Poppy hurried back to her trailer where Matt had told her he would meet her after saying his good-byes to Joselyn and the crew. She clattered up the metal steps and inside to pack up her things, barely making it past the door when it slammed shut behind her and a hand roughly grabbed her by the arm and spun her around.
It was Timothy, brandishing a Glock pistol in one hand while squeezing her arm so tight with the other it began to cut off her circulation. His eyes were dark and menacing, and the malevolent sneer on his face chilled her to the bone.
Chapter 49
Timothy forcefully shoved Poppy down on the hard, uncomfortable couch and took a step back, the pistol pointed directly at her.
Poppy took a deep breath. “Timothy, what are you doing with a gun? Why would you—?”
“Stop! Just stop!” he barked. “My mother called me from her car and told me all about the wild rumors you were spreading about me. She warned me to steer clear of you, but I knew I had to deal with you myself, once and for all.”
“Then it was you, you smothered Danika with that pillow.”
“She trusted me. I offered to run lines with her and she let me in her trailer when no one else was around. It was so easy.”
“Why? Why did you do it?” Poppy cried, her eyes fixed on the pistol aimed straight at her face.
Timothy’s eyes seemed to glaze over as his mind wandered back to another time. “When I was a kid, I always felt so lost and alone, my mother did her best to raise me, but she was always working and didn’t have much time for me, and not knowing who my father was consumed me. Every time I watched a TV show or the news and saw some random guy I’d think, is that my father? Could that be him? Whenever I’d ask my mother, she’d brush it off. Finally she told me my father was dead just to get me to shut up, but deep down I knew she was lying.”
“When did you find out about Hal Greenwood?” Poppy asked gently, not wanting to rile him up any more than he already was.
“About five years ago. Can you imagine my surprise? My mother’s boss? He’d been in my life the whole time and she kept it hidden from me, I was completely in the dark! She didn’t even list his name on my birth certificate, she just said ‘father unknown.’ But my grandmother knew the truth, and on her deathbed, she couldn’t stand to see how tortured I was about not knowing who my father was, and so she confessed everything. I was so angry. It took me a long time to forgive my mother.”
“So you reached out to Hal and he rejected you?” Poppy asked. It was a guess. But an educated one knowing the kind of man Hal Greenwood was.
“He adamantly denied it. I told him I wasn’t trying to get any money or anything like that, but he didn’t care. He just kicked me out of his office and threatened that if I ever brought it up again, he’d fire my mother. But that didn’t stop me from wanting to know more about him. I became obsessed, I did a deep dive into his past, where he came from, how he became the success he is today . . . and along the way I stumbled across the Pillow Talk murders back in the nineteen eighties, and suddenly everything came into focus. . . .”
Poppy stared at him, confused. “How?”
“My whole childhood, especially when I was a teenager, I had these violent thoughts, these urges to kill in order to release all the anger pent up inside me. Whenever these thoughts crept into my mind, I’d try to suppress them, but the older I got, the more frequently they came, and it was like I was at war with myself on the inside. When I found a link between Hal and the Pillow Talk murders, it was like a eureka moment.”
“You finally found a connection with your father,” Poppy said solemnly.
“What is it they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree? I was ecstatic, I finally had an explanation for what was going on with me, it was simple genetics.”
“That is an extreme oversimplification,” Poppy snapped, shaking her head. “Just because you share DNA with someone who has committed murder, that doesn’t give you an excuse to do the same!”
Timothy thrust the gun out, inflamed. “You don’t know anything! Don’t you see? We’re now bonded, inextricably linked, forever! Father and son!”
“You’re deluded if you believe that he will somehow be proud of you for this! Hal Greenwood is a raging, immoral narcissist! He won’t care that you were trying to impress him by following in his footsteps! He only cares about himself, and right now he’s not thinking about you, he’s only thinking about how he’s going to get out of spending the rest of his life in prison for those ghastly murders he committed forty years ago!”
“You’re wrong!” Timothy shouted.
“And your mother? Did she know what you did to Danika?”
“Of course not. She would have been horrified. It was best to keep her in the dark, like she kept me in the dark all those years.”
“Why Danika? What did she ever do to you?”
“She was the exact same type of victim as the ones my father went after. She fit the profile. Simple as that. Anyone on the set could see how attracted he was to her. I knew if he had been younger like me, Danika would have been his perfect victim so I chose her. I wanted to feel what he felt all those years ago, the adrenaline, the thrill. . . .”
His cold
