by Amy Vansant
Stephanie straightened. “Yes. It doesn’t hurt to have someone on the inside. His”—she turned her head and pretended to spit on the ground—“his girlfriend, Charlotte, knew about the fridge poisoning, and while I know now that wasn’t quite the news I thought it would be, we don’t have Charlotte and her sheriff buddy without Declan.”
Jamie hummed and Stephanie cocked her head.
“Wait. Why are you asking me about Declan?”
“I was going to help save you from yourself, but as it happens, what you just said occurred to me in the nick of time last night.”
“What does that mean?”
“I thought maybe I’d give you a little present.”
Stephanie slapped both her hands on the desk. “What does that mean?”
Jamie waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry. I didn’t kill him.”
“Why does that sound like it is about to be followed by a but?”
The woman smirked. “Well, I might have sent a shot across his bow, so to speak.”
“How so?”
“With a gun. I sent an actual shot across his bow.”
“You shot at him? That seems a little uncomplicated for you, doesn’t it?”
Jamie laughed. “You should know the Puzzle Killer is a very small portion of my work. I do maybe one puzzle killing a year just to keep the legend alive.”
Stephanie tilted back her head before training a steely gaze on the woman across from her. “Do not kill Declan. He’s mine.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. Why him? What does he have you could possibly need?”
Stephanie felt her jaw tightening. “I don’t see how that is any of your business.”
“Fine. What about Charlotte? Can I kill her?”
“No. She’s our direct line to the sheriff. Oh, and Seamus, Declan’s uncle. He’s looking into the puzzle murders, too. Detective, hired by someone called Simone, could be important. Do you know a Simone?”
Jamie shook her head. “Maybe she’s a reporter.”
“No, apparently she’s a Federal Marshal. Does that catch your attention?”
“It does.”
“Good. So you can see Declan and Charlotte need to stay alive if we’re going to keep our edge.”
Jamie flicked her wrist in the air. “Fine. I won’t kill her until we’re done.”
Stephanie slapped the desk again. “Don’t kill Charlotte ever! If you kill her, you’ll turn her into a martyr. Declan will be pining for her for months until some sweet empty-headed little thing finds a way to console him.”
“Couldn’t you be that sweet, empty-headed little thing?”
“Ha. Just leave them both alone. I need him to come to his senses on his own.”
“On his own?”
“Maybe not entirely on his own. But let me handle things.”
Jamie shook her head. “What you see in him anyway.”
“If you must know, he’s the sweetest person I’ve ever known.”
The woman lifted her gaze toward the ceiling. “Exactly. How boring.”
“He’s also incredibly handsome.”
“I’ll give you that. But there’s something deeper here, isn’t there? I just can’t put my finger on it—”
Stephanie grimaced. “How about we get back to you and your multitude of problems.”
“I thought we covered all the new news?”
“All the news by way of Charlotte and Declan, but I have other news.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“An email.”
“An email?”
“From your admirer. Nothing you can trace. I had my people try. It’s bouncing from IP to IP, probably originating somewhere in Pakistan.”
“This guy is in Pakistan?”
“No, his email server is based there.”
Jamie huffed. “Speak English.”
“I have his email address. You can’t use it to trace him or find where he is, but you can use it to talk to him.”
“Really? How did you get it?”
“The delivery method followed his usual modus operandi. Originally, he put that ad in the paper telling “PK” to contact me and by some miracle, you saw it and figured out it was a message to the Puzzle Killer, right?”
Jamie ran her tongue across her teeth. “I wouldn’t call it a miracle. I’m not an idiot.”
“I mean it’s a miracle he guessed your general location and that you actually read the paper that day.”
Jamie shrugged. “I’ll give you that.”
“He was less subtle with me. Left a note about the people he murdered for you on my doorstep. He wanted us to talk without you two discovering each other’s identities.”
“Yes.”
“Then we thought he went dark. But he didn’t. Not really.”
“What do you mean?”
“I went back and looked at the press coverage of the alligator attack. Did you see the picture in the newspaper of the pool?”
“Yes.”
“Did you notice on the lounger there was a newspaper open to the personals? There was also a flashlight sitting next to it and a glove with the fingers folded to point to it. He couldn’t have tried harder to make you notice it if he’d draped it in Christmas lights.”
“There were? I couldn’t stop staring at the puzzle pieces floating in the water...”
Stephanie opened her desk drawer and retrieved a newspaper. Slapping it on the desk, she pointed to the photo under the headline “Alligator Attacks Puzzle King.” It depicted a backyard pool surrounded by EMTs and police.
Jamie squinted at it. “My eyes aren’t what they used to be.”
“I saw the glove and thought, why is there a winter glove there? See the pattern on it? It’s little snowmen.”
“So both the glove and the flashlight are pointing to the paper? I told you, I don’t have my glasses with me.”
“Yes. So I put a cryptic ad in the personals telling him we were awaiting further word. Shortly after, he—and one random nut job who saw the ad—sent me an email.”
“Did you—”
“Yes. I checked. It was untraceable.”
