As Good as Dead

by Holly Jackson

  “I didn’t say that.” She rolled her eyes at him.

  “But what you did just say,” he said, “was that this was for you, that you can do this alone. This is what you are good at. Investigating.”

  He was right, she had just said that. Her test. Her trial. Her final judgment. Save herself to save herself. That was all still true. Even more so if there was that chance, that possibility, that there was a right man and a wrong man.

  “I know,” she said quietly, conceding with a long outward breath. She’d known as soon as she’d finished reading the article what she had to do, had only needed Ravi to draw it out.

  “So…” He smiled the little smile that always got her, and he dropped her phone into her hand. “Investigate it.”

  Pip had stared at the numbers so long they were burned into the underside of her eyes. 475-555-0183. A lilting tune inside her head that she could now repeat back, without looking. An ever-repeating loop that had played through her mind all night as she’d begged for sleep. Down to her last four pills now.

  Her thumb hovered over the green call button again. She and Ravi had tried it five times yesterday, but it rang out each time, no voice mail. Maria Karras must have been busy. Maybe even visiting her son, they’d guessed. Pip said she would try again in the morning, but now she was stalling, afraid, even. Because once she pressed that button, and Maria picked up on the other end, there’d be no going back. No unknowing what she knew, or unhearing or unthinking it. But already the idea had burrowed deep, settling down inside her head next to Stanley’s dead eyes and Charlie’s gray gun. And even now, as she clicked a ballpoint pen in one hand, she heard something in the click and unclick. Two distinct notes, two letters. DT. DT. DT. And yet, she kept on clicking.

  Her hand was resting against her notebook, a new page, after her notes on body decomposition and livor mortis. Maria Karras’s number scribbled there. She couldn’t escape it.

  Pip finally pressed the call button and put the phone on speaker. It rang, the shrill sound riding up and down her spine, just as it had yesterday. But then—

  Click.

  “Hello? Karras residence?” said a muffled voice, the words softened by a Greek accent.

  “Oh, um, hi,” Pip said, recovering, clearing her throat. “I’m looking for Maria Karras?”

  “Yes, that’s me,” the voice replied, and Pip imagined the woman behind it: heavy eyes and a sad smile. “How can I help you?”

  “Hi, Maria,” she said, fiddling nervously with the pen again. DT. DT. DT. “Sorry to disturb you on a Sunday. My name is Pip Fitz-Amobi, and I—”

  “Oh my god,” Maria cut across her. “You finally got my message?”

  Pip stuttered, felt her eyebrows pulling together. What message? “Oh, I…um, your message?”

  “Yes, the email I sent through your website, oh, back in April, it must have been. I also tried to send you a message on Tweeter but I can never work these things on my own. But you finally got it?” she said, her voice climbing in pitch.

  Pip had never seen this email. She considered for half a moment, deciding to go with it. “Y-yes, your email,” she said. “Thank you so much for reaching out to me, Maria, and apologies it’s taken me so long to respond.”

  “Oh, sweetheart, please,” Maria said, a rustle down her end as she repositioned the phone. “I know you must be terribly busy, and I’m just so happy you got it at all. I didn’t know if you would be doing any more of this podcast, but I wanted to reach out anyway, in case you were looking for another local case. You’re really very brilliant, your parents must be very proud of you. And I just knew this is exactly what we need for Billy, to bring some media attention, which you and your podcast would very much do. It’s very popular, my hairdresser listens to it too. As my email said, we are trying to get The Innocence Project to help us with Billy.”

  Maria paused to take a breath, and Pip stepped in, before she lost her chance.

  “Yes,” Pip said. “And, Maria—I have to be up-front with you—this call doesn’t mean I will necessarily be covering your son’s case on the podcast. I’d need to do some extensive research before I make any decisions on that front.”

  “Oh, sweetheart, yes, I understand, of course,” Maria said, and it was almost as though Pip could feel the warmth of her voice, radiating out of the phone. “And maybe you are still thinking my son is guilty. He’s the DT Killer, the Stratford Strangler, whichever name it is. Almost everybody does. I would not blame you.”

