to you?” Kathy asked worriedly wondering what was involved in getting rid of a body, how could Alice hide that? “No one knows they were murdered?”
Alice smiled at her wife’s naiveté. “Technically, a murder is not committed if a body isn’t found. If enough evidence is collected to create ‘reasonable doubt’ or to pin the murder on a ‘person of interest’ then a case can be built. But with no body the person is merely ‘a missing person.’”
“You sound like you know what you are talking about?” Kathy suddenly realized how insane this conversation truly was. They were talking about murder for Christ’s sake!
Alice had a self-depreciating smile on her face as she thought over that question for a moment. “I do,” she admitted.
“Do you do this for me, or do you do this for yourself?” Kathy asked looking intently at Alice.
Alice looked up at the question and shook her head sadly, “I don’t know.”
Kathy had to concede that Alice had always been honest with her, direct questions got answered. She hadn’t known, she hadn’t realized though, that she wasn’t asking the right questions.
“You’ve done this before?” she asked hesitantly again, searchingly, they both knew the before she was asking about was the compound and Kathy’s incarceration. Kathy still held out hope that she was wrong or that this was a one-time thing.
Alice nodded looking at Kathy intently trying to convey something.
“But why?” Kathy asked repeating an earlier question.
“I don’t know. The ones I have killed needed it. Deserved it. They weren’t going to escape justice. The police couldn’t do anything, but I could.”
Somehow that made sense to Kathy. She knew she should be horrified but the thought of any of them escaping from what they had done to her made her so angry she could…kill them. “But why you?”
Alice shook her head and looked out the dark window across from their bed where they were sitting. “I don’t know, it isn’t random.” She didn’t mention any specific murder she had committed. “It has to meet my own sense of justice, they must deserve it.”
Kathy understood that, it made sense. She had many more questions and she was already exhausted from what had been revealed already. Suddenly she realized what Alice had said before. “Why didn’t you kill Eli Watson?”
Alice smiled a self-depreciating smile. “That was a mistake, I should have. I thought if I destroyed him, made him destitute; let the courts punish him properly that he would leave you alone. Instead he sold his knowledge to people like Alex ‘The Flybird’ Johansen.” She made quotation marks at ‘The Flybird’ part. “That and Bonnie entered the picture.”
“How do you know all this?” Kathy asked amazed.
“Kathy, I do a lot of research, I don’t randomly kill people, they have to deserve it. I take this responsibility on myself. I know that it is wrong but at the same time my sense of justice doesn’t allow them to get off so lightly.”
“But couldn’t you hire someone else to do it?”
Alice had to concede she was right as she nodded. “I could have but then someone else knows things that could come back to me and they could either extort things from me or they could slip up and point fingers at me. If I do it myself I only have myself to blame.”
“But you have a family; you have me, if they caught you…” Kathy was suddenly afraid at the thought.
She nodded again in agreement. “I’d ‘retired’ for a long time. It wasn’t until I realized that they had taken you, they had fooled me into believing you were dead, they were after Kit…I came out of retirement to make them pay. They weren’t going to get away with it. Each of those bastards had to pay.”
Kathy knew she should be revolted, she should be afraid, but Alice did have a point. They had been bastards. “I’m sorry you had to come out of ‘retirement’ for me,” she said in a small voice.
“I’m not,” Alice assured her. “I
happen to think you are worth it.”
Kathy looked at her. This was the Alice she loved, the caring woman who had tried so hard to keep her safe, to rescue her. Her sense of justice might not be the same as others but she had exacted revenge that Kathy wished she could have. She wondered if any of the other women had thought the same.
Alice was looking at her wife worriedly wondering when she would reject her for the monster she knew she was. Even talking logically and calmly as they were didn’t justify to most people the deaths of many people however horribly they had treated them.
Kathy simply said, “I love you Alice,” and burst into tears at the relief of knowing that her wife, despite being a killer, had protected her in her own way.
Alice was confused by the tears and gingerly reached out to take her wife in her arms unsure of how she would accept it.
Kathy wrapped herself around Alice sobbing into her arms as a release of some sorts went through her. She wasn’t horrified by what Alice had confided in her she was strangely empowered by it. The tears were washing away some of the shame she had felt at being glad over their deaths.
A while later she asked, “What about Eli?”
“He’s dead,” Alice said quietly as she relished the feel of Kathy in her arms and wondered how long this would last. Kathy would think about everything, it would sink in and she would be horrified.
“How do you kn…” Kathy began and then pulled back to look into Alice’s eyes for confirmation.
“I arranged for someone to take care of him in prison,” Alice answered the unspoken questions. “Someone needed a favor and in exchange he took out Eli.” Kathy didn’t need to know the details. The less she knew the better off she was.
Kathy relaxed back into Alice’s arms and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Eli started it all,” Alice said menacingly. He, Bonnie, Dan, Alex, and many many others. If it took her a lifetime, they would pay, one by one.
Kathy remembered back all those years and how grateful she had been to Alice saving her from that situation. Even then she had been protecting her and Kathy knew nothing about it. She was older and perhaps wiser now. The fact that her wife was a killer didn’t bother as much as it would have all those years ago. She knew a different Alice. A loving and caring one. Perhaps that cold woman everyone else saw was something that a killer needed. Kathy was suddenly exhausted. They had gone over a lot and she was still absorbing the information. She sat up and looked at Alice. “I need to get ready for bed.”
Malice Masterpieces 2 Page 30
