Infinite(61)

I flailed against the bonds but couldn’t free myself. I stared at him with murder in my eyes. He was right. I would have strangled him then and there if I could.

He grinned, as if he’d made his point. Then he got up from the chair and went to the closet and began taking out men’s clothes, which he draped across the bed piece by piece like a fashion show. “Relax. I’m just baiting you. I don’t apologize for who I am. Unlike most of our other twins, I accept it. So should you.”

“I can’t imagine becoming someone like you. Doing the things you’ve done.”

He shrugged, as if we were talking about the ethnic foods we liked and didn’t like. As he reviewed the clothes he’d taken from the closet, he held up a Hawaiian shirt from the bed and rolled his eyes. Then he sat down in the chair again.

“Really? You’ve spent your whole life afraid of turning into your father. Why is it so strange to meet a Dylan Moran who did?”

His one cigarette was done, so he took the time to light another. Every motion he made was unhurried. When he’d savored a few puffs, he leaned close to me, with curiosity in his voice.

“Let me ask you something. If you could go back to that day, what would you do? You know what I’m talking about. Dad took the gun and fired. Mom was dead. You’re sitting in the corner. What would you do differently?”

“I was a kid,” I said, trying to make myself believe it this time. “There’s nothing I could have done.”

“Not true. I did something.”

Oddly, I found that I had to know. “What did you do?”

“I killed him. I charged him, knocked him over, took the gun, and blew his head off. I got revenge for our mother.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why not? Because you were a coward, and I wasn’t? Because you wish you’d done the same thing as me?”

“I don’t wish that.”

“No? Then why do you keep getting into fights with men who abuse their partners? It’s because when the chips were down, you didn’t stand up for our mother. You did nothing, and it eats you alive.”

I felt myself breathing hard. I wanted to scream a denial, but he wasn’t wrong. Yes, I’d dreamed about doing what this other Dylan had done. This mirror of myself, this serial killer, knew me better than I knew myself. A little smirk of triumph crossed his face as I looked away.

“See?” he announced, easing back in the chair and sucking on his cigarette. “I’m the ultimate Dylan Moran. I do what all of you wish you could do, and I get away with everything. Killing my father? They let me off. I was just a traumatized kid. In high school, I kept beating kids up, but they didn’t do a thing to me. Oh, that poor boy, he had such a tough upbringing. They’d send me to detention, or send me to a counselor, and then I’d do it again. Sound familiar?”

I frowned. Yes, it did.

“So I just kept raising the stakes. I wanted to see how far I could go. But I already knew where I was headed. I knew the line I wanted to cross. It’s how I’m wired. Somewhere inside you, you’ve got the same code, whether you like it or not.” He shot me a look that said he was familiar with all my secrets. “Who was the first girl you slept with? Diana Geary, right?”

There was no point in lying. “Yes.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“We met on a train,” I said, because it was obvious the same thing had happened to him. “I was seventeen. She was older, twenty-two. We started talking and went back to her place, and then she got me drunk on tequila, and we ended up in bed. She was feeling bad because her boyfriend had dumped her, and I was the consolation prize.”

“I met Diana Geary on a train, too,” the other Dylan replied. “Same as you. We had sex.”

He stopped. He waited for me to ask, and I couldn’t stop myself.

“Then what?”

“Then after we were done, I suffocated her with a pillow and cut off her head.”

“Oh, shit.” I struggled against the ropes that held me again, but I couldn’t move.

“And do you know what happened after I killed her? Not a damn thing. No one found out. No one knew it was me. Once I figured that out, once I knew I could do anything, I tried different methods, different victims. The violence itself wasn’t really the high. The thrill was knowing I could get away with it. By the time I turned twenty-six, I’d killed fourteen people. The police had no idea.”

“You’re a sick son of a bitch.”

He shrugged off my loathing, as if moral and immoral were just mirror images of each other.

“I could have kept going like that for a long time, but everything changed on my twenty-sixth birthday. Do you remember what you did that day?”

Actually, I did. It was a memorable thing to do on my birthday. “I saw a shrink.”

“That’s right. Court-ordered therapy for anger management. After a bar fight.”

“Yes.”

“Who did you see?”

“Her name was Vanessa Kirby.”

Dylan nodded. “Yeah, I was supposed to see Dr. Kirby, too, but she was sick that day and didn’t show up. So I saw someone else. There was a shrink with an office on the same floor, and I figured, what the hell? All I needed to do was check off a box on my court papers. Guess who I saw?”