  Pip cleared her throat again, to buy herself some time. She certainly hoped Billy Karras was guilty, for her own sake, but she couldn’t say that.

  “Well, I haven’t looked into all the details of the case yet. I know your son confessed to all five murders, and then pleaded guilty in court, which isn’t the easiest position to begin with.”

  “It was a false confession,” Maria said with a sniff. “It was coerced by the officers interviewing him.”

  “So why didn’t Billy then plead innocent, take the case to trial? Do you think you could talk me through the details, the evidence, why you think Billy is not guilty?”

  “Of course, darling, I do not mind,” Maria said. “And I can tell you a secret. I thought Billy was guilty too. For the first year or two. I thought eventually he would tell me the truth, but he kept telling me, Mama, Mama, I did not do it, I promise you. For two years. So then I started to look into it, and that’s when I realized he was telling the truth: he’s innocent. And you would think so too if you could see the police interview. Oh wait, I can send it to you!” More rustling down the line. “I got copies of all these police documents, years ago. Through that, what do they call it again…oh, the Freedom of Information Act. I have the whole interview, his confession. The transcript is over a hundred pages; did you know they had him in that room for nine hours? He was exhausted, terrified. But I tell you what: I can go through it and highlight the most important parts, send a scan to you? I think I know how to use that scanner. It might take me a while to go through it all, but I can send that to you, tomorrow latest.”

  “Yes, please,” Pip said, making a scribbled note on her page. “If you could, that would be very helpful, thank you. But there’s no rush, really.” Except there definitely was. Five little stick women, their heads gone because they were all wrapped up in tape, climbing up to Pip’s room to meet their number six. The end in sight. Unless that’s just what someone wanted her to think, of course.

  “Yes, I will,” said Maria. “And you can see exactly what I mean. All the answers they feed to him. He knows nothing. They tell him they have all this evidence against him, they even imply they have someone who saw him during one murder, which wasn’t true. Billy got so confused, bless him. I know he’s my son, but he was never the sharpest tool in the shed, as they say. He had a bit of a drinking problem too, back then, sometimes would black out in the evening. And these officers convince him that he’s committing the murders while he’s blacked out, that’s why he doesn’t remember. I think Billy started to believe it of himself, even. Until he finally got some sleep in the cell, and then he recanted the confession right away. You know, false confessions are a lot more common than you think. Of the three hundred and sixty-five people The Innocence Project have helped exonerate in recent decades, more than a quarter of them had confessed to their alleged crime.”

  Maria must have recited that fact from the top of her head, and that’s when Pip fully realized: This was her entire life. Every breath and every thought dedicated to her son. To Billy. He had new names now, though: the DT Killer, the Stratford Strangler, a monster. Pip’s chest ached for this woman, but not quite enough to want her to be right. Anything but that.

  “I did not know that statistic,” Pip said. “And I’m very interested to see Billy’s interview. But, Maria, if he recanted the next morning, why did he then plead guilty?”

  “His lawyer,
” Maria said, a hint of reproach tainting her soft voice. “He was a public defender; I did not have money to hire a lawyer. If only I had…It is one of my biggest regrets. I should have tried harder.” Maria paused, her breath crackling through the speaker. “This lawyer basically told Billy that because he had already confessed to all five murders, and the police had this confession on tape, that there was no point in going to trial. He would lose. They had other evidence too, but the confession was the thing. The jury would believe that tape over Billy any day. Well, the lawyer wasn’t wrong; they say that a confession is the most prejudicial piece of evidence.”

  “I see,” Pip said, because she couldn’t think of what else to say.

