Thankless in Death (In Death #37)(113)

“You can’t prove any of that!”

“I can prove all of it. Let’s start with the first part. You abducted Joseph Klein.”

“Did not!” His voice cracked a little as he jabbed a finger at her, twice. “He came to see me. He walked right into my place on his own. And I was just fooling around, just messing with him.”

“That’s what you call it? Bashing him in the head with a baseball bat, breaking his teeth, his cheekbones, his jaw, burning him with a torch, cutting him. That’s just messing with him?”

“He screwed with me; I screwed with him. That’s self-defense. He …” His eyes actually shifted, left and right. “He came to my place and he threatened me. I protected myself.”

“He gave you a bad time, so beating the shit out of him while you’ve bound him to a chair is self-defense? You’re an idiot, Jerry.”

“I’m not an idiot!” Harsh red color stained his face, ran down to his neck as if his fury needed to pump through his pores. “I’m smarter than you, smarter than most people. I proved it.”

“How?”

“I did what I had to do. I got what I needed to get.”

“Starting with stabbing your own mother over fifty times.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He looked away again. “I wasn’t even there. I came in, and I found them. It was awful.”

He covered his face with his hands.

“You’re saying you came home and found your parents dead, Jerry?” Peabody did her masterful slide, a touch of sympathetic horror in her voice. “God.”

“It was …” He dropped his hands, and for the first time looked at Peabody. “I can’t even tell you. I’d warned them not to just open the door for anybody, but they never listened. And I came in, and they were … all the blood.”

“Give me a break,” Eve muttered, but Peabody shook her head.

“Come on, Lieutenant. We wondered about that. What did you do, Jerry?”

“I don’t know exactly. It’s all kind of crazy in my head. I just freaked. I think maybe I blacked out or had a kind of, I don’t know, seizure or something.”

“So you don’t really remember what you did after. When did you find them, exactly?”

“Ah, I guess late Friday night. I came in and—”

“Where had you been?”

“Just around. Anyway, nothing made any sense, you know?”

“Did you come out of your seizure long enough to steal the watch you sold? To transfer your parents’ life savings to accounts you opened?”

Eve’s question snapped him back. “It was mine since they were dead. I didn’t know what else to do. I was scared—and, and not thinking straight. You try coming home and finding your parents dead, see how you act.”

“It had to be awful, but … You should’ve called the police, Jerry,” Peabody said, gently.

“I know. I know that now, but then, I just wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Straight enough to take what cash and valuables they had in the apartment. Straight enough to withdraw the funds you’d transferred Monday morning,” Eve pointed out. “To book a high-flyer hotel suite and eat hearty Saturday and Sunday nights.”

“That’s not a crime.” But he swiped at the sweat on his lip. “I needed some money to get by, didn’t I? I needed time to think, then I saw how you cops were after me, and I needed time to figure it out, so—”

“So you went to Lori Nuccio’s apartment, used the key you hadn’t given back to her after she dumped your sorry ass, and you tortured and killed her.”

“I did not! And she didn’t dump me, I dumped her. It wasn’t working for me, so I dumped her—and she begged me to stay with her, give her another chance. Then, I figured it out when I heard about how she was dead. The same person who killed my parents killed Lori.”

“Now, that I agree with.”

“But Ms. Farnsworth,” Peabody began, gave Reinhold a worried look.

“Her, too!” Excitement lived on his face as he grabbed his theme, ran with it. “The same person did it, trying to screw with me. See, it was all about screwing with me, so you cops would come after me—maybe kill me before I could prove my innocence. Joe.”

Eve all but saw the metaphoric lightbulb flash on over his head.

“I knew it had to be Joe who did it. He’s crazy, anybody’ll tell you, and he was really jealous of me. That’s why I got him to come to my new place, why I was messing with him. I needed to get him to confess so I could turn him over to you.”

“Wow.” Peabody hoped she looked shocked and impressed instead of showing the absolute disgust she felt. “So Joe killed your parents, and Lori, and Ms. Farnsworth because he was mad at you, jealous of you?”

“Yeah. He hit on Lori a few times—she told me—and she blew him off. So he was pissed about that, too. And he ragged and ragged on me about Vegas, kept buying me drinks so I got a little, you know, impaired, then pushed me into betting all that money. He made me lose all that money. And, oh! He knew I didn’t really hold anything against Ms. Farnsworth—she taught me a lot. But he ragged on me, so I made like she was a bitch. Just saving face like. Then he goes and kills her so he can pin it on me.”