Dear Killer (3 page)

And now my mom was stifling laughter, biting her lower lip until it hurt, trying to keep a straight face. Alex glanced down at the ground, and I took the opportunity to give her a halfway-serious warning look. She giggled silently and nodded, as if to say
I know, I know
. But she kept laughing; as she continued, I tried to restrain a smile as well. Even when silent, her laughter was somehow contagious.

“The Perfect Killer?” Alex asked uncertainly, looking up again.

“Yeah, that.”

“I’m not officially in charge of that.”

My mom was calming herself down now, taking deep breaths, settling into her role.

“But you’re running the show, aren’t you?” I regretted that comment. It sounded too intelligent, especially with the way I said it.

“Well . . . ,” he said, voice trailing off. He didn’t want to say anything that might be perceived as out of line. I was starting to see, a little bit, why my mom had invited him. It was a good idea to know my enemy.

“Stop embarrassing the poor man,” my mom scolded me playfully, and gestured to the small table on the other side of the kitchen counter, where we always ate. The actual dining room was dark and stuffy—we ate there only on special occasions, when we felt that we had to. “Let’s eat, shall we? I’m sorry I don’t have any cocktails, Alex. As a rule, we don’t keep alcohol in the house.”

“No worries,” he said, waving a hand. “I don’t drink much anyway.”

“You sit at the head of the table, ’cause Dad’s not home,” I said flippantly. He nodded awkwardly and walked around the counter to take his place at the end of the table. My mom and I followed.

As I sat down, I giggled once more for good measure. I really wanted him to believe I was an idiot. He seemed a bit uneasy with me, probably because I was acting like such a dimwit and people are usually a bit awkward with people they think are less intelligent than they are. That was good. He was easier to handle than I had expected.

“It’s lovely to have you over,” my mom purred.

“Thank you for inviting me,” he said with a glance at me, as if he were regretting coming. He didn’t quite know what to do with himself—he was so uncertain. I flashed him a smile, trying to make him feel better about things, and he returned it uncomfortably.

The poor man! Sitting at a table with two murderers, one of whom was a supposedly idiotic teenage girl. It was somehow comedic how clueless he was. He still made me nervous, but the humor of his situation didn’t escape me. He was out of his depth, a small fish that had unknowingly swum out into water far too deep. And now, of course, he couldn’t go back. We had found him, and we would make him ours.

I ate a few bites of my steak in silence. The policeman—what was his name, Alex?—stared off into space.

“You have a beautiful home,” Alex said, gesturing around with his fork. My mother batted her eyelashes and put her fingers to her neck as if clutching at pearls.

“Oh, thank you!” she said aristocratically. I rolled my eyes. She saw me and glared.

For a moment more I looked down at my plate. Alex said something, my mother laughed, but I wasn’t listening. There was another lull in the conversation.

After a moment I glanced at my mom and met her eyes. Alex was staring at his plate; he didn’t see us. We shared a long look, and I smiled slightly. It was the smile of two people who shared a secret. And what a good secret it was.

Alex left late. It was past ten o’clock now, and the crescent moon sat glowing like a painting in the sky. I usually went to bed late—sometime in the hours past midnight—and I liked to take time with my letters, a few hours at least, reading them, memorizing them, tasting the ghosts of the words on my tongue as I mouthed the messages to myself. But I did have school tomorrow, so I couldn’t stay up too far into the morning. I had to be reasonable. And being reasonable left me less time for my letters. Sitting in my bedroom near ten o’clock watching the policeman’s car drive away, I felt a small surge of irritation, directed pointedly at his retreating rear bumper as it faded into the darkness.

I sat on my bed with my bag in front of me. I didn’t dump out all the letters, though I wanted to. I wanted to dump them and let them spill out of the bedspread and watch them fall wherever they pleased. I wanted them to spread out and I wanted to truly see how many of them there were, see how many people wanted my expertise and my individual, incredible instinct.

But no. They would be too hard to clean up if someone inconvenient decided to come into the room without much notice. Not that I was expecting anyone to, but it was always best to be prepared for anything.

I was wearing my usual latex gloves, stretched too tight over my hands, so I wouldn’t leave fingerprints on the letters. The last box of gloves I had bought was a size too small for me, and they were really bothering me, but I didn’t want to buy gloves any more often than I needed to lest I begin to look suspicious.

