You Kill Me

by Alison Gaylin

“I talked to him and his nanny when they were leaving school yesterday. Anybody will talk to you if you show ’em a badge.” He grinned. “And if you get very, very close to them, and tell them you’ll cut their pretty mommy if they say a word to anyone…they’ll keep a secret, too.”

  “Superheroes save people,” I heard myself say. “Monsters take them away.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  He lay down next to me and I held my breath. “Anyway, Ezra said you like polar bears, which made me know for sure we’re soul mates.”

  From the back pocket of his shorts, he pulled out a long, mean-looking hunting knife and held it in front of my eyes. On its black metal hilt someone had painted a white bear standing on his hind legs, his mouth roared open, revealing sharp black teeth. “I like polar bears too.”

  I closed my eyes, focused on the munchkins’ voices, singing on TV. “She’s gone where the goblins go, below, below, below….” I pulled at the handcuffs.

  And then I felt warm breath on my face. I opened my eyes and saw Pierce, so close his eyes blurred into one. “I just gotta kiss you,” he said.

  I bit his lip hard, and he grabbed both my shoulders, pushed me back onto the pillows.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I saw a trickle of blood edging down his chin and felt a dim satisfaction, until he straddled my stomach, putting all his bulky weight on me, so my breath came out in shallow, desperate gasps. He took out the polar-bear knife and touched the tip of the sharp blade to the delicate skin just behind my earlobe. “I bet your blood is beautiful.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the one not holding the knife. “Redder than Marla’s. Redder than my mom’s.” I felt the sting of the blade, a warm trickle edging down my neck. “Mom called me Zachary, too. I cut her throat when she was sleeping.”

  Help me, help me, I thought, my heart pounding against my ribs. Until slowly, Pierce took the blade away, touched his thick fingers to the skin and stared at them, slick with my blood. “Beautiful.”

  “We represent the Lollypop Guild, the Lollypop Guild….”

  “Please put the knife away.” I felt two tears oozing out of the corners of my eyes. Deep breath. Okay. Stay calm.

  “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like someone who’s never stabbed another person to death. You know how it feels. Quit playing like you don’t.”

  “I…”

  “I know you, Sam. I know you better than anybody.” He pressed his bloodied fingers to his lips, and for a second, I could almost hear that sound again, the horrible draining of someone else’s life, the death rattle. I hadn’t wanted to kill that murderer. I only wanted to call the police. But I couldn’t. I had to…The blood, leaking out of the dead body’s mouth…

  “It feels awful.”

  He punched the pillow next to my head, and a thin gasp escaped from my throat.

  “I did this for you. All of it, and now you’re acting like…like fucking Nikolas. What’s wrong with you? You don’t whimper. You’re a killer.”

  I gritted my teeth, stared up at this densebodied, bald psychopath I’d come to for help. I’m such a crappy judge of character.

  Should I risk screaming? Stuy Town walls were thin, as I knew from my fighting neighbors. Someone was bound to hear me and call 911. First, though, I needed him off me. And I needed for him to give me that knife.

  How can I get out of this? And like an answer, a familiar sentence popped into my head: “If you stop acting like a victim, he’ll stop treating you like one.” Who said that? Doesn’t matter. It’s good advice.

  I made my voice as steady, as calm as I could. “You know, you’re fast with that knife.”

  Pierce’s features softened a little, and for a moment, he seemed to transform back into the cop I knew. The cop who yelled at Yankees games and offered Froot Loops to his visitors.

  “It’s impressive.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “You gonna be nice to me now?”

  “Yes.”

  He moved off my stomach, touched the tip of the blade to my lips, to my cheeks, to the hollow of my throat. “This place is a big change for you, but I know you’re gonna like it,” he said. “I know you.”

  The Wicked Witch of the West said, “Well my little pretty, I can cause accidents too,” and for the next few moments, I forgot all about who I really was, forgot what my own voice sounded like. My mother filled my head—the one person I knew who was nobody’s victim. I took her seductive bedtime-story voice, made it my own.