“So how do you know it’s this person who’s been killing people to get my attention? Couldn’t anyone have responded to the ad?”
“Yes. But I’m sure this is the right person.”
“Why?”
“The email was [email protected].”
Jamie’s lip curled. “Alex? Is that his name?”
“I suppose.”
“And did you say erection pills? That tells you he’s the right guy? Honey, you have a lot to learn—”
“He’s using a spam server for his email. The important part is the gator. No one but the real killer would know my ad had anything to do with the alligator killing.”
Jamie sighed. “You know who I should have killed? The guy who invented the Internet.”
Stephanie wrote the email down on a piece of lined yellow paper, tore it from the pad, and handed it to her client.
“Don’t use it yet. I’m going to get you an email account so you can talk to him. Untraceable.”
The woman stood and took the paper. “I hate all this. I don’t know why I’m giving this idiot the time of day.”
“Because the idiot is here. Your home turf. He’s closer than you think to figuring out who you are. He didn’t send you to me on accident.”
“Oh, right. Good point.” She walked to the door and then turned. “Hey, how’s Debbie?”
Stephanie scowled. “You mean the woman you left me with so you could run around the country killing people?”
She nodded. “That one.”
“She’s dead.”
“Oh.” Jamie shrugged. “That explains why I haven’t heard from her in a while. She was a useful lady.”
Stephanie nodded. “She did her best.”
“Well, thank you for all your help.”
“My pleasure, Jamie.”
Jamie paused in
the doorway. “Can you call me the other name? I think I’d like that.”
Stephanie sighed.
“Fine. It was my pleasure...Mom.”
Jamie smiled. “See? Wasn’t that nice? Have you enjoyed our time together?”
“Sure. I’m over the moon that it took another murderer threatening you to bring you to me.”
“But I told you. I told you I was your real mother. Don’t I get points for that?”
“You told me...only after I told you the packet I received from the killer said you were my mother. And only after you paid me so the information would fall under attorney-client privilege. Which, since I received that information independently, technically isn’t covered, FYI.”
“Still. I could have denied it.”
“You could have. And it would have been crushing not to find out my mother is the Puzzle Killer.”
Jamie grinned. “Oh come on. It’s kind of exciting, isn’t it? I mean, I am famous!”
Stephanie stood and walked to her mother. She took her hand in her own.
“What are you doing?” asked Jamie, trying to tug back her hand.
Stephanie held it tight and watched as the intimacy of their connection made her mother’s eyes ring white with fear.
“Mother, I need to ask you something.”
Jamie paled. “What’s that?”
Stephanie stared into her mother’s eyes. “If this guy kills you...”
Jamie scoffed. “He won’t.”
Stephanie nodded. “I know. But if he does?”
Jamie tried jerking away her hand again but Stephanie held on. “If he does, what?”
“If he does—can I have those earrings?”
Chapter Twelve
Jamie had been so many things during her illustrious career as a serial killer. She’d begun at seventeen, murdering her own drug-addicted mother by overdosing her while she was wrapped in a heroin dream. Her mother had done most of the work with her own needle; Jamie only finished the job. Her mother'd had cancer, so it hardly even counted as murder. She told herself it was a mercy killing, before realizing she didn’t need justification.
She didn’t care.
Her mother’s death served as a gateway drug of its own. Jamie’s initial success killing her mother made it easier to punish her father for leaving her mother. He, and the cancer, had been responsible for pushing her mother into the depression that led to her heroin addiction in the first place.
Daddy’s death took some planning. Living with her agreeable but uninterested aunt, Jamie plotted for nearly a year. She knew killing him too soon or too obviously would arouse suspicion. Eventually, eleven months after her mother’s death, she called her father and begged him to let her visit him at his new home in Orlando. He agreed to pick her up, though he made it clear the prime motivator for his kindness was free babysitting for his new son. He and his new wife wanted to take a cruise to the Bahamas.
He arrived on time, and Jamie hopped into his truck, a bowl of potato salad like her mother used to make cradled in her arms. She told him it was a gift for his kindness. He barely looked at the food. Or her.
He certainly didn’t see the glued crack down the center of the bowl.
Jamie buckled in, and, once they reached a decent speed, jerked her father’s steering wheel, sending the truck into a tree.
She’d underestimated the force of a pre-planned car accident. She broke her nose on the dash. Poor, unlucky Daddy caught a shard of the glass potato salad bowl she’d brought in the neck and bled out before the ambulance arrived.
The fact that the stabby part occurred sometime after the crash was an inconsequential detail.
With very little effort, the bowl had split along the crack Jamie created the day before. A crack she’d glued together with cheap white glue. She knew a knife in her father’s neck would be difficult to explain, but a shard of glass from a potato salad bowl during a car accident? That was just bad luck. No reason to give it another thought.
Even then, as a fledgling killer, her murders had a sense of poetry. Back when Jamie’s mother discovered her father’s cheating, she’d thrown a bowl of potato salad at him. It was one of Jamie’s most vivid childhood memories; potato salad exploding against a wall.