Dad was still out, and Mom was getting into bed. My light was the only light in the house still on. It glowed out of the house’s top window over the empty black street. I plucked the first letter out and opened the envelope. Inside was a thoughtfully written note and seven hundred pounds. Not a bad amount. I scanned the letter.

Dear Killer,

I hate my fiancée, but she’s blackmailing me into staying.

A couple of months ago, I was driving. And okay, maybe I had had too much to drink, maybe I shouldn’t have been driving, but I didn’t mean anything bad. I was just going home. But there was this red light and I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I drove through it—and there was this other car that swerved to avoid me, and it crashed and someone died.

I just kept driving. I didn’t know what had happened—I realized it only when they were talking about it on the news the next day. They didn’t know who had done it, and they were asking for information. But I couldn’t go tell the police it was my fault—I couldn’t. They’d charge me with a felony. Being charged with something like that would ruin me.

I felt really bad about it, so I told my fiancée about the whole thing. But then things got bad between us, and I told her that I wanted to leave. She’s crazy. Legitimately. I can’t stay with her. But she’s told me that if I leave, she’ll tell the police about what I’ve done. I could go to prison. No one would ever hire me again. All I’ve worked for, gone.

I can’t let my fiancée ruin my life like this.

Kill her. Her name is Lily Kensington, and she lives at 28 Lark Place, in Chelsea. She gets home every night at nine.

The letter writers, like this one, always did their desperate best to prove their point, convince me that their request was the most worthwhile one. They could do that without much danger. When the letters were found, their contents weren’t released to the general public, for legal reasons, though it was revealed to the public that there
was
a letter; and the police couldn’t actually prove who had written them—I made sure of that. Before I left the letters, I cleaned them of fingerprints by spraying them with oil-based cooking spray; it was the oil in fingerprints that allowed them to be lifted, so covering the pages entirely in oil confused and thwarted any test that the police might want to use. It was a simple and clever solution.

My mother had come up with it when I told her I wanted to leave the letters as my calling card, so many years ago.

I never left any proof at all that the letters were real. No fingerprints or DNA from the writers, nothing. I had to be careful. If I made a single mistake, I knew they would stop coming to me, and then I would be nowhere.

Because of my meticulousness, the writers couldn’t be convicted, only questioned; they could say whatever they wanted in their letters without fear of legal punishment, and they always did. They would be branded socially, of course. Any given person had only so many people who could honestly want them dead—usually one or two, at most. More often than not, people who knew the deceased could guess the writer without seeing the letter. The writers’ friends would always suspect them of hiring a murderer, and occasionally, in cases like this, the police might suspect them of other crimes in addition to murder. Of course, though, due to questions about the letters’ authenticity, the police could do nothing about those suspicions. All that, in the end, was a small price to pay for what the writers wanted.

Outside, a faint breeze rustled the leaves of trees planted in small squares at the edge of the sidewalk.

Like the vast majority of letters I received, this one was unsigned. But it was obviously this woman’s fiancé who had written it. Of course, someone might be framing said fiancé. That was always a possibility. I might be killing people not because they deserved to die, but because someone else wanted to frame someone for conspiracy to commit murder. I consoled myself with the fact that for some reason or other, by someone’s standards, the people I killed probably deserved to die.

Rule one, I reminded myself. There is no right or wrong.

Chelsea—28 Lark Place. The girl was close, then. That might be a good one. And the money was good, too. The sender had been generous. The generous requests got highest priority. I set the letter aside to look at again later and put the money in a different place, starting my pile. By the end of the night, I could have over twenty thousand pounds, all in cash. That wasn’t too uncommon. One time I pulled in forty-six thousand in a night. I had a higher salary than many adults. And if I spent it cautiously, no one would ever know.

I went through the letters slowly, reading each one with care, weighing the difficulty and generosity of each request against the risk. Risk didn’t factor into my decisions too much, though, to be honest. Perhaps it should factor in more, but I had never paid much attention to “should.” There were a few authors of letters who were liberal with their money and a few who were obviously being stingy. There was no set price, but I had no sympathy for the stingy ones. Ten letters, twenty letters, twenty-five letters, twenty-six.

Letter number twenty-seven honestly shocked me.

