These Deadly Games(90)
So that’s what set him off. I’d figured it would take a sociopath—someone who experienced no emotion or empathy—to make me play this sadistic game. But Andrew felt emotions. His brother’s death had been traumatic, and on top of his guilt, the unfairness of us getting away with everything tormented him, embittered him, provoked him to seek revenge. He’d dwelled on it for years, and his parents’ deaths—dying without closure, leaving him all alone—triggered him to enact his plans.
“But how could you kidnap Caelyn?” I asked. “She had nothing to do with any of this. Nothing!”
He jabbed a finger at me. “But now you feel just as helpless as I did, don’t you?”
“I didn’t hurt Brady on purpose!” I cried. “But you’ve been hurting—torturing—an innocent thirteen-year-old girl. And you’re going to kill her—”
“No. I’m not a complete monster!”
What? “You stabbed my sister! And, sorry to break it to you, but killing two people is definitely monster territory.”
“I didn’t kill anyone. You did.”
My heart jerked. “Following your instructions. And you tampered with those brownies, and stole the EpiPens…”
He raised his eyebrows. “You sure about that?”
There he went again, trying to make me doubt myself. But I wasn’t going to let him fool me anymore. He wanted to make me feel the crushing guilt he’d felt for years, but I wouldn’t let him pile any more stones on my chest.
His eyes bored into mine—eyes that made my heart flutter just this morning. Now they were like silver daggers piercing my soul. There was so much anger in them, so much hatred. He’d hidden it so well. He glanced at his watch. “You’re almost out of time. And you know what happens if you don’t win.”
My stomach lurched. “No way. Your game is over.”
“It wouldn’t be fair to call it now, would it?” He took something from the coffee table and handed it over. A burner phone. Just like the one now at the bottom of Hanover Lake. “We still have two games left.” Two. Zoey and Randall.
“But Randall’s game was yesterday…”
“No, it wasn’t,” said Andrew. “I just wanted to scare him with the SWAT team. I didn’t think his parents would make it home so fast. And his dad having a heart attack? Yeah, didn’t expect that either,” he muttered, raking his hair back, like accidentally giving a man a heart attack was more obnoxious than anything else.
“Not a very good game designer, are you?”
“Well, a good designer needs to be flexible. I had Akira’s game planned for weeks, after she mentioned her parents’ trip to California. But when you screwed that up, I had a work around ready to go.” He considered me saving Akira’s life a screwup. And suddenly I realized he’d never let Caelyn go. That would ruin his plans to frame me. She’d tell the police someone kidnapped her, that someone was forcing my hand. None of his plans worked if he let her go. He had to kill her.
I’d been playing an unwinnable game all along.
“You’ll never get away with this.” I clutched the phone so hard I thought I might crush it. “I’ll tell the police what you’ve done, who you really are.”
He shrugged. “They won’t believe you. Once you tell them your ‘theory’ about me”—he made air quotes—“you’d have to tell them what you did to Brady. Then they’ll know you’re a liar. Even if they dig into it, there’s no physical evidence I’m Andrew. None of his things are left in California. There’s nothing to DNA match. And he used his passport to go to Europe. He’s going backpacking for a year, you know—there’s no telling where he might end up.” The way he talked about himself in the third person, like he’d completely dissociated from himself, sent tremors down my spine.
“You … you went to Europe first? Before coming here?”
“No. The dude who bought Andrew’s passport did, though.” My God, he’d thought everything through. “Nah, the police won’t be able to prove anything. But you? All the things you did? They’ll be able to prove all of that.”
“People will believe me over some kid who just moved to town.”
“You think I plan to stick around to convince them?” His eyes sparkled mischievously. “It’s not as hard as you’d think to become someone else.”
“If you disappear, that’s even more reason for everyone to believe me.”
“Not if people think you killed me, too.” Andrew whiffed the air. Then it dawned on me. The natural gas. My nose had quickly gotten used to the smell. He planned to blow up the house, to fake his own death. But wouldn’t the police think it odd they couldn’t find his body? I thought they usually found some remains in fires—bones, at least. Maybe I was wrong. Could they DNA-match ash? I didn’t know much about that sort of thing.
“How will you explain the fact that your father doesn’t exist?” I asked, desperate to poke holes in his plan.
“Because nobody but you and your friends think my father exists. I’ve been renting this place myself. I enrolled in school as an emancipated minor. Mr. Chen, the teachers, everyone thinks I’m an orphan whose parents left me enough money to take care of myself. Which is entirely true. They just think I’m two years younger than I am. I was in eighth grade when we moved, so none of our teachers would’ve recognized me.” That meant once he “died,” nobody would come home to bury him, or look for him if the police never found his remains.