What Have You Done(87)
Liam looked behind him to measure the distance between where he was sitting and the front door. It was too far to escape without being shot. They were sitting too close. He knew she’d never miss at this distance. He looked back at his captor and saw a woman he no longer recognized. The expression in her wild eyes reminded him of his mother’s eyes the day she tried to kill him. That scared him the most.
“Secrets. One day, completely out of the blue, Kerri confronts me about my affair with Sean. She comes right up to me in the hospital parking lot after one of my shifts. I was stunned. That slut had the nerve to approach me? It took all I had not to throttle her right on the spot and strangle that perfect little neck, but she wasn’t coming to chastise me or make a scene. She was coming as a friend. She was coming to warn me.”
“Vanessa, please.”
“I listened to what she had to say, and what she told me was stunning. First, she confessed to having an affair with you and told me that she was pregnant with your child. Your child. I knew I would kill her right then and there, but I was calm, choking down the hate until I almost passed out. You gave her a child when I couldn’t have one. There’s nothing else you could’ve done that would’ve hurt me more.”
“I—”
“Shut up.” The house grew quiet again. “Kerri told me she didn’t want to interfere with my life, but she needed me to know about Sean and his secret. She was afraid for my life. She told me Sean had been seeing her ever since the two of you broke things off. Another secret. Another betrayal. I don’t know how, but Kerri found out about me and Sean and confronted him one weekend when they were in Lakewood together. She showed him pictures she’d taken of the two of us together and confessed to being pregnant with your baby. But she’d found something else while following him around, tracking his every move. She’d found his real secret. Of course, Sean flipped out. Totally lost his mind and beat her up, but she didn’t press charges. I listened to her, swallowing the screams that wanted to burst out of me, and I’m glad I did because she told me what she found, and at that point, everything changed. I knew I could no longer love Sean the way I’d thought I could. In fact, I knew I couldn’t love him at all.”
The room was growing so hot. Liam could feel his face beginning to perspire. “Give me the gun,” he said again. He could hear his own weakness in his voice.
“Your brother turned out to be an unanticipated gift. That’s when I knew this was all meant to be. With Kerri’s help, I came to find out that Sean is a creature all to his own. He can’t be manipulated and molded to fit someone’s bidding. Yes, he was charming and caring and handsome and confident, but at the same time, he’s the most vile, destructive, and evil person you’ll ever know. He is a master sociopath. The mask he wears was created over years of loss and pain and anger and suffering. He was the big brother tasked with taking care of his entire family, even while still in middle school, and who never had the opportunity to work through what had happened in his own life. Who puts that kind of burden on a child? He could never express how he really felt, and after a while, when a person bottles up so much of that toxicity, it has to come out one way or another. Your mother was crazy. Sean told me once that the police originally thought she’d cut the brakes to your father’s car because he was threatening to leave her. Did he ever tell you that? They could never prove it, so no charges were filed, but they always suspected. Sean used to wonder if insanity could be passed down as a gene, like blond hair or blue eyes. Maybe.”
Liam pounded his hand on the table. “Enough of this! Please!”
Vanessa smiled and remained calm. “Kerri told me that your brother is a killer of women, Liam. Those other bodies you all found. The prostitutes in the hotel rooms and by the dumpster and in the park? That was Sean. That was the secret Kerri found. He’d been killing for some time now, and his actions were escalating.”
The news, delivered so matter-of-factly, stunned Liam even though he knew everything she said was true. He wanted to deny it, to rush across the table and scream to anyone who could hear him that his older brother wasn’t capable of the things he’d seen in Delaware and inside room B11 at the Tiger Hotel, but he knew that would only be wishful thinking. Of course the other murders were Sean’s. They were too similar to Kerri’s, and the hair he’d found in Sean’s gun-cleaning kit were from more than one head. He knew Vanessa was telling the truth.
“So there I was, furious, confused, and standing in front of the woman I wanted dead. Sean cheated on me with the same woman my husband cheated on me with, and she was pregnant with my husband’s baby. I was a cliché. A goddamned Lifetime movie. Kerri wanted to go to the police about Sean, but I convinced her to wait. I told her I’d help her and look for more proof at Sean’s house while pretending to still be with him. At first she was skeptical, wanting to get the police involved right away, but I explained how cops stick together and cover for each other and that no one would believe her without hard evidence. I told her I could get that evidence. She finally agreed, and that bought me time.
“The very first thing I did was confront Sean about everything. I needed to know if that bitch was telling me the truth or if she was scaring me away so she could have him all to herself. I talked to Sean, and instead of demanding apologies or ending our affair, I told him I understood. I played it cool. I wanted to know about his secret. I wanted to know everything. No judgment. Just the truth. When he was done, I told him my secret and my truth. I told him I wanted him to help me kill Kerri and frame you, and when that was over, I promised him our love would grow stronger and we’d be rid of all the bad in our lives. I made him see that Kerri knew too much. She was dangerous and had to die. And you had to suffer.”