It wasn’t because I was unused to teenagers being brutal. I had received and fulfilled requests from teenagers before. And besides, I was a teenager, and I was famous worldwide for the horrors I had committed. I was the most brutal of them all. That wasn’t why I was surprised. I had to read the letter twice, to make sure I was seeing it correctly.

I was seeing it correctly.

I was shocked because it was so close. I had never encountered a request that involved people I knew. But this—this was incredible. This was heartless. This was intriguing.

Could I get away with it?

I didn’t relish murder. I didn’t treat it as a game. But I was confident in my abilities, and even though I knew I should follow rule number two—be careful—sometimes my ego got the better of me. The writer of this letter had unknowingly issued me a challenge.

I grinned.

It was a challenge I would take.

Chapter 3

T
he London morning air tasted like steel, in a vaguely unpleasant way, but that’s London for you. The streets of Chelsea were quiet as I wound my way through them, watching the last pieces of the sunrise disappear from the sky. I liked the streets in the morning. They calmed me, and they even managed to make me feel alone.

It’s hard to feel alone when you’re me, sometimes. Sometimes even the houses crowd me in. I can imagine the people in them, still sleeping, or making breakfast, or dressing for work. It’s hard to feel alone when you’re me, when you can imagine the throbbing of blood through each of them and you know the way each of them breaks, like dolls lined up on a shelf.

Such intricate knowledge of what it means to be human can never be forgotten. So I see nearly all of them acutely, and those I don’t see I imagine, and it is hard to feel alone.

Ivy High School was quiet, vicious, and beautiful. In many ways, it was a lot like me.

Thinking about it, I realized it was probably strange that I hadn’t gotten a request from a student there before. Everyone had some stupid grudge against someone else. And everyone always had too much of a stick up his or her arse to do anything about those grudges themselves. Most of the time people just sulked about it, simmering, glaring at each other ludicrously across classrooms and talking about people behind their backs as importantly as if they were discussing matters of international importance. But this time—this time someone had actually decided to do something. It felt almost like a breath of fresh air.

The grudge was based on a wonderfully juvenile issue.

Dressed in my neat navy-and-white school uniform with the skirt that just brushed the tops of my knees, I walked through the gates of Ivy High School. I was in a good mood.

I looked at the crowds of teenagers moving down the oak-lined front walkway toward the overlarge school doors. They chatted, leaned their heads on each other’s shoulders, chortled rudely. Cruel little bastards, all of them. I laughed inwardly, finding it funny. The gray stone school rose up before me in a pretentious sort of way. It was a newly built campus, actually, less than ten years old, but it had been designed to look like it had been there for hundreds, with turrets and gray stone and even a stone statue of an angel standing high overhead, arms outstretched, on the highest point of the tallest building of the school. We weren’t a religious school. I don’t even know why the statue was there, except for effect. Young green vines wound part of the way up the outside walls, stretching cautious tendrils in between the bricks. Eventually, they would make the buildings look old and wise. Now they made them look half-baked and silly.

As I walked through the plain white plaster hallways, up flights of stairs, and toward my classroom, I managed to avoid anyone who might want to talk to me. I liked people, I really did. But at the moment, I didn’t trust myself enough to talk to them like a normal teenager instead of a serial killer.

I made it to morning homeroom and made myself smile normally, smile like a silly teenage girl, smile like the version of Kit they all knew.

I walked in grinning.

“Hello,” I said. The ten or so people in the room looked up at me halfheartedly and gave me slight unenthusiastic smiles. We had been in the same class for three years already, and because there were only eighty-three people in our grade, everyone knew each other. It was a sort of running joke among us all, or at least a well-known piece of information, that I was irritatingly cheerful in the early mornings. I felt obliged to comply with their expectations.

“What, no happy replies?” I laughed, walking to the center of the room and sitting down next to Maggie Bauer. Dark-haired, rosy-cheeked, looking positively exhausted, she yawned and put her head down on the desk. She was wearing a red ribbon in her hair that bobbed childishly as she moved, and the collar of her uniform shirt stuck up sideways, lopsided, giving her an off-kilter, not-entirely-there feeling. I felt bad about thinking of her so judgmentally, but whenever I looked at Maggie Bauer, I imagined that she was going to end up as a crazy cat lady or with a house full of garden gnomes or something equally strange.

