Lovegame(87)

I close my eyes, try not to remember what I saw when I looked up the case after joining the FBI. Because we were his family, they’d kept as much of the case evidence from us as they could. But once I was at Quantico, once I had access to the files, I hadn’t been able to stop myself from looking. And now those images are branded in my head, the coroner’s report of what Jason did to those girls written in indelible ink on my soul even all these years later. I’ve had years to come to grips with the fact that he did it, but knowing something’s true doesn’t always make it easier to accept. Sometimes it makes it harder, especially when the authorities looked at him for other murders in the years preceding his arrest—all of which fit his M.O. to a tee—but were never able to gather enough evidence to try him.

“The FBI identified two other women they think he killed,” I tell Veronica, who is sitting so still in my arms that I’d think she’d turned to stone if I couldn’t still feel her breathing. “But when I was with them, I looked into a number of other unsolved cases that fit his general M.O., and found three more I’m almost positive were him, too. That’s eight women who died because of my brother. Eight women who suffered horribly, who probably hoped and prayed and pleaded to be saved from him. And five of them will never get justice. Five families will never know who did such terrible things to them.”

“Did you tell the others—”

“I did, yes. I sent the three cases I found to both my superiors in the FBI and to the local authorities, but none of those murders were in Texas. And since Texas had him dead to rights on a murder one–death penalty rap, the D.A. fought to keep him there. And I get it. I do. She wasn’t about to risk sending him somewhere else and having them hold on to him—especially since two of the states where he committed murder weren’t capital punishment states. They weren’t going to risk sending him anywhere that might be able to hold on to him and stall their death penalty conviction. So, the cases weren’t reopened and Jason was never tried. Instead, he’s sitting in Huntsville waiting for a lethal injection and I’m out here, trying…” I break off with a shake of my head, not sure what I want to say anymore. Not sure, even, what I’m trying to do.

“You’re out here trying to make up for his crimes even though nothing he did was your fault.” Her voice is a little shaky, her pupils blown in shock. But the hands that hold me are steady.

“He’s my brother. My older brother, but still my brother. And he was always a little off, always a little meaner than he had to be. We should have known, should have guessed what he was capable of and—”

“How exactly were you supposed to do that?” she demands. “Were you working for the FBI when he committed those murders?”

“No. He’s nine years older than I am. I was ten when he committed his first murder. Of course, we didn’t know it then. We wouldn’t know about it for almost ten more years.”

“Just in time for you to change your college major and go into the FBI?”

“Something like that, yeah.” All the old memories are crowding in now and I shake my head in a futile attempt to clear it. “My parents didn’t get it. They couldn’t understand why I would want to have anything to do with the organization that arrested my brother. That helped convict him in a trial that would eventually end up taking his life, too. But it wasn’t the same for them, you know? They didn’t understand that I needed to understand. That I needed to figure out how he could go so wrong when…”

“When you hadn’t, despite having the same genetics and background.”

Fuck. I can’t believe how well she gets me. No one has ever gotten me like this before, just so instinctively. Like she can get inside my head as easily as I can get inside everyone else’s. Everyone’s, that is, but hers.

“It wasn’t that I hadn’t,” I tell her as the anguish of those first few years boils up inside me. “It was that I was terrified that I would. I look just like him, you know. I mean, just like him. So much so that when we were young, people used to call me Jason’s mini-me. We had the same parents, the same genetics, the same upbringing. Fuck, for a long time we even had the same interests. And then he went and did all those things and I…I didn’t understand how he could do it. How he could be so sadistic, so evil, when we came from the same place. The same people. And there was a part of me that was terrified—that’s terrified still—that I have that same darkness in me, too. That if Jason can do these things, then maybe I’m capable of it as well.”

“No.” Veronica grabs my shoulders, squeezes tight. “You aren’t.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I do know that. And so do all the people you worked with. You were a behavior analyst for the FBI, for God’s sake. You worked with some of the best investigative minds in the world—and, I’m assuming, you also had fairly regular psychiatric testing. If they accepted that that wasn’t in you, then I think you need to do the same thing.”

“It’s not that easy. I mean, when I joined the FBI, I wanted to understand why he did it. It’s been fourteen years and I still want to understand. What went wrong? What happened to him that he just broke wide open like that?” The idea that I’ll never know, that I’ll never understand, haunts me like few things ever have.