I started to puke but Dale got a wastebasket and helped me to my knees. When I could breathe again, I reached into my pocket and took out the photo of the woman who had jilted Grey forty-five years ago and put the splinter in his mind that had gone deeper and deeper until it cut him in two. I hoped she was alive. I hoped she hadn’t been Grey’s first victim.
I handed the photo to Gilmore and said, “I don’t know her name or anything about her, but check on it. See if she was murdered. Grey… he might have…” I looked down and streams of blood were pulsing down the front of my jeans. Dale pushed her way in and said, “Oh God, Terry, you’re-” She grabbed more towels from the kitchen and pressed them to my stomach. My mother was going to wonder where the hell all these towels went.
Dale started tying off my wounds. Gilmore said, “They won’t hold.”
“Do something,” she begged. “Help my brother.”
He winced as he rubbed his jaw and finally came to a decision. Covering over Grey’s murder was the lesser of two evils. It was between that and the promise of a completely empty life. We Rands were all he had.
“All right,” he said.
“We have to get rid of some other things,” Dale told him.
“I know a place.”
We were going to be seeing a lot more of Gilmore from now on. He owned us, and we owned him.
He and Dale helped me to my feet. Maybe I would die anyway. Maybe I wanted to die. Maybe that was the perfect choice to make.
39
I visited Collie one last time. I requested that we meet in the area where I’d first spoken with him, where we could talk on the phone and there would be reinforced glass between us.
The screws brought him in and took their time unlocking his chains. He must’ve come straight from the gym. He was still sweaty and the veins remained knotted all across his arms, twisting red and black in his throat. He smiled at me through the glass but he knew something was wrong. I was a little heartened to realize he could still worry about something even now.
The screws left and Collie spun his chair around, sat backward as usual, and snatched up the phone. I took a brea#x2='1em' a
glass betwth and reached up to mine. I moved stiffly. It had taken twenty staples to close the jagged tears in my side. The emergency-room docs had done an excellent job patching me up. They told me the scars wouldn’t be bad. The dog tattoo would need some touching up, though.
“I wasn’t sure if I’d see you again,” my brother said.
“I didn’t plan on coming back,” I told him.
“So why are you here?”
I could feel that old singular pain rising once again. My foolish mantra returned to me. It beat along with my pulse. I can do this. I can do this.
“You were right,” I said. “Someone else snuffed Becky Clarke.”
He let go with a chuckle that grew wilder until it became a whoop. It got the screws looking in at us. “I knew it. Lin was right. My girl is sharp as hell. Idiot cops couldn’t figure it out, but she did.” He raised his chin and eyed me. “Did you find him?”
“Yes,” I said.
He waited for me to continue. I didn’t. I decided there was no need to tell him that I thought Lin had been wrong too. I didn’t believe Grey was a serial killer. Instead, there was a world of mad dogs like him, husbands and boyfriends who couldn’t contain their rage, whose hands had learned how to batter and strangle. The world was littered with dead young brunettes.
His face emptied of its usual high-strung emotion. He looked at me with some real attentiveness. “Did you take care of it yourself? There’s been no word here. Nothing on the circuit. Lin hasn’t said anything.”
“I handled it. Nobody else knows.”
“Right. But I can see you’re holding back. You’ve got more to say.”
I nodded. “Why didn’t you tell me about how you kissed them?”
Collie looked away in embarrassment. His face flushed until it glowed pink. I had never seen my brother embarrassed about anything. It was a revelation. I had learned something new about him on the eve of his death, and that disturbed me. I didn’t want to believe that there was more I might learn about my brother, if we had more time.
“I didn’t know they knew about that,” he said.
“Forensics did their job. Did you really think they’d miss that?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was in the files. Your attorneys should have used it.”
“I didn’t care. I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want them to fight for me either.”
“You should have told me anyway. Maybe it would have helped convince me that you hadn’t iced Rebecca Clarke.”
“Nothing was going to convince you one way or the other. You were either going to help or you weren’t.”
He was right. I couldn’t argue the point. Right from the beginning I knew I was going to help. Even before he asked me. Despite my own protests. He called me and I had come running home.
“Why’d you put your lips on them, Collie?”
“I just did, Terry.”
We were bound by our rituals. The underneath forced him to kill with viciousness, but perhaps rev it couldn’t steal all of his love from him. Maybe it was his way of begging forgiveness from them. Or him forgiving them for allowing themselves to become his victims and the impetus for his own destruction.
“So tell me,” he said. “What happened? Who was it?”
I leaned so far toward the glass that he actually drew away on the other side. “I want the truth from you, Collie, do you understand? Don’t run any kind of a game on me. Don’t hold back. Don’t lie. Talk straight. If you’ve got any kind of a heart, use it now. You owe me that much.”
“What the hell do you mean, Terry?”
I enunciated every word very clearly into the phone.
“Did I know what?”
“Did you have any idea at all who it was?”
He shook his head. “No, of course I don’t know who it was. If I’d known I wouldn’t have needed you to check into it. What happened? What did you do?”
I said, “Does it really matter?”
He glanced away again. “No, I suppose not.”
I looked at my brother for so long that his expression shifted several times. He smiled, then frowned, then a hint of real concern began to ply his features.
“What is it, Terry? What do you need to say?”
My throat was raw. I swallowed several times. I looked at my reflection and then realized it wasn’t my reflection. I was staring at my brother. We were the same. Maybe it was the onset of Alzheimer’s, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe there really was no reason. Maybe Grey had none either. It might not have been the girl who broke his heart. It might have been anything at all. And me. And me. Was I going to wind up collecting Toby mugs or would I murder young women who reminded me of Kimmy? I was already a murderer. I should be sitting on the other side of the glass. I had a premonition that I would be someday.
“What is it?” he repeated.
I sucked air like I was suffocating. “Collie, I have to tell you something.”
“Okay. That’s okay, Terry. You can tell me anything you need to. Go on. What is it? Tell me.”
I said, “I love you.”
He couldn’t have been more shocked if I’d opened all the doors and ushered him to a limousine and driven him out of there. His face grew a healthy, youthful pink again. It took ten years off him. He looked like a kid again.