She had been sick all last week, so today was her first time being in school this year. I had hoped she’d be in school today.

I had good luck, just like always.

“Oh, come on, mornings aren’t that bad. Welcome to school, by the way,” I said, nudging her in the shoulder with my elbow. She grumbled and turned her head away from me. She laughed quietly to let me know that she was being more joking than flat-out rude, and I laughed back.

I had always been on good terms with Maggie Bauer, but I made it a point to never have actual friends; I had far too many secrets to hide for that. It was easy to talk to her, since she never really said much. Or rather, it was easy to sort of talk
at
her.

“How much coffee have you
had
this morning?” Michael, tall and pale, grumbled back toward me from where he sat at the front of the classroom. I waved my hand playfully at him.

“Enough,” I said. I didn’t want to say any more to him than I needed to. He gave me the heebie-jeebies, just a little bit. And that was saying something, considering who I was.

Next to me, Maggie yawned, sat up, and pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of her bag. She stared at it for a few seconds. I leaned over her shoulder.

“Your schedule?” I said, looking over the paper. She nodded.

“That’s a bitch of a schedule,” I said honestly, grimacing at it.

“I’m good at math,” she replied blearily.

“So it seems.” I adjusted my skirt. “I like that, it’s cute,” I said, pointing vaguely to the red velvet ribbon tied in Maggie’s hair. It took her a moment to realize what I was talking about.

“Oh, yes. It’s a tradition. I always wear a ribbon on the first day of school. Well, I guess this isn’t really the first day of school, but it’s close enough.”

“You do?” I replied, trying not to sound too disbelieving. I’d never noticed it before.

“Yeah.”

“How did that start?”

She hesitated, then shrugged.

“Can’t remember.”

“Well, we’re glad to have you here, glad you’re better, anyway.” I smiled, reaching out to touch the soft end of the ribbon thoughtfully; she didn’t react. It was a deep charismatic red, almost dark enough to be black.

Maggie laughed uncomfortably.

“And aren’t you glad to be back?” I prompted, knowing full well what the answer was. It was no, of course. No, she wasn’t glad to be back. Not at all. I let go of the ribbon and leaned casually away from her.

“Of course I’m glad,” she replied uneasily.

At the end of last year Maggie had had a falling-out with her friends. I didn’t know the details, but I had heard that it was somehow her fault—her friends had thought she was being antisocial or a prat or something. I didn’t know if she was actually being one or not. Either way, at the start of this new school year, she was friendless. Which, of course, made things all too easy for me.

The bell rang, signaling the end of homeroom. I stood, stretched, and patted her on the back again, like I would pat a small dog.

“I’ll see you at lunch.”

Seeing her grateful smile, I felt a little guilt. But not too much guilt. Not enough guilt to make me doubt myself.

The first three classes were calculus, biology, and French. Nothing very interesting, and I was smart enough to learn nearly everything on my own, so I mostly didn’t listen. But fourth period was philosophy. A class I very much liked in general, though some others found it boring. In every other class I sat in the back. In that class I sat nearly all the way in the front and leaned forward over my desk.

We talked about moral nihilism as an introduction to unusual ways of interpreting morality. And, of course, moral nihilism was a subject I knew something about.

“Can anyone tell me what moral nihilism is?” Dr. Marcell said slowly as soon as class began. She had on this draped, toga-like dress patterned with green bamboo; it didn’t suit her figure, and it bothered me, but she was one of my favorite teachers despite her odd dressing habits. I’d had her a few years ago for an English class. She taught English when she wasn’t teaching philosophy, and I liked her and how she spoke. Her short black hair was no-nonsense, no-frills. She didn’t talk too fast. She took her time with things, and sometimes I even believed that she might understand me and why I killed. But I would never tell her, of course. She was legally obligated, as a teacher, to tell the police.

I raised my hand. Slowly, so no one suspected anything or thought I was too eager. No one else raised their hand, even though they were supposed to have learned this much in the reading assigned over the weekend. After a moment of looking aimlessly around the room, her eyes settled on me, and she nodded, signaling that I should speak.

“It’s the belief that nothing is wrong and nothing is right,” I said, making myself sound a little uncertain, even though I knew exactly what I was talking about.

