Before She Knew Him(52)

“And you think he knew in that moment. You think that he wasn’t just utterly terrified.”

Matthew leaned forward a little. “If all he felt was utter terror, then I still did my job. He was a bad man. He was going to make many, many women miserable.”

“But wasn’t there a possibility that he would change? That maybe what happened with the student at your school, as horrible as it was, was just a one-time thing? Maybe he would have gone on to get married, raise children, become an okay person.”

“First of all, what he did to Courtney was enough. For that he deserved to die. You know, I overheard him make a joke about her after she left school. He and his friend were talking about which girl had the biggest breasts now that Courtney was gone. They didn’t use the word breast, of course. No, trust me. He was a bad person. Personalities don’t change. Do you remember the night you came over for dinner with your husband? You asked me about teaching, and I said something about how wonderful it is to watch kids grown up before my eyes, the changes that take place between freshman year and senior year?”

“I remember that.”

“It’s only partly true. I watch these kids mature, watch them go from awkward adolescence into adulthood, but what I never see is their personalities change. They are who they are. If they are kind their freshman year—even if they make mistakes or get in trouble—then they are kind senior year. It goes the other way as well. I knew that Dustin Miller was going to be an abuser of women his whole life, before I even heard what he’d done to Courtney in St. Louis. It was just in him. It was the same way with my father—he preyed on the weak.” Matthew felt his voice rising, and he took a breath, told himself to talk at a lower volume. “Nothing would ever change that fact. He was what he was.”

“And you changed him? You changed Dustin Miller?”

“Yes, I did. I changed him from the living to the dead.”

“That’s, uh, a pretty big change. Lots of people probably think like you do, but not many people act on it.”

“I’m not like many people.”

She hadn’t touched her beer since sitting down, but she looked at it now and took a small swallow. “Do you think you can stop?”

“Stop killing people?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you’re here, because you think you can stop me?”

“I’m here because you asked me to meet with you, because you said you wanted to tell the truth to someone. I assumed that maybe you wanted to unburden yourself of some guilt, maybe find a way to stop what you’re doing.”

“I can see why you’d think that, but that wasn’t why I wanted to talk with you. I thought, maybe, that you’d understand what it is that I do. I’ve seen your artwork, and I thought—”

“You think you’re some kind of artist as well.”

“No. I don’t. I don’t think that, but I do know that when I kill someone—when I do it well enough—that what I feel afterward is close to the way I feel when I look at a piece of perfect art.”

“Why is that?”

“You must know the feeling. When you create something—like that picture you drew of the teenage girl looking in the mirror and seeing herself with the . . . with the . . .”

“With the deer horns.”

“Yes. When you first drew that—or engraved it, or whatever you do—how did you feel? It didn’t exist until you drew it, right? You brought it into the world out of nothing. That’s what I do but in reverse. I take a living, breathing person, and I subtract him from the earth. When I’m done with him, he is entirely changed—the most changed a person can be—and that’s a monumental thing. You have to understand that.”

“I understand that it’s a monumental thing, but I don’t understand what’s good about it.”

“You wouldn’t go back in time to kill Hitler if you had a chance?”

“I’m not sure that really applies here.”

“All right, then, would you go back and kill Ted Bundy if you had a chance?”

“You’re saying that Dustin Miller would have become a serial killer? Or Scott Doyle? How could you possibly know that?”

“I’m saying that they were going to spread unhappiness—that they were going to make life miserable for people. By subtracting them from the world, I’ve added to the world’s happiness.”

Hen looked skeptical, and Matthew decided to stop talking for a moment, even though he was just getting going and felt like he had a lot to say. Hen didn’t speak, either, so Matthew said, “Can you at least admit that I might be right?”

“That you might have been right in killing them? No, I can’t admit that. You don’t have the right to make that decision. It’s not up to you. That’s not the way it works. Look,” Hen said, shifting in her seat. “I think coming here was a mistake. I don’t know what I was looking for exactly. I think you need to get professional help. I think you need to stop doing what you’re doing. You’re not an artist; you’re just a criminal. I watched Scott Doyle die, do you know that?”

“You mean that you saw him when he was dead.”

“No, he wasn’t dead when I got there. I saw him die.”