Jan Burke - Nine

“Jerome?”

“The man she married.” He hurried on. “She had just turned eighteen when she got pregnant with me. I was her second pregnancy, as far as I know. She got rid of the first one. She was sixteen that time. She thought about getting rid of me, but she decided it might be nice to have a kid to keep her company.” He paused. “That’s what she told me, anyway.”

Meghan turned the page, unable to look another moment at Serenity.

The photograph on this page was larger. “Moriarty took that one when he found me. I was fourteen.”

She stared at the boy in the picture, so much more like the Kit she had first met, and yet so utterly unlike him. This boy was bruised, and both his skin and ragged clothing were covered with dirt and what looked like bloodstains. His large gray eyes were lifeless, the eyes of a person in shock. He was holding fast to a skinny mongrel that was mostly yellow Lab.

“It was taken just a few hours after I had killed Jerome. I’m not sure how much time had passed-some of that part of my life is still hazy in my mind.”

She looked across at him. He looked away.

“I guess everyone who went to Sedgewick heard that I was a murderer. Part of what Freddy the snoop uncovered. Gabe probably told you that much, although you never asked me about it.”

“Gabe also told me your stepfather had killed your mother.”

“Yes. But that was about two years before the photo was taken.”

Kit watched her closely, but she didn’t say anything or give any sign of disapproval. He could tell it was news to her that there had been so much time between the two events. He felt an urge to try to shock her, to explain that he had struck Jerome Naughton again and again with a shovel, and continued to strike him long after he was dead. But he thought it would be cruel to give her those images to carry around in her head, and there was so much more to give her a disgust of him that he would not need to make any real effort to alienate her. It would happen anyway.

“This is Molly, isn’t it?” she said.

He nodded. It wasn’t the question he had been expecting. “Jerome tried to hit me, and she bit him. So he kicked her. I don’t know why, exactly, but I snapped. I killed him.”

She held her head to one side, considering him. “How did Moriarty find you?”

“Like I said, he had already been looking for me. My grandmother was frustrated with the police, so she hired him. He’s one of the best at what he does, I think. That night-he wasn’t all that far away from me, as it turned out.”

He paused, then said, “My stepfather had…he had done things and said things that made me terrified of trying to contact my grandmother before that night. I thought of Jerome as someone who was all-powerful, and he had made it seem possible that he would kill her if I called her. I believed that-I had absolutely no doubt that it was true. So, that night, after he was dead and I…I don’t know how to describe this, exactly, except to say that somehow, as I stumbled around in a daze, I realized that I could finally call my grandmother. So I called collect, and she told me she would send someone to help me, and she stayed on the line with me until Moriarty reached me. Then I remembered to tell them about the woman.”

“The woman?”

This would be it. Their last conversation would be about this. “The woman Jerome had been torturing. He left her hanging upside down over a bathtub to come after me.”

She went pale. “He tortured a woman in front of you?”

Keep it straightforward, he told himself. Still, his voice wasn’t quite steady when he said, “He tortured and killed eight women in front of me. One of them was my mother.”

“Oh, Kit…”

“Don’t pity me,” he said angrily. “I helped him.”

“Helped him?” She searched his face, looking, he knew, for some sign that he’d lied to her.

He fell silent.

“I don’t believe it.” She was angry, too. Of course she was.

“Believe it,” he said in a tone that would allow no argument.

She frowned. “How?”

“What?”

“How did you help him?”

He reached for the tortoise, gripped it. “In a thousand ways.”

“Name one.”

His mind filled with images. He closed his eyes tightly.

She waited. Why didn’t she just give up? he wondered.

“Just believe me,” he said. It was a plea this time.

“This once, I don’t.”

He came to his feet. “You want to know, Meghan? You want to know? All right. I did whatever the hell he asked me to do. Anything. ‘Tie her up, Worm.’ ‘Take a picture of me with her, Worm.’ ‘You stay in that chair and watch, Worm.’ And I’d do it.”

“You were a child.”

“I didn’t act like one. Would you like to see the photographs of them being forced to kiss me? To hold me? I’d strip naked and sit on their laps. And he’d tell them where to put their hands. What to do to me. They hated it. They hated me. Even the one who understood-but he killed her just the same. All the others, all so scared of him, they couldn’t talk or cry or anything else. He’d take pictures of them and everything he made them do with me.”

“Kit-”

“And after they were dead, I helped him then, too. I buried them. I’d be shoveling dirt into a grave, and he’d be in his room, beating off while he was looking at those photos. Why didn’t I run away while he was in there with his pants around his ankles? A thousand times I could have escaped from him. Ten thousand.”

“You were a child.”

“I was old enough…” He sat down again, buried his face in his hands. He was surprised to feel the dampness on his face. When had he started crying?

“He beat you, didn’t he? The bruises in this photo-”

“So fucking what? I had been beaten before, and by bigger men than Jerome Naughton.”

“But he did more than use his fists, didn’t he? He terrorized you, day after day. He made you afraid to disobey him.”

He didn’t answer.

“Just tell me that when you were asked to do those things, you weren’t feeling afraid of him, that you would have done them if he wasn’t there-say that’s true, and I’ll blame you for your part in it.”

He opened his mouth to say it, just to get her to see how bad it was, how unclean he was. But he couldn’t.

He stood up, and she came to her feet as well. “I have to go,” he said.

“Wait-” she said, and blocked his way.

She was inches away from him. “Please let me leave,” he said. Physically, she was no match for him. He could have tossed her aside, martial arts training or no. He waited.

“I’ll let you leave. But first, promise me that you won’t start avoiding me now that you’ve told me this.”

“Meghan-”

“Promise.”

He looked up at the sky. God, he pleaded silently. God, help me.

“I promise,” he said, and moved past her into the house.

Los Angeles, California

Wednesday, May 21, 4:50 P.M.

Frederick Whitfield IV wondered when he had ever felt better. True, he had been barfing his guts out a few minutes ago, but now he was fine. Now he was great. That barfing business, well, nothing to be ashamed of there. A lot of people might not know it, but great actors tended to puke after giving their best performances. Athletes barfed a lot, too. He had a friend who ran marathons, and he said a lot of those runners would cross the finish line and two seconds later, they’d be delivering street pizza. Just a fact. Bodybuilders, too. Famous for upchucking after a tough workout.

And what a workout he had just had. Two of them, both of them pros!

Granted, the one had been in restraints inside a locked cell, a little dull-witted from drugs-but so what? He knew a lot of people who would have been afraid to go in there with a guy who had been a sniper.