The Death Sculptor

One Hundred and Fifteen

Hunter twitched on the ground again and Olivia aimed the gun at his head. ‘Don’t, Detective. Trust me, I know how to shoot. And from this distance, I won’t miss. If there was one thing my fath—’ She cleared her throat angrily, ‘Derek taught me, it was how to shoot.’

‘My neck hurts. I was just stretching it.’

‘Well, don’t.’

‘OK. I won’t.’

Olivia moved to the left side of the room. ‘You still haven’t told me how you got to me. I know you figured out what I was telling you with my shadow puppets, but how did you figure out it was me?’

‘After I heard the story Jude told me about what happened to her, things started moving in my head. I suspected I had read the second shadow image wrong. It wasn’t a fight, it was a gang rape. I didn’t know Roxy was your mother, but I guessed that, if they had done what they did to Jude and Roxy, there probably were others. Others who, like Roxy, also had a child. And that that child had found out about everything. From the first shadow image you left us, I was certain that the only way that child could’ve found out was through Derek Nicholson. A confession on his deathbed.’

Olivia chuckled angrily. ‘He was able to live with it, but not die with it. How ironic is that?’

Hunter knew how common it was for human beings to endure unspoken guilt throughout their entire lives, but to die with it was something few were prepared to do.

‘For Derek Nicholson to be able to call that child to his home in order to reveal everything,’ Hunter continued. ‘It meant that he had to have somehow kept tabs on who and where that child was. I was running through possibilities in my head when Jude called me again last night. She had remembered the name of Roxy’s child – Levy.’

Olivia twitched on the spot.

‘At first I thought it was a last name, or maybe a male name. It sounded vaguely familiar, but when I looked at the picture your sister had given me of Nicholson and his wife I remembered where I had heard that name before. It was a nickname. Allison had called you by it that day in your house. Not a common nickname for Olivia, but it was your nickname.’

Olivia gave Hunter a melancholic smile. ‘My mother always called me Levy, never Liv, or Ollie, or anything else. I liked it. It was different. Allison was the only other person who called me that.’

‘First I checked your background. You went to medical school.’

Olivia shrugged. ‘UCLA, but in the end I decided I didn’t want to do it. The knowledge came in handy, though.’

She offered nothing else, so Hunter continued.

‘I called someone I know who could access the California Department of Social Services’ database. I found out that Nicholson had adopted you during his first year of marriage. An odd choice for a young couple that had no known problem bearing children. In fact, Nicholson adopted you the same year his wife became pregnant with her daughter, Allison.’

‘So you know that he adopted me out of guilt for what he’d done.’ The anger was back in Olivia’s voice. ‘Guilt for being part of the group of animals who raped and killed my mother. Guilt for allowing it to happen. Guilt for not telling the police.’

Hunter didn’t reply.

‘How could I live with all that knowledge, Robert, can you tell me? Because I struggled with it. He called me to his deathbed to tell me that my whole life had been a lie. I was adopted not into a family who wanted to share their love and care for me, but into a family who wanted to bury their guilt.’

‘I don’t think Derek’s wife knew about what happened,’ Hunter said.

‘It doesn’t matter!’ Olivia spat the words out. ‘He convinced her to take me. He told her that my mother was a drug addict who had left me. He told her that I was this poor kid, unwanted, unloved. But I was loved, and I was wanted, until they took her from me. He was the one who didn’t want me. All he wanted was to lessen the guilty feeling that was eating him inside. I was his daily feel-good pill. His anti-guilt drug. All he had to do was look at me, and in that sick heart of his he would find some peace. He would tell himself everything was OK because he gave the poor hooker’s child a better life. You know what? I never wanted this better life. I was happy. I loved my mother. But he made me believe that she didn’t want me. That she had run away. And for twenty-eight years I hated her for walking out on me.’

Hunter understood now where Olivia’s incredible violence came from. Displaced rage. Twenty-eight years hating her mother for something that she didn’t do. When she learnt the truth, and that she’d been lied to for most of her life, that rage was woken up, gaining a whole new intensity and purpose. Twenty-eight years is a long time to bottle up rage.

A tear ran down Olivia’s cheek and her voice croaked for an instant.

‘I still remember her – my mother. How beautiful she was. I still remember how we used to play shadow puppets every night when I went to bed. She was so smart at creating them. She could come up with anything – animals, people, angels . . . anything. She didn’t have much money, so I never had any real toys. Our shadow puppet theater was my toy. We would sit for hours making up stories of our own. Creating silly plays against the wall. All we needed was candlelight and our hands. We were happy.’

Hunter closed his eyes for an instant. That was why she had created shadow puppets from her victims’ body parts – a macabre tribute to her mother. Another way to expel her anger.

‘He never played with me, did you know that?’ Olivia said, shaking her head. ‘When I was a kid, he never played with me in the park or anywhere. He never read me a story, or put me on his shoulders, or had pretend tea with me like any father would. I played shadow puppets by myself.’

Hunter couldn’t reply.

‘After he told me, I went home and cried for three days. I had no idea how I could go on living. My life had been a lie, a good deed to allow my father to sleep at night. I was never loved the way a child is supposed to be loved, except for when my mother was alive. And now I knew that all four people who had mutilated her body and thrown her into the ocean like unwanted garbage had gone on to raise their own families, to prosper in their careers – to live without an ounce of remorse for what they’d done. And worst of all, they had gone on living without ever being punished.’

Hunter knew that very few minds wouldn’t break after being faced with what Olivia had been faced with. And the few that didn’t break would certainly be damaged forever.

‘You know as well as I do that there was nothing I could do with that information that would bring justice to those people. It happened twenty-eight years ago. I had no proof, except for the words of a dying man. No action would’ve been taken by the police, the DA, the state, or anyone. No one would’ve believed me. I would just have had to carry on living as I had for the past twenty-eight years.’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t do that, could you?’

Hunter thought back to when his father was gunned down inside that branch of the Bank of America. He wasn’t a cop then. But he remembered his rage. A rage that was still inside him, dormant somewhere. And cop or not, if he came face to face with the people who had shot his father, he would kill them – no hesitation.

‘I came this close to killing myself.’ Olivia brought Hunter’s thoughts back to the room. ‘And then I realized one thing. If I was able to kill myself, then I was able to kill. Full stop. And I decided that, whatever happened, I would have my version of justice. For my mother. She deserves justice.’

For a moment her stare wandered around the room.

‘Everything just came to me like in a dream. As if my mother was there, telling me what to do, guiding my hand. My fath—’ Anger was back on Olivia’s face. ‘Derek Nicholson loved mythology. He was always reading books, quoting passages. It was only fair to make him into a mythological symbol.’ She pulled back and released the slide mechanism on Hunter’s gun, manually loading a round into the chamber.

It was time for the final act.