Eight Perfect Murders(64)

I wrote back: Are you who I think you are?

There was no time stamp on the message, so I didn’t know when I’d gotten it. Still, I waited, staring at the screen. Just when I was about to give up, a new message popped up: Do you even know my name, Malcolm?

I wrote back: I don’t. Why don’t you tell me?

Maybe I will but we should go to a private chat first.



I checked the box that made the conversation private. My heart was beating, and my jaw was clenched so tight that it was starting to throb.

Why? I wrote.

Why what? Why did I keep going with something that you started? I think a better question is why did you stop?

I stopped because there was only one person that I wanted dead. And once he was dead there was no reason to go on killing.



There was a lengthy pause, and I was suddenly nervous that Charlie had logged off. I wanted to talk with him more. Also, this was ridiculous, but it felt safe, somehow, seeing the words he was typing on the screen. It meant he wasn’t doing anything else, I suppose.

Sorry for the delay, he eventually wrote. I need to be quiet where I am.

Where are you?

I’ll tell you, but not right now. It will ruin the rest of this conversation and I’m really happy to be having this conversation.



Something about his tone was starting to get to me, and I wrote, You are fucking insane, you know that.

A short pause. Then: I thought I was too. After I killed Eric Atwell for you I felt so incredible good that I was convinced that I was a monster. It was all I could think about. I shot him five times and it was the fifth shot that killed him. The first shot went into his stomach. He was in a lot of pain but after I told him why he was going to die, I saw all that pain get replaced by fear. I saw the knowledge on his face, the knowledge that he was about to die. Did you see that with chaney?

No, I wrote back.

Did he know why he was dying?

I don’t know. I didn’t tell him.

Maybe thats why you didn’t enjoy it like I did. Maybe if you’d seen it in his eyes, him knowing what was happening to him and why, then you’d understand.



I didn’t get any pleasure out of it, I wrote. And you did. That’s a big difference between us.

Thats why I think you’re the insame one, he wrote. You write a list that celebrates the art of murder and then I decide to actually do what that list proposes, to create actual art, and that doesn’t make sense to you?

There’s a difference between fiction and reality.



Not as much as you’d think, Charlie wrote. There’s beauty in both and I know that you know that.

I wrote out the words There wasn’t any beauty when I killed Norman Chaney then deleted them. I needed to think for a moment. I needed to get Charlie to trust me, to tell me either who he was, or where he was.

I wrote, Can we meet?

Oh, we’ve met came immediately back.

When?

I can see were your going with this. Just to save time I am not going to tell you who I am. Not now, like this. Theres more work to be done. Its amazing how you keep leading me to new perfect victims. You handed me Nick Pruitt on a silver plattter.

He wasn’t guilty of anything.

He was guilty of something, believe me. I thought it would be harder to get him to drink himself to death but I think he almost enjoyed it. The first drink was the hardest, then he just kept drinking whatever I gave him. He seemed amost happy.

I don’t suppose I can get you to turn yourself in before you do anything else.



Only if you go with me, he wrote, like I hoped he would.

Of course, I wrote back. You and I together. We’ll tell the whole truth.

There was a long pause, and I thought I’d lost him. Or else I thought he was actually thinking about it. Finally, he wrote:

Its tempting but I’m not done yet. And the thing is that you’ve provided me with two more victims, one who will die and one who’ll go missing, just like red house mystery. You can help ifyou like.



My body went cold.

Let me think about it, I wrote back, already standing. I dressed quickly, pulling my damp socks back on, and putting on my shoes. I was shaking. He would be on his way right now to Brian and Tess’s house. Or else he was already there. I grabbed my cell phone and immediately called Tess’s number, thinking I could warn her not to let anyone into the house. It went straight to voice mail, and I didn’t leave a message. I thought of calling 911, but somehow I knew that if I did make that call, the police would show up to find nothing, and I’d be stuck explaining why I’d made the call in the first place. I told myself I was making the right decision.



Outside, it was snowing harder than it had been all night. I went up the hill to where my car was parked. The roads would be terrible, but I still thought I could get to the South End faster by car than on foot.

I U-turned and drove too fast down the hill, the car sliding at the bottom when I applied the brake, turning almost sideways. I took my foot off the brake and started tapping it, but the car kept going, sliding on its own accord through a red light and onto Charles Street. I braced for an impact, but there were no other drivers on the street. And just a few pedestrians, including a couple that had stopped on the sidewalk to watch my near accident.

When the car finally stopped, it was angled diagonally but pointing more or less in the right direction. I straightened it out and kept driving, going slower this time, telling myself that spinning off the road was the worst thing that could happen. Unless he was just trying to scare me, Charlie had identified his next victims. If I could get there first, I could at least warn them. But I was also wondering if Charlie was already there. He might have been in their house when we were having the conversation on Duckburg, writing from his phone. It would explain the typing errors. I tried to concentrate on steering, and not think about it. The snow was driving now, directly into my windshield. My wipers were working but ice was building up along the edges, and the windshield was fogging. I turned the defrost all the way up, rolled down my window, and stuck my head out, driving along the edge of the Common on Arlington that way. Then I got onto Tremont, and my windshield had cleared a little. I knew that I couldn’t turn onto the Murrays’ one-way street, so I’d already planned on leaving the car at the corner and walking the rest of the way. But then I passed their street and decided to keep going, to take my next right and see if I could loop back.