My last killing: midnight Thursday. Your suicide: soon thereafter. Billy Wiles consulted his wristwatch. A few minutes past noon, Wednesday.
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If the freak meant what he said, this performance, or whatever it was, would conclude in thirty-six hours. Hell was eternal, but any hell on earth must be by definition finite.
The reference to a “last” killing did not necessarily mean that only one more murder lay ahead. In the past day and a half, the freak had killed three, and in the day and a half ahead, he might be no less murderous. Cruelty, violence, death. Movement, velocity, impact. Flesh, blood, bone. Of those nine words in the second document, one struck Billy as more pertinent than the others. Velocity.
The movement had begun when the first note had been left under the windshield wiper on the Explorer. The impact would come with the last killing, the one meant to make him consider suicide.
Meanwhile, at a steadily accelerating pace, new challenges were being thrown at Billy, keeping him off balance. The word velocity seemed to promise him that the longest plunges of this roller coaster were still ahead. He neither disbelieved the promise of increasing velocity nor dismissed the confident assertion that he would commit suicide.
Suicide was a mortal sin, but Billy knew himself to be a shallow man, weak in some ways, flawed. At this point, he wasn’t capable of selfdestruction; but hearts and minds can both be broken. He had little difficulty imagining what might drive him to such a brink. In fact, no difficulty at all.
Barbara Mandel’s death alone would not drive him to suicide. For almost four years, he had prepared himself for her passing. He had hardened himself to the idea of living without even the hope of her recovery. The manner of her murder, however, might cause a fatal stress crack in Billy’s mental architecture. In her coma, she might not be aware of much that the killer did to her. Nevertheless, assuming that she would be subjected to pain, to vile abuse, to gross indignities, Billy could imagine a weight of horror so great that he would break under it. This was a man who beat lovely young schoolteachers to death and peeled off women’s faces.
Furthermore, if the freak intended to engineer circumstances in which it would appear that Billy himself had killed not only Giselle Winslow, Lanny, and Ralph Cottle, but also Barbara, then Billy would not want to endure months of being a media sensation or the spotlight of the trial, or the abiding suspicion with which he’d be regarded even if found innocent in a court of law.
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The freak killed for pleasure, but also with a purpose and a plan. Whatever the purpose, the plan might be to convince police that Billy committed the homicides leading to Barbara’s murder in her bed at Whispering Pines, that his intent had been to establish that a brutal serial killer was at work in the county, thereby directing suspicion from himself to the nonexistent psychopath. If the freak was clever—and he would be—the authorities would swallow that theory as if it were a spoonful of vanilla ice cream. After all, in their eyes, Billy had a strong motive to do away with Barbara.
Her medical care was covered by the investment income earned by a seven-million-dollar trust fund established with a legal settlement from the corporation responsible for her coma. Billy was the primary of three trustees who managed the fund.
If Barbara died while in a coma, Billy was the sole heir to her estate. He did not want the money, none of it, and would not keep it if it came to him. In that sad event, he had always intended to give the millions away. No one, of course, would believe that was his intention.
Especially not after the freak was finished setting him up, if in fact that’s what the freak was doing.
The call to 911 certainly seemed to signify that intention. It had drawn Billy to the attention of the sheriff’s department in a context that they would remember… and wonder about.
Now Billy combined all three documents and printed them on a single sheet of paper: Because I, too, am a fisher of men. Cruelty, violence, death. Movement, velocity, impact. Flesh, blood, bone. My last killing: midnight Thursday. Your suicide: soon thereafter.
With scissors, Billy trimmed out the block of text, intending to fold it and put it in his wallet, where he would have it for easy review. As he finished, he realized that this paper appeared identical to that on which he had received the first four messages from the killer. If the diskette in Cottle’s hands had been prepared on this computer, perhaps the first four notes had been composed here as well.
He exited Microsoft Word, and then entered the software again. He called up the directory.
The list of documents was not long. He had used this program solely for writing fiction.
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He recognized the key words of the titles of his single novel and of the short stories that he had completed, as well as those of stories never finished. Only one document was unfamiliar to him: Death.
When he loaded that document, he discovered the text of the first four messages from the freak.
He hesitated, remembering procedures. Then he rattled the keys, summoning the date when the document had been first composed, which turned out to be 10:09 A.M. the previous Friday.
Billy had left for work fifteen minutes earlier than usual that day. He had swung by the post office to mail some bills.
The two notes left on his windshield, the one taped over the Explorer’s ignition, and even the one he’d found on his refrigerator this same morning had been prepared on this computer more than three days before the first had been delivered, before the nightmare had begun Monday evening.
If Lanny had not destroyed the first two notes to save his job, if Billy had offered them to the police as evidence, sooner or later the authorities would have checked this computer. They would have reached the inescapable conclusion that Billy himself had written the notes.
The freak had prepared for all contingencies. He was nothing if not thorough. And he had been confident his script would play out as he had intended.
Billy deleted the document titled Death, which might still be used as evidence against him, depending on how events unfolded from here on. He suspected that deleting it from the directory did not remove it from the hard
