Page 110 of M for Murder

Realising that if she was right then her life was in danger, Rebecca glanced desperately around the room, looking for some kind of weapon to use. The knife she’d earlier brought upstairs was now down in the kitchen, in plain sight of Kylan. No use to her now. As she cursed herself for being so stupid, her eyes dropped to the knife embedded in Lawrence Parker’s chest.

Could she really bring herself to pull it free?

Do you have a choice?

If she touched the knife, she would be tampering with evidence.

Screw evidence! This is a matter of life or death.

Bending down over Parker’s body, she placed both hands firmly on the wooden handle and pulled hard, trying to wrench it from his chest. The blade made a wet sucking sound as it started to tear free from his flesh and Rebecca grimaced, feeling the urge to throw up.

She looked down at the knife. What was visible of the blade was red and shiny, dripping with his blood. Could she do this?

Do you have a choice?

As she started to give the blade a second tug, she heard a noise coming from behind her. She turned to face the door and caught her breath sharply as she saw Kylan standing above her with the knife from the kitchen in her hand. There was no malice in the girl’s eyes. They were wide and glazed, staring at Rebecca as though she didn’t know who she was.

As the knife came towards her, Rebecca tried to duck to the side, but she was unable to miss the penetrating blade as it dove into the back of her shoulder. Screaming loudly, she toppled forward, landing against Lawrence Parker’s corpse.

The pain was blinding and, as she slid off his body, landing in a heap on the floor, she struggled to keep hold of consciousness, knowing that she had to get out of the house.

Nobody knows. They’ll never believe it’s Kylan. I have to tell Hickok. I have to get out of here before she kills me.

Finally, unable to hold on any longer, her eyes dropped shut.

Joel arrived in Seattle a little after midnight.

He had called the local police department just before landing and when he arrived at the airfield two patrol cars were waiting to greet him. As they made their way to Tania Isaac’s house, he thought back to Parker’s house. To the clothes he’d found in the bedroom.

Kylan?

As they approached the house where Rebecca Angell was planning to meet her, he hoped to hell he was wrong. Hoped, but knew it was unlikely.

Kylan stared at Rebecca Angell, lying sprawled across the bedroom carpet, and wondered if she was dead. She hadn’t meant to kill her. Hadn’t wanted to hurt her. Unfortunately, she hadn’t had a choice. Rebecca Angell knew the truth, and if she survived then everyone would find out the truth. They would come and take her away. Lock her up and force her to see all the doctors and therapists again. The ones who made her take pills and thought they could cure her.

What they didn’t understand, what nobody seemed to understand, was that they were wasting their time. Instead of trying to analyse her every thought they should be out there hunting for Boone. He was the one who was dangerous. They had told her that he was probably dead, but she knew different. Rodney Boone was still alive, and she knew that one day he would come for her.

Lawrie had said he would protect her. He had promised that if they moved back to Juniper, he would be there for her. And, at first, he had been. Then he had started working late. Always too tired to talk when he got home. Never reassuring her. No longer telling her that things would work out okay. Kylan had suspected he was seeing Emma Keeley. She had seen the way the two of them acted together when they thought she wasn’t watching. The lingering looks they shared. The secret touches. Lawrie was slipping away from her, and with him he was taking all of her strength. When Boone came back for her, when he came to take revenge for what she had done to him, how would she be strong enough to fight him off?

Then it had occurred to her that maybe she could save herself. If she helped Boone finish his alphabet, perhaps he would leave her alone. After all, that was what he had wanted, wasn’t it?

Twenty-six students. Twenty-six letters. All she needed to do was take up from where he had left off.

She knew the drill. The joker playing card. The initial carved into the back of the neck. She could finish the murders for him and then it would finally be over.

The first time had been easy. Lawrie had been working late and her selected victim, Scott Jagger, was a flirtatious football player who’d just broken up with his girlfriend. Kylan knew that he liked her, and it wasn’t difficult to persuade him to go for a drive out to the coast, or to have a few drinks from the vodka bottle she’d earlier laced with sleeping pills. When he finally passed out, she wrapped her belt around his neck and pulled tightly until he stopped breathing.

She dumped his body in the beach entrance of the sewer, just half a mile from where she had killed him, sensibly waiting until she had dragged his body out of the car before she cut the back of his neck with the kitchen blade she’d brought from home. By the time Lawrie returned, later that night, she was in bed, the car was in the garage, and the knife she had used was washed up and returned to the kitchen drawer.

The second victim hadn’t been a difficult choice. If Emma Keeley was having an affair with her husband, she would be able to deal with two problems at once. Playing on her hunch, she had sent two typed notes, one to Lawrie pretending it was from Emma, asking him to meet her at The Coven; another to Emma inviting her to the house. When the girl arrived, she used Lawrie’s baseball bat to hit her over the head then, after strangling her, she dragged her out through the side door to the car in the garage. Not sure how much time she would have before Lawrie returned to the house, she decided not to use the sewer, and instead dumped Emma’s body in the river, which was less than a five-minute ride away.

It hadn’t taken her long to work out that the male victims were easier than the females. Kylan knew she was attractive, and she had no problem enticing Rufus Lind or Kevin North to their deaths. She made sure that they were blind drunk or had passed out before she killed them. Aside from being physically stronger than her, she didn’t want to see them in pain. The only reason she was doing this was to stop Boone.

Catherine Maloney had been risky. She hadn’t known for sure that the girl would show up at the bridge. Catherine had talked non-stop about Aidan and about how much she liked him. Did she like him enough to meet him in the middle of the night, though? Feigning a headache, Kylan had persuaded Lawrie to return home early from their date with Vic and Jill, and she had dropped a couple of her pills into his coffee to make sure he slept like a baby. When she was certain he was zonked out, she had taken the car and gone down to the bridge to find Catherine.

Justine Orton was the only victim who had proved to be a problem. Not knowing enough about her, Kylan was unable to come up with a plot to lure her away from the campus, so using Lawrie’s keys she had let herself into the caretaking block, stolen the master keys to the dorms, and gone into Justine’s room to wait for her. While she’d been in there, she had found Lawrie’s tie. Her mind had worked overtime as she’d tried to figure out if her husband was having an affair with Justine Orton and, when the girl finally returned, it seemed only fitting that she use the tie to strangle her. Killing Justine Orton in her room made it impossible to get the body off campus. Kylan didn’t think Rodney Boone would worry about technicalities though. As long as she completed the alphabet, she figured she would be home and dry. At least that was what she had thought before running into the guy from the grocery store outside her English classroom. Initially she had assumed that he was there to keep an eye on her. Probably working for Boone to make sure she finished the alphabet. Then it had occurred to her that maybe her plan wasn’t working. That maybe Boone was going to kill her anyway. She had panicked and come to Seattle, to get away from everything that was happening and figure out the best course of action.

What she hadn’t counted on was Lawrie showing up on Tania’s doorstep earlier that night, saying that he’d found the case full of clothes. The clothes she had taken from the victims and, not knowing what to do with them, had hidden under the bed in the spare room. Lawrie told her she had to go to the police, that they would help her get psychiatric treatment. Kylan didn’t want treatment, though, she just wanted to be rid of Rodney Boone and in a moment of rage she had stabbed her husband in the chest.