  “You want to tell me why you did all this for me?” The voice floated out of my mouth, touching the Ds and Ts so lightly, like keys on a child’s piano. A perfect impersonation of Dr. Sydney Stark-Leiffer. “This room and…everything else?”

  Pierce looked at me, his expression softening even more. “Because…I…”

  “Go on….”

  “You know why. I can tell from how you look at me.”

  “We have a spiritual connection, don’t we?”

  “You don’t belong with John. He leaves you alone in bed at night.” He moved closer, stared into my face. His breath was antiseptic—from mouthwash, or kissing spray. “John doesn’t care who comes in when he’s gone. He doesn’t care who watches you…sleeping.”

  I cringed. Stay with me, Sydney. “The night Marla was killed, John was gone all night,” I said. “Why were you in her apartment rather than mine?”

  “If you go into her closet, the coat closet, next to the door? There’s a spot in the back corner. It still smells like you.” He leaned on one arm, gazing at the side of my face, and I thought, Pillow talk. That’s what he thinks this is. “Marla Soble died because she decided to hang up her raincoat.” He grinned. “Nikolas died because he was a better blabbermouth than a spy, and Gundersen…Well, you know why he died. Not an ounce of body fat on that guy. I see why you liked him.”

  I stared at his lower lip, still shiny red on the spot where I’d bit him. “Where did you get the blood…for Marla’s valentine?”

  “That’s your valentine, not hers.” He got up on his knees, and slowly, he took off his T-shirt. I remembered Fiona saying, “All the cutters I’ve ever known have been girls.”

  If she could see this, I thought as I looked at a collection of thin, even scabs about two inches long, running across the width of Pierce’s pumped-up chest, between the nipples, as if he were keeping score of something. There were three rows of them. “These are for you, too.”

  “You cut your chest for me? I don’t understand.”

  “Ever since you knifed that perp, I’ve wanted you,” he said. “No, that’s not right. I’ve…worshiped you.”

  “But how was I—”

  “Each line is for a time I saw you, or had dinner with you, at John’s apartment. It’s blood from my heart.”

  “That’s…romantic.”

  “Each time I made a cut, it was to stop myself from doing what you made me want to do.”

  “What did I make you want to do?”

  “What I did to Marla. And what I did to Nikolas, and Nate. And my mother. And John.”

  I gasped. “John?”

  “Sorry. I mean what I’m going to do to John.”

  He left the room for a moment. When I saw him again, he was holding the cordless phone in one hand and his knife in the other. And he was smiling.

  The smile grew broader as he hit the redial button. “Hey, buddy, guess what? She showed up. Yes, isn’t that great news? And she says she’s really sorry about freaking out…. What’s that? You want to talk to her?”

  Pierce held the receiver to my ear while placing the knife at my throat. “Sam?” said the voice on the phone, as Pierce touched the tip of the blade to my skin. Please, not Krull, I thought.

  “Talk,” Pierce whispered.

  “John,” I said.

  “I’m so glad you’re all right,” he said. “That camera. We have to find out who—”

/>   “Yes,” I said. “We do.” Please don’t let him be next. Please don’t let Pierce carve him up and take digital photos of him.

  “Tell him to come,” said Pierce, as the pictures from the camera flashed through my mind like a sick slide show: the bloody heart on Marla’s wall, Nate’s carved-up abdomen, the woman’s bleeding leg (Marla’s leg? Pierce’s mother’s?) against that dull pink background. A dirty, stained pink background, it was…It was Pierce’s shag rug.

  I said, “I know you didn’t take those photos. You could never do that to that woman’s leg.”

  “I could never do any of that, Sam. But we have to find—”

  “I couldn’t look at that leg either.”

  Pierce said, “Tell him.”

  “Come get me, John. We can all figure this out together.”

  “Okay…”

  Pierce took the phone away and hung it up. “Nice work,” he said. “And you’re right. He could never do any of that.”

  What if Krull didn’t understand what I was trying to tell him? What if he doesn’t know me well enough to take a second look at that leg photo, or doesn’t recognize the setting? “I’ll make a deal with you,” I told Pierce. “Let him go, and I’ll stay here with you forever.”