  “But we should have tried,” Maria continued. “Who knows what might have come up in a trial, to save Billy. What evidence. You know, there was an unidentified fingerprint on the second victim, Melissa Denny. The print does not match Billy’s and they don’t know who it belongs to. And—” She broke off. Paused. “On the night that Bethany Ingham was murdered, the third victim, I think Billy was here, with me. I can’t be certain, but I think on that night, Billy came over to my house in the evening. He’d been drinking, a lot. Could not string one sentence together. So I made him sleep in his old bedroom, took his keys so he wouldn’t try to get in the car again. I don’t have any evidence of this; I have searched and searched. Phone records, security cameras down the road, everything. I don’t have evidence, but in a court, my testimony would have been evidence. How could Billy have murdered Bethany if he was home with me?” She exhaled. “But the lawyer told Billy that if he pleaded guilty, the judge might let him serve in a prison closer by, so that I could visit him more easily. Which then didn’t happen, of course. Billy lost hope—that’s why he said he was guilty. He thought the game was already lost before it began.”

  Pip had been scribbling as Maria spoke, her words slanted, letters trampling each other in her haste to get it all down. She realized Maria had stopped, was waiting for her to speak.

  “Sorry,” Pip said. “So, other than the confession, what other evidence did the police have that made them think Billy is DT?”

  “Well, there were a few things,” Maria said, and Pip could hear shuffling down her end, as though Maria were flicking through papers. “The main one was that Billy was the person who found Tara Yates, the final victim.”

  “He found her body?” Pip asked. She vaguely remembered that now, from one of the podcasts she’d listened to, remembered how they’d framed it as the big twist.

  “Yes. He found her like that. Tape around her ankles and wrists, wrapped around her face. I couldn’t ever imagine, seeing another human being like that. It was at work, where he found her. Billy worked for a grounds maintenance company: cutting lawns, trimming hedges, picking up trash, that sort of thing. It was early in the morning, and Billy was on the grounds of this hotel, one of his company’s sites, cutting the grass. He spotted Tara in the trees around the edge of the site.” She cleared her throat. “And Billy…Well, the first thing he does is run over to her. He thought she might still be alive. Couldn’t see her face, you see. He shouldn’t have gone over, should have left her there and called the police straightaway. But that’s not what Billy did…”

  Maria trailed off.

  “What did he do?” Pip prompted her.

  “He tried to help her,” Maria exhaled. “He thought the tape on her face was keeping her from breathing, so he started to unwrap it. Touching her and the tape with his bare hands. Then, when he realized that she wasn’t breathing anyway, he attempted CPR, but he didn’t know what he was doing, had never learned what to do.” A small cough. “He knew he needed help, so he ran back to the hotel and told one of the employees to call the police, to come help him. He had his cell on him, he just forgot about it in the moment. I guess maybe he was in shock? I don’t know what that does to you, seeing another person like that.”

  Pip knew exactly what it did to you, though she could never try to explain it.

  “So the result of that,” Maria continued, “was that Billy’s DNA, his sweat and saliva, were all over poor Tara. And his fingerprints. Silly boy,” she said quietly.

  “But the police would have known that was from him discovering the body. Trying to save Tara, even if he didn’t realize it was too late and he was only contaminating the scene.”

  “Yes, well, maybe that’s what they believed initially. But, you know, I’ve done a lot of research into serial killers these last few years. I would even go as far as to say I am an expert in them now. And with this kind of criminal—DT—it is very common that the killer would try to insert himself into the police investigation somehow. Calling in with ideas or tips, or offering to help search parties, that sort of thing, even trying to get information to see how safe they are from suspicion. That’s what the police thought this was, eventually. Billy inserting himself into the investigation by discovering Tara’s body, to appear helpful, innocent. Or maybe to cover himself in case he had left any DNA on her while committing the murder.” Maria sighed. “You see now, how everything is twisted to fit the story?”

  With a sinking feeling in her gut, Pip realized she had just nodded. No, what was she doing? She didn’t want it to go this way, because if there was a chance Billy was innocent, then…Fuck. Oh fuck.

  Luckily, Maria had resumed talking, and Pip didn’t have to listen to the voice in her head anymore.

