The Match

Chapter Forty-One

I park. Just like last time. I just need to kill Jenn. If they catch me immediately after that, so be it. If they have the same car on tape parked in the same remote area, so be it. It’ll be over by then. Any additional murders will be gravy.

I have the gun in my hand.

I keep it low and out of sight. Jenn will be here in approximately ten minutes. I wonder how to play it. Should I kill her fast? Three shots. My modus operandi. I bet the forensic serial-killer profilers will come up with some great theories on why I shot them three times. The truth is, of course, there is no rhyme or reason. Or at least not a very interesting reason. When I shot Henry McAndrews, my first kill, I fired three times. Why? I can’t be sure, but I think that’s when I eventually paused or wondered whether that was enough. Anyway, it was random. I could have shot him two times or four times. But it was three. So now I’m stuck with that number.

No great insight there, profilers. Sorry.

I close my eyes for a few seconds. I think about the gun in my hand.

I want to ease this pain.

That’s how it started, isn’t it? With pain. Pain is all-consuming. It robs you of reason. You just want it to end. I thought that killing those who had done such harm would ease the pain.

And, surprise alert, it did. Correction: It does.

But only for a little while.

That was the problem. Murder for me is a salve — but the salve works only for a little while. Its healing power starts to fade. So you throw more and more salve on the wound.

It is right then, while I’m thinking about salving a wound, that I see Jenn turn the corner.

I look down at the gun, then back up at Jenn, at those famed golden-blond locks framing the heartbreakingly gorgeous face.

Do I shoot her right away? Do I let her get in the car and see it is me and then, boom, boom, boom, end it immediately? I think that’s the play. I want her to suffer. That’s new. I only wanted the others dead. What they did was awful and hurtful. But what Jenn had done, the planning, the betrayal...

Jenn is only a few yards away.

I knew she’d come. Like her sister, she couldn’t help but try to grab this life preserver.

She squints now, trying to see who is driving the car. But she can’t make me out yet.

When Jenn is only a few yards away, I lift the gun.

I sit in the driver’s seat and watch her reach out to the passenger side door. I hit the unlock switch so she can join me.

But that’s not what happens.

The moment I hit the switch — as soon as I hear that little click indicating the car doors are unlocked — my car door swings open. I turn toward it, raising my gun, but a hand darts in and snatches the gun away from me.

I look up into Wilde’s big blue eyes.

“It’s over, Vicky.”

Wilde moved into the passenger seat, Vicky stayed on the driver’s side.

She stared straight ahead out the window. “You set me up. You told me about Jenn to see if I’d act.”

Wilde saw no reason to reply.

“How did you know it was me?”

“I didn’t for certain.”

“You should have let me kill her first, Wilde.”

Wilde did not reply. He looked out the window too. Rola stood with Jenn by the chain-link gate to the construction site. She had two other people readied and in position, but Wilde hadn’t needed them.

“What gave me away?” Vicky asked.

“What always gives people away? The lies.”

“Specifically?”

Wilde still stared out the window. “For one thing, you lied about your relationship with Peter. You’re not his sister. You’re his mother.”

She nodded slowly. “How did you find out?”

“The same way Peter did. From a DNA database.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said in a small voice.

“That part? No, Vicky, that part wasn’t your fault.”

“He raped me, you know.”

Wilde nodded. “Your family lived outside of Memphis.”

“Yes.”

“You were the oldest,” Wilde said. “I didn’t think about that at the time. But you told me your younger sister Kelly was upset about your moving because she’d miss a friend’s eleventh birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.”

“That was true.”

“I don’t doubt it. But that got me thinking. Kelly was eleven. You were older. How much older?”

Vicky swallowed. “Three years.”

Wilde nodded slowly. “You were only fourteen.”

“Yes.”

“I’m really sorry that happened to you,” Wilde said.

“He started raping me when I was twelve.”

“Pastor Paul?”

She nodded. “I didn’t tell my parents. I mean not then. He was God to them. Then I tried, but they wouldn’t listen. When I told them I was pregnant, they called me a whore. My own mother and father. They demanded to know what boy I had screwed around with. Can you believe that, Wilde? I told them the truth. I told them what Pastor Paul had done. My mom hit me. Slapped me across the face. She said I was a liar.”

She stopped then, closed her eyes.

“So what happened next?” Wilde asked.

“Can’t you guess?”

“You moved away.”

“Something like that. My parents decided the only way to save the family name was for me and Mom to say we were going on a religious pilgrimage once I started showing. Mom would tell everyone she was pregnant. And when we came back to our community, we would just raise the baby as if it were hers.”

“And you’d pretend to be the baby’s sister.”

“Yes.”

“So how did you end up in Pennsylvania? I checked. Your father did work at Penn State. Your family did move to the area.”

“They changed their minds. My parents.”

“They believed you?”

“They never admitted it,” she said. “But yes.”

“Why?”

A tear came to her eye now. “Kelly.”

“Your sister?”

“Pastor Paul started showing interest in her.” She closed her eyes for a long moment. “That woke my parents up. They weren’t bad people, my parents. They’d both been raised in brainwashing religions. They didn’t know any better. The idea that the man they literally worshipped would defile their own daughters...” She took a deep breath. “I guess you found Pastor Paul through Peter’s DNA.”

“Yes.”

“How did you know I was Peter’s mother?”