  “No, he has to die.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for one thing, you’re gonna stay with me no matter what. I might as well have my cake and eat it too.”

  “But…I want to tell him to leave and never come back.”

  “I’m not buying that.”

  “I mean it, I—”

  “I don’t know why you care so much about him, anyway. He’s a cheater, just like Soble.”

  “He’s…what?”

  “He’s been seeing his ex-wife.”

  I tightened my jaw, summoning shock into my eyes. “He doesn’t have an ex-wife.”

  “Yes, he does. Didn’t you see all those letters in his safe?”

  “I…I was too focused on the camera.”

  “He has an ex-wife and a son.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You know those times when you have no idea where he is?”

  I nodded slowly.

  That’s where he goes. I followed him once. Or maybe it was fuckin’ Nikolas who did it; I don’t remember. She lives in Brooklyn. Park Slope.”

  Through my teeth, I said, “Does he love her?” This felt so bizarre, acting out a bad soapopera scene while bound and handcuffed to a green bed in a green room, a scarecrow on the screen of a green TV, singing about his missing brain.

  I heard movement in the hallway. Pierce dashed out of the room to look through the peephole. “Took him long enough,” he said when he returned.

  I pulled against the cuffs, fear rushing through my body like blood before finally transforming into the false anger, the outrage, I needed. Act like a murderer and he’ll treat you like one. “I want to help.” My voice was so tight and vengeful it actually surprised me.

  He turned and looked deep into my eyes. “You mean…”

  “I want to help you kill him.”

  Slowly, Pierce’s mouth twisted into a grin. I smiled back as he unfastened my feet, my hands, and I followed him into the front room.

  As we stood in front of the door, I talked to him in the same voice Sydney had used when she thought I was Sarah. Intimate, loving. “You do know me, and guess what? I’m just like you. You can see inside me, so you know. You’re the only one who does.”

  He produced a gleaming switchblade from his pocket and handed it to me. “You remember how to use it?”

  Thank you. “Of course I do.”

  Krull knocked on the door. “Zach?” He knocked again.

  “It’s open!” Pierce hollered.

  “Ex-wife, huh?” I said, and Pierce smiled and nodded as the door creaked open.

  Krull walked in, a loaded gun held straight in front of him. “Put your hands up over your head now,” he said.

  But Pierce was too close, too fast.

  He pulled me to his sweaty chest, held the polar-bear knife to my throat. “You tipped him off, you bitch.”

  “No, she didn’t,” Krull said. “I figured it out myself.”

  “How?”

  “From the way you fucking act around her all the time.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You really want to know? I took a saliva sample from one of the beer cans you’re never throwing away and I got a match for the DNA on Marla’s wall.”

  Pierce stared at him, unmoving. I turned my head a fraction of an inch, and whispered in his ear, so low only he could hear it, “I’m just like you.” His grip loosened a little, but not enough. Not yet. The cold hilt stayed pressed to my sternum, the blade still sharp against the thin skin of my throat.

  “Let her go,” Krull said.

  Pierce said, “Drop the fucking gun.”

  “Let her go first.”

  Pierce leaped at Krull, the switchblade straight in front of him, sticking it in Krull’s chest as he fired off a shot. “Missed!” said Pierce, pulling out the blade. And as I watched Krull collapse to his knees, blood pouring, spreading throughout his yellow T-shirt, the muscles in my legs tensed up. My veins hardened and numbed with pure, true rage.

  I plunged the blade into Pierce’s bare back, into the soft spot between the scapulae.

  “Oh…fuck,” Pierce groaned, and fell to the ground.

  “See?” I said. “I’m just like you.”

  Before coming over, Krull had called for backup and, within minutes, uniforms and paramedics were rushing past the bewildered neighbors, peering out of cracked-open doors.

  Both detectives were carried out on stretchers. Krull was nearly unconscious from blood loss. But Pierce, ever alert, ever overreactive, stared at me with wide, unblinking eyes. “I’ll be thinking about you,” he said, and touched a hand to his lips, still stained with my blood.