  “Maybe this would have been OK on its own,” she said, “but there were other details that tied Billy into this whole mess. He knew one of the victims. Bethany Ingham, number three, she was his supervisor at work. He was very sad after he learned about her death, said she was always so nice to him. And the first victim, Phillipa Brockfield, her body was found on a golf course just outside Bridgeport. It was another site that had a contract with the company Billy worked at, and Billy was on the team assigned there. His work van was seen driving to the golf course on the same morning Phillipa’s body was left there, but, of course, he was just driving to work. And the duct tape…well, it was the exact same kind Billy had access to at work, so…”

  Pip could feel that part of her awakening, the spark in her brain, questions rolling over each other, gathering speed. The world slowing as her mind picked up, double pace. She shouldn’t, she knew what this path meant for her, but she couldn’t stop it, and one of the questions came loose.

  “So, all of these details tying Billy to the murders, they’re related to his job,” Pip said. “What’s the name of the company he worked for?”

  Too late. Just asking it meant it was already too late for her. That, on some level, she must think it possible, that she might not be speaking to the mother of the DT Killer at all.

  “Yes, that is where the connections seem to come from,” Maria said, voice even faster now, more excitable. “The company is called Green Scene Limited. Scene, not like eyes, like the kind in a film.”

  “Got it, thanks,” Pip said, writing the name of the company at the bottom of her page. She tilted her head, studied the words from another angle. She thought she recognized the name. From where, though? Well, if the company operated nearby, she’d probably seen its logo on vans driving through Fairview.

  “And how long had Billy worked there?” Pip asked as she swiped her finger across her laptop’s trackpad, the screen springing back to life. She typed in Green Scene Ltd Connecticut and hit enter.

  “Since 2009, it was.”

  The first result was the company’s website and, yes, Pip did recognize the cone-shaped tree of its logo. An image she knew, that already existed in her brain somewhere. But why? The Home page told her about Green Scene’s specialist and award-winning grounds-maintenance services, with a slideshow of photos. Lower down the page was a link to another site, its sister company, Clean Scene Ltd., which offered cleaning services for offices, housing associations, and more.

  “
Hello?” Maria said tentatively, breaking the silence, and Pip had almost forgotten she was even there.

  “Sorry, Maria,” she said, scratching her eyebrow. “For some reason, I recognize the company’s name. And I can’t figure out why.”

  Pip clicked on the menu item labeled Our Team.

  “Oh, I know why you’ll recognize it, sweetheart,” Maria said. “It’s because the—”

  But the page loaded, and the answer was there in front of her, before Maria could say it. A grinning photo of a suited man at the top, introducing the managing director and owner of Green Scene Ltd. and Clean Scene Ltd.

  It was Jason Bell.

  “It’s Jason Bell’s company,” Pip said in an outward breath, the pieces connecting in her head. Yes, that was it. That’s how she knew it.

  “Yes, dear,” Maria said softly. “Andie Bell’s father, and, of course, you know all about Andie Bell. We all do now, because of your podcast. Poor Mr. Bell was going through his own unthinkable tragedy around the same time.”

  Exactly the same time, Pip thought: Andie died the same night Tara Yates was murdered. And here Andie had come up yet again, back from the dead. Billy Karras worked at Jason Bell’s company, and his connection to the DT killings in each case was also tied to his job.

  If Pip had to admit it to herself, right here, right now, that there was even the faintest possibility Billy Karras was innocent—that there might be a wrong man and a right man—Green Scene Ltd. was where she should look first. If this were a case with no other complications, no ties to her, no dead pigeons or stick figures at her doorway, that would be her first step. And yet, that step seemed so much harder this time, so much heavier.

  “Maria,” Pip said, her voice rough and gravelly, “just one last thing. After Billy was arrested, the killings stopped. How do you explain that?”

  “As I said, I’ve learned a lot about serial killers in the last few years,” she said. “And one thing most people don’t realize is that sometimes serial killers just stop. Sometimes they age out, or they have life events going on that mean they don’t have the urge, or the time anymore. Say a new relationship, or maybe the birth of a child. So maybe that’s what happened here. Or maybe the killer saw an easy way out, after Billy’s arrest.”