“Correct. Though it’s a bit more than that. It is the belief that”—she turned and began to write what she was saying on the whiteboard—“nothing is inherently wrong and nothing is inherently right, because morality is only a set of rules created by society and not based on any greater truth.”

I nodded. That was exactly right.

“For example, a moral nihilist might say that killing a person is neither wrong nor right.”

Yes. Exactly.

“That’s sick,” Michael, the pale boy from my homeroom, said with disgust, loudly. There were murmurs of agreement from the eleven other students in the class. Michael. He was interesting to me. I disliked him, for one—and also, he was a factor of Maggie’s life, which now made him a factor of mine by extension. I focused on him just a bit more than usual. He had been friends with Maggie last year, before his little clique had kicked her out. He had been something of a ringleader to that group, until he too had left them after Maggie’s departure. Michael was a drifter, a destructive one. He had a talent for making friends and he was even good at keeping them; he was easy to talk to, and he had a smile as charming as the Cheshire cat’s. But he never seemed to
like
keeping friends. He would be friends with a group for a few months or so, and then, for seemingly no reason at all, he would move on to something new. Right now he was floating between old groups, undecided about who he would be friends with this new school year. The uncertainty didn’t seem to bother him.

He looked innocent for the moment, with his high, attractive cheekbones, fluffy brown hair, and shiny brown eyes that always sort of made him look like he was going to cry because someone had kicked him in the shin or something. He looked almost pitiful. But I knew better. I made it my business to know better. Sometimes, in flashes, for some reason or another, you could see it. Something in his eyes, his face, even something in the way he held his body changed. It was hard to explain. He never actually did anything, but looking at him, you could just
tell
.

I frowned, ever so slightly. Dr. Marcell saw it.

“You disagree, Kit?” she asked curiously.

I winced and closed my eyes as everyone turned to look at me.

“Well . . . ,” I said hesitantly, feeling everyone’s eyes on me. Dr. Marcell looked at me with waiting eyes. “Well . . . ,” I said again.

I didn’t want to say anything. I really, really didn’t. But now I had to, didn’t I?

“Well, throughout history, in different cultures, there were different social standards based on different morals, right?” I said tentatively. Dr. Marcell nodded faintly. I gained a bit of confidence and went on. “So if you look at that, morality is just . . . a social construct. There’s no greater truth to it. It’s just . . . you know, what people of the time think is right.”

“You’re onto something there. See, that is exactly what moral nihilists through the ages have seen and thought about. Is there a greater moral truth? Or are our morals just a product of our society? I think it is an inarguable truth that our society does have morals that we have to adhere to. But do those morals hold any truth, or are they just rules that have been superficially created?” Dr. Marcell asked. No one responded. Everyone in the class looked faintly skeptical.

“Anyone?” Dr. Marcell said encouragingly. Still silence. She glanced at me. Our eyes met. I could see it—she wanted me to say something. It was only the second week, but I was obviously her most enthusiastic student, and she knew it. I spoke up when there was silence and guided class conversations back on track when they went in odd directions. She knew I had something more to add and looked at me pleadingly, her eyes asking me to say it.

But I didn’t.

After class, as everyone filed out of the classroom, she tapped my arm and gestured for me to come to her desk. I glanced toward the students walking out into the hallway, then uncertainly back to her, then back to my classmates. But I couldn’t just blatantly disobey her. So I went with small steps to stand nervously before her desk in the front of the classroom. She had been walking around during class, but somehow, now that she was sitting, books piled up before her, a nameplate centered in front of her chest on the edge of the desk, hands folded, she seemed more imposing. More official. I looked at her expression, and I couldn’t tell whether she was irritated or just disappointed.

“Yes?” I asked doubtfully, looking at her face, which was turned up toward me.

She met my eyes without blinking.

“You had more to say today. You were holding back,” she said bluntly.

“No, I didn’t have anything else to say,” I protested.

“I saw it in your eyes. You weren’t done talking. You shut yourself up.”

“No, I—”

“There’s no use in lying, Kit. I consider myself a good judge of character. I can see what kind of person you are. Intelligent, thoughtful—but timid. You seem very outgoing, very individual, but you’re scared of not fitting in. At the risk of sounding clichéd, you’re better than that. You’re a good student, and you have a good interest in philosophy. I want to urge you to speak out more and be yourself. Don’t be afraid to say what you mean, if you have something good to add to the conversation.”