  I rode in the back of Krull’s ambulance, holding his cool, dry hand as paramedics hovered around him, pressing a tourniquet to his gushing chest wound, fitting him with IVs. “Please live,” I said, over and over and over.

  Just as the ambulance arrived at St. Vincent’s Hospital, he squeezed my hand. I looked into his pale face and, for a fraction of a second, his eyes opened and he said something.

  I thought it was, “Okay.” But I wasn’t sure.

  An hour later, a bespectacled young doctor in bloody blue scrubs walked out into the waiting room and stood over me, staring for half a minute. Then he said, “He’s stabilized. He’ll be fine.”

  I exhaled. “Oh, thank God. I thought you were going to tell me—”

  “Yeah, sorry about that long pause,” he said. “I’m kind of delirious with exhaustion, and I thought for a second you were Sydney Stark-Leiffer.”

  They moved Krull out of the ER, and into a regular hospital room, and when they finally let me in, he was propped up on pillows, looking pale and tired, but alert.

  I felt a powerful sense of déjà vu—of Krull in the same hospital, a bullet wound in his neck, a year and a half earlier. “Would you do me a favor and stop bleeding for me?”

  Krull said nothing—just smiled, slid to the side of his narrow bed and lifted the covers. I got in beside him and took his hand, the one that didn’t have the IV in it.

  And for a long time, I stared up at the ceiling, just feeling Krull’s hand, listening to his breathing until I started to drift off.

  Krull said, “I couldn’t look at that leg either.” His voice was so whispery thin that, for a moment, I thought he was talking in his sleep.

  “What?”

  “I couldn’t look at that leg either. Look at that leg. I got it. I saw Pierce’s rug in the photo.”

  I looked at his face. “You mean you didn’t run a DNA test on him?”

  He turned his head toward me, smiling. “I only run those on you.”

  I kissed him, very softly, and then we closed our eyes. We fell asleep in the hospital bed, breathing in
and out in unison.

  EPILOGUE

  What Scares Me Now

  In the months following Zachary Pierce’s arrest, those who didn’t like him—Patton especially—liked to say, “I told you so.” But the real truth was, when it came to Pierce, nobody told you, or me, or anybody so.

  Most people found him mildly annoying, a little weird at the worst. He had his eccentricities—the gleaming head, the gym addiction, the strange fact that he never took his T-shirt off, even in the shower—but none of these seemed like warning signs, even to his seasoned, cynical colleagues. Every last one of them thought his mother’s death the previous year had been a suicide.

  Before his arrest, there were only two people who knew the real Zachary Pierce, and that was Katia Stavros and her son, Nikolas—a sweet, smart boy who played chess for money in Washington Square Park, before realizing he could make a lot more money selling crack.

  Pierce had been drawn to the building first, because it was the perfect place to stake out my classroom. The building led to Katia, Katia to Nikolas. Pierce knew a lost soul when he saw one, and pounced. He started leaning on Nikolas almost as soon as he met him, asking him to watch me, follow me, report back on what I did on a daily basis.

  For that, Nikolas got a small, weekly stipend and the promise he’d never go to jail again, no matter how much crack he sold in the park where he used to play chess. As an added bonus, Pierce bought him a pair of binoculars.

  But Nikolas saw the rages, which occurred when Pierce thought I’d looked at him the wrong way, or had shown too much affection toward Krull. Nikolas knew what had happened to Marla, and that scared him into action.

  His mother had asked him to stop sending me those notes, to stay out of the policeman’s business. But he didn’t listen, and Pierce found out. Just like he found out about Jenna’s suspecting Nate and I had slept together. Just like he found out about Krull’s ex-wife and son. That was the irony—Pierce was a better detective than anyone ever gave him credit for.

  He’s awaiting trial, with a hotshot female lawyer who’s already dropping hints about an insanity plea. For the time being, Pierce is living on Riker’s Island, separated from the rest of the prison population for his own safety; former cops are never popular in jail, especially when they’ve killed women. He hasn’t read the interviews with Katia in the Daily News and the New York Times because he’s denied access to all print and electronic media. But according to the Post, he’s been getting bags of fan mail.