The Collective(68)

I look at her.

“I mean, we’re both involved. People have been killed. This isn’t something we can just walk away from.”

I swallow hard. “We can talk to your sister-in-law.”

Her eyes go huge.

“You don’t even have to be involved. You can just say I’m your friend. Your fellow Bachelor fan, and we went out for drinks and I told you about this thing, you know it sounds crazy, but your friend can show her the website. I’ll take it from there.”

“You really want to do that?”

“I don’t want to. But what I want doesn’t matter.”

“You’re going to shut this whole thing down. After everything it’s given us.”

I stare at her. “Are you serious?”

“I heard about Harris Blanchard, Camille. I was at work and some people were talking about how he died—the way he died—and I had to do everything I could to keep from cheering. It was fucking poetic. And you never would have lived to see that happen if it weren’t for the collective.”

“Listen, Wendy—”

“I knew exactly how you felt about Blanchard, because a year ago I got to feel that way too. I told you what a blessing that was. I can sleep at night now. That . . . thing who raped my son. He got what he deserved.” She puts her hand on mine and gives me big, expectant eyes. “Gary Kimball won’t destroy another young girl. And it’s because of us.”

For a few seconds I’m with her. The collective has given Wendy and me so much, not to mention Rachel Ruley, Violet Langford, all the mothers of Gary Kimball’s victims. . . . The collective has succeeded where the system failed all of us. Couldn’t I forgive it collateral damage? Wouldn’t it be so much easier to heed that trooper’s warning, to forget everything Olivia Weiss said to me, to compartmentalize what I did to the Duvals like I’ve done with so many other things I’ve done wrong in my life. . . .

But then I recall 0001’s own words, and I’m back to where I started. Harris Blanchard just won a humanitarian award at school. Do you feel the good deeds he racked up to win that award outweigh what he did to your daughter? “Good acts can’t erase unspeakable ones,” I say. “I killed a grieving father, Wendy. As he was leaving his daughter’s grave.”

She turns away from me, her forehead resting against the passenger-side window. “You did,” she says quietly. “Not me.”

She puts her hand on the car door handle. I push the automatic lock.

She laughs a little. “You’re trying to trap me in here?”

“Do you know the details behind any of the deaths you contributed to? Do you know the identities of all your victims? How do you know that one of them wasn’t someone like Natalie Duval—someone whose husband found out? How do you know you haven’t killed a decent human being just because they said or did something that 0001 didn’t like? I’ve been in the collective for three weeks. You’ve been in it for three years. What are the odds you haven’t killed an innocent person?”

Wendy says nothing, and she won’t look at me. I wish I could see her face.

“I’m scared,” she says.

“Me too.”

“I swore my loyalty. On Tyler’s memory.”

“I swore mine on Emily’s.”

She pulls away from the window and levels her eyes at me, her voice low and angry. “Why did you look up Duval’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why do you have to keep asking so many questions?”

“Wendy,” I say, “if I didn’t ask questions, the truth would still be the truth.”

She opens her mouth, then closes it again.

“I know it’s hard. . . .”

“I have to think.”

“Okay.” There’s nothing else I can say.

She puts her hand on the door handle again, and this time I release the lock.

“I strangled a woman to death.”

She says it the way you might tell someone you’re going out for groceries, and I don’t say anything in response. I don’t think she wants me to.

“It was about three in the morning. An empty parking lot at a strip mall, a lot like this one. She was in the front seat. I was in the back. She was older than I was. A lot smaller. I used a scarf that turned out to be her own. Stolen off her purse, I think, by another sister. Sent to a PO box down in Larchmont. Anyway . . . Turns out she owned a dry cleaner’s in the strip mall, and she was found in there the next morning. I heard on the news that she hanged herself in her place of business, so, obviously, she got moved after I left.”

Hanged herself. Just like Natalie Duval.

“It’s the worst assignment I’ve ever done. The only thing that got me through it was thinking of Tyler. And how this woman must have killed someone’s child, just like that animal killed him.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Wendy.”

“Duval could have been an aberration. A onetime thing.”

“Yes. It could have been. But it’s still something that happened.”

She pulls something out of the drugstore bag—a white box with bold red letters on it—and hands it to me. “It’s a burner,” she says. “I bought one for each of us, back when I thought that this was about Kimball and we might need a way to communicate.”