Mom missed.
She did not.
In both cases, potato salad was everywhere.
Jamie left her aunt’s home soon after the crash. She murdered strange men for the contents of their wallets for years before developing the Puzzle Killer persona. Murder had become too easy and she’d wanted to put a twist on her exploits. A little flair.
She was smart, and that helped her avoid the authorities. More importantly, she was gorgeous, and being beautiful was ninety percent of the battle when it came to setting a man-trap.
At first her puzzle murders were simple; not puzzles at all, really. A man cheating on his wife with a ravishing young drifter might open a hotel door tied to the trigger of a shotgun, for example. It thrilled her to kill people and make the deed their fault. Not because it removed her guilt, but because it made them as culpable as she. Her victims were her accomplices.
It made things less lonely.
But she quickly tired of the shotgun-string trick. Even if the victim technically caused his own death, it was obvious someone set the crude trap. The situation lacked finesse.
She moved on to murders that looked like terrible accidents. That saved the trouble of the police looking into their deaths. Then, emboldened by her success, she created elaborate traps and began leaving puzzle pieces at the scene. She’d wanted to leave potato salad as an homage to her beginnings, but it proved too impractical.
Once, she wired a cat box to a trigger switch. A woman in a store had bumped into her while lifting a bag of cat litter into her cart. She didn’t even say excuse me. Jamie followed her home. The next day, she broke in and found the cat box. Then she found the cat. She weighed both and went home, where she built a switch that would set off an explosion if the weight of the cat box was ever more than ten ounces over the weight of a clean cat box, litter and the cat. She figured ten ounce of cat poop was too much to forgive.
It took six days for the bomb to blow. Could be the cat gained weight, or maybe there was a second cat she’d missed, or the woman pushed on the box...but Jamie liked to imagine the trigger was laziness. People should clean cat boxes more often.
It wasn't that she was particularly fond of cats; a few weeks earlier she'd paid a man to teach her how to set up a mercury switch bomb. So someone was going to blow for something. She had to practice her new skills. She was a firm believer in learning by doing. And that cat lady should have had better manners.
In addition to the fact she was always learning, the key to Jamie’s longevity as a serial killer was simple. Since killing her parents, she’d never dispatched anyone she knew. Without motive, most investigations fizzled.
She didn’t need to know her victims. Strangers could annoy her in an infinite number of ways.
She also never told anyone. It baffled her why so many murderers blabbed to strangers, lovers and bartenders. It reminded her of a Benjamin Franklin quote she’d heard in grade school.
Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
Following those two simple rules kept her free and alive, apart from two exceptions. First, her husband. That was a necessary evil; it’s hard to be a killer and keep a full time job. She needed a lifetime of money. So she’d chosen him partly for his trust fund but, more specifically, for the decade long feud he’d had with his brother. When the two of them killed each other during an argument with no witnesses other than the dead brothers themselves, there was little reason for the police to suspect her.
But though no one blamed her, she did have one growing problem.
She was pregnant.
Though it would take over twenty years, the pregnancy lead to her second exception.
She left the child, Stephanie, with a sympathetic, baby-desperate childhood fr
iend back in Charity, Florida, shortly after giving birth. No one knew about Stephanie. Unwilling to share custody with her husband’s family, Jamie gave away the child before anyone ever knew she existed.
She’d done right by the girl. Paid for her college and law school. Kept her adoptive mother in food, clothing, beer and shelter. Now she had a lawyer built into her family.
How convenient.
Who knew you could just make a lawyer.
But she’d broken her second rule by sharing information with Stephanie. When this Alex person sent Stephanie a package stating Jamie was her mother and the Puzzle Killer, she could have denied it all, but she didn’t. Thank goodness for lawyer-client privilege. Stephanie had taken the news like a trooper. Finding out your new client is a famous serial killer and your mother might have destroyed lesser women. She respected the girl for her composure.
Jamie sat at her kitchen table in front of the laptop computer Stephanie had set up for her. She turned it on. It worried her that the person trying to catch her attention had killed the crossword champion by making it look as if he had fallen on his own pen. Both the death by accident and the sweet irony of the weapon being his own beloved puzzle pen was her style when she wasn’t the Puzzle Killer. Did this annoying killer-wanna-be know that? Or did he just get lucky? It was one thing for him to obsess over her carefully-crafted public persona as the Puzzle Killer; it was another if he also knew most of her work went unnoticed, with no one knowing they were murders at all.
She suspected this fan of hers was young. No established serial killer would waste his time proving his devotion to an idol. Putting her poster on his wall, so to speak.
Jamie opened the email account Stephanie had set up and watched the wheel turn as something downloaded.
I’ve got mail.
The subject line said: First time emailer, long-time fan.
She opened it and read. The body of the email only had one sentence.
Do I have the honor of talking to the Puzzle Killer?
She typed back: Who wants to know?
It sounded juvenile, but it was an important question.
The response came back almost immediately, announced by the ring of her email notification.