“The same way Peter did. The match with Silas. Silas kept talking about sharing a quarter of his DNA with Peter as meaning you’re a half sibling. He jumped to that conclusion. But that couldn’t be anymore. Half siblings can only share one parent. Could Pastor Paul be both their fathers with two different, totally unrelated mothers? That seemed highly unlikely, especially since Silas found other matches on your father’s side too. The key is, if you have a twenty-three percent DNA share, it doesn’t just mean you could be a half sibling. The DNAYourStory website said as much. You could be a grandparent. Or, as in this case, an uncle. It was the only thing that made sense. You’re Peter’s mother, making Silas his uncle.”

Vicky nodded. “Do you want to hear something odd?”

Wilde waited.

“Having Peter was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. After all the horror and abuse and cruelty, at the end for me, there was this perfect little baby boy — a golden child too good for this world. Nothing I told you about him was a lie. Peter was special.”

Wilde pushed ahead. “Did Peter reach out to Boomerang, or was that you?”

“We both did. Peter still thought I was his sister back then. And he was devastated by what happened with Marnie and Jenn and the whole Love Is a Battlefield world. He was obsessed with proving his innocence. So when he saw that DogLufegnev account claiming he had more pics, worse ones, he wanted to know more. I pushed him to let Boomerang help us. Then one day, maybe a month later, someone from Boomerang emails me that our case had been rejected. I wrote back as Peter, saying how devastated I was and how we still needed their help. Eventually the person from Boomerang told me her name was Katherine Frole. She started going on about how big a Battler she was, how she loved Peter’s season, all that. She said she still wanted to help.”

“Katherine Frole gave you Henry McAndrews’s name?”

“Yes, I got it out of her. But it was too late.”

“What do you mean, too late?”

“Peter was already gone.”

“So you went to McAndrews’s house anyway.”

“Yes.”

“And you killed him.”

She nodded. “I thought that would be the end of it.”

“When I found McAndrews’s body, when his murder went public, did Katherine Frole contact you?”

“Yes.”

“She suspected you or Peter had something to do with it.”

“We set up a meeting in her office at a time she knew no one would be there. I said Peter and I would explain everything.”

“Were you afraid she’d talk?”

“That was what I told myself,” Vicky said. “And I think she would have eventually. But Katherine Frole had a lot to lose too. She was an FBI agent working for an illegal vigilante group. I’m not going to go into detail on this part because it’s not really important. But after shooting McAndrews, I realized — I know how this will sound — that I liked killing.” She smiled again, but now that smile raised hackles. “You could chalk it up to my childhood, the trauma of rape, though that’s a terrible cliché, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s an illness or some other life event or more likely just a chemical imbalance in my brain. Do you want to know my own theory, Wilde?”

He said nothing.

“A lot of people are potential serial killers. Not one in a million, like you read about it. I’d say more like one in twenty, maybe one in ten. But if you never do it, if you never kill for the first time, you don’t ever get to experience that addictive high. Many of us could be, say, heroin addicts, but if we never try it, if we never get a taste for it...”

“And that explains Martin Spirow.”

Vicky nodded. “There are so many terrible people, Wilde. Did you see what Martin Spirow put on that poor dead girl’s obituary space? I got a Boomerang list of names from Katherine Frole — a list of people who were so pathetic and appalling that the only way they got through their day was saying cruel and vile and hurtful things anonymously to people they didn’t know. I mean, think about it. Martin Spirow woke up one day and saw a heartbroken family grieving over the death of their young daughter, and what does he do? He writes, ‘It’s sad when hot pussy goes to waste.’ What sort of awful life choices has a person made to end up doing something like that?” She shook her head in disgust. “I did the world a favor.”

“So where is Peter?” Wilde asked.

“I told you the first time we met.” She smiled. “You know, Wilde. You’ve always known. My son, my beautiful son, got his affairs in order. He bought a ticket and flew to that island. He went through passport control and checked into that hotel, and the next morning he checked out. He took a taxi to the path where you hike to the top of the cliff. He left a message for me on one of those apps that automatically deletes itself two minutes after you listen. He told me goodbye. I could hear the surf in the background. And then my son jumped to his death.”

Wilde said nothing.

“You know how he was harassed and bullied, how he was shamed and disgraced, how no one would forgive him for something he didn’t do. You know how he lost his wife, the supposed love of his life, and his career, and, yes, his celebrity. All of that and no one would believe him. Step into his shoes for a moment. The whole world believes you roofied your own sister-in-law and not even your own wife defends you. Everything you had is taken away from you. But don’t stop there, Wilde. Add into that the fact that the person Peter loved the longest, the one who really raised him and took care of him and, as Silas pointed out, favored him above all else, the person he trusted most in the entire world, had lied to him his whole life, that in reality she wasn’t his sister but his mother, that he was the product of a rape. Are you thinking about that, Wilde? Are you teetering yet? Good. Because now, after your call today, I can add one more. Peter was so cryptic toward the end, so suddenly quiet and sad. Now I know why. He’d figured it out. He’d figured it out that Jenn had set this all up. He loved that woman, Wilde. Imagine that pain. That final blow. So you tell me. Who do you blame? Was it Marnie? Was it reality TV? McAndrews? The cruel fans? Was it my fault? You tell me, Wilde. Who killed my boy?”

Wilde had no answer to that, so he opened the car window and nodded to Rola. She nodded back and made the call.

Five minutes later, the police came and took Vicky away.