The Kind to Kill, page 1
Contents
Cover
Also by Tessa Wegert
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Acknowledgments
Also by Tessa Wegert
The Shana Merchant novels
DEATH IN THE FAMILY
THE DEAD SEASON
DEAD WIND *
THE KIND TO KILL *
* available from Severn House
THE KIND TO KILL
Tessa Wegert
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2023
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
This eBook edition first published in 2022 by Severn House,
an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
severnhouse.com
Copyright © Tessa Wegert, 2022
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Tessa Wegert to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0713-5 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-1005-0 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0979-5 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
This eBook produced by
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For Ethan, Michelle, Aidin, and Foster.
Brainstorming has never been more fun
PROLOGUE
It was on the eighth day that I decided to kill him.
Eight days spent largely in darkness, the hours not ticking by so much as unspooling like an upstate highway, no end in sight. All the while, I listened to him talk about his difficult childhood and the bad luck he had to endure. The fatherless home, the mother’s paralyzing anxiety, how it all deprived him of the skills and tools he needed to connect with other kids. He never once mentioned the three women he’d abducted and murdered before taking me, or the others before them. Their luck didn’t concern him.
I knew who he was by then, not just that he was the suspect I’d been hunting with the NYPD, but that we had history. All week long, I’d been waiting for the moment when he’d show up not with the cheap takeout needed to keep me alive for some purpose I couldn’t divine, but with the knife he’d used on those other women. Because history or not, this man was a killer.
But that eighth day was different. For some reason I’ve never learned, and never will, he was late with the food. I’d come to anticipate the odor of oily noodles as much as the sustenance itself, because that smell blocked out the others. The stink of burning fabric that filled the cellar every time the ancient, dust-caked boiler fired up with a lurch. The musty, wet dog stench of mold spores. The ceiling of that East Village apartment building basement was all exposed pipes, the floor poured cement gone grimy with disuse, but the smells permeated my clothing and hair and I couldn’t escape them. That day, my nose was buried in my sleeve and I was huffing what little scent of fabric softener and safety and home remained when I heard the click of a key and the flick of the switch. When the lights came on, my eyes zipped down his body in search of that weapon. There was only the bag of food in his hand.
Bram smiled and said, ‘Miss me?’
And then, as one, we turned our heads to the sound of a voice in the hall.
It belonged to a woman, a tenant come to ask for the janitor’s help. Bram’s help. When I met his gaze, I knew: if I made a sound, he’d kill her. He put a finger to his lips. I didn’t move. He closed the door on me, and locked it. A beat, and then I was on my knees, cheek flat against the filthy floor, my left eye in the seam of light that shone under the door.
They stood at the other end of the room. He was motionless, his dingy white Converse rooted to the floor. She wore ballet flats and rocked on the balls of her feet as she spoke. She was my way out. I tented my fingers against the door, moving them over dents left by a hundred years of boots, boots belonging to people who had come and gone from this place freely. A dozen escape plans hurtled through my mind, but every one ended the same way. Another woman dead, lying lifeless on that basement floor.
Murmurs. A pleasant lilt, followed by a low, steady drone. Didn’t she hear the edge to his voice, that dangerous undercurrent of impatience? Get out of here. I squinted at her feet and willed her to hear me. Go! When she finally did, I was relieved. Until I remembered what that meant.
For a long time, his feet still didn’t move. The woman hadn’t seen me. But she’d seen him, and to anyone who knew what the janitor looked like a few months ago, that would have incited suspicion. When my precinct first started investigating Blake Bram, the man who’d been targeting women through a dating app and bringing them here to die, he had dark hair and azure eyes. He was ash-blond now with a buzzcut, hiding from the city in plain sight. On their own, hair dye and colored contacts might not arouse misgivings. Coupled with cagey behavior, they were a tocsin. Did the woman hear it?
When at last he opened the door again, Bram’s expression was fiery. ‘Fuck.’ He spat the word, eyes moving fast around the room. ‘I’ll be back. Stay right here, I want to hear all about your day.’ His grin peeled the lips back from his teeth. My day. I’d spent it picturing those toxic spores spiraling down my throat like dandelion seeds to contaminate my lungs, and shivering despite the room’s airless heat, and thinking about my family, and wondering if my squad at the Ninth Precinct would ever find me. Bram threw me a wink and began to close the door, but there was a new voice then. It commanded him to raise his hands.
It’s dehydration-induced psychosis, I thought. A fever dream. I didn’t find out until much later that instead of going to her apartment the tenant, sensing something was amiss, burst onto the street and grabbed the first police officer she saw. He was just eight months on the job when the woman sent him down those basement steps. His name became one I would never forget.
I can only imagine what that rookie cop saw when he looked at me, crouching hollow-eyed in that subterranean hell. He was still staring, sidearm drawn and shaky, when Bram made his move.
It happened quickly. Bram lunged at the rookie’s knees and toppled him, knocking him backward on the cement floor. There was a thud and a sickening crack. I jolted to my feet. I had trained for this. The air was close and my pulse pounded in my ears, but this moment was mine. I wasn’t like the other women he’d taken. I had skills that were designed to save my life, and while I was weak and disoriented from my ragged, endless days in the dark, I knew how to disarm an assailant. I thought
You’ll fail. You failed once already. Your training didn’t help you when Bram slipped a date rape drug into your drink and shuffled you into a waiting car.
I shook my head, but the voice was insistent.
He’ll only kill you, too.
So help me God, I listened. Despite all my preparation, all those years of police training and martial arts, when my brain told me to act, my body refused to follow orders. I didn’t – couldn’t – move.
Before the cop could catch his breath, before he could peel himself off the floor, Bram had his Glock – and that was when I knew. People weren’t safe, and never would be, as long as Blake Bram was alive.
I blinked at the scene. Where moments before a woman had fidgeted in ballet flats, a man was now bleeding from his head on the cement floor, and Bram held his gun. I opened my mouth to scream as the shots rang out like canon fire. A whisper in a wind storm. I watched with a disorienting sense of detachment as Bram stepped over the young officer’s body and back into my cell.
As he set down the gun, and took my hand.
You’re next, said the voice, deadpan.
Am I?
‘This is not how I wanted things to end.’ Bram’s sigh was familiar. Displeased. Childlike. His fingers were tacky with blood, blood that was now on my hands, too. ‘His partner will be right behind him.’
The gun. So close that the grip kissed my knee. My eyes traveled from Bram’s face, a face I had once known so well, to the Glock. Here, at last, was my chance. The decision was made. But it had come too late.
By the time I looked up, Bram was gone.
ONE
Two years later
The knock on my office door gave me a jolt. Panicked, I stuffed the latest issue of People under a stack of papers. Just when I thought the press had finally moved on, an old friend from high school tipped me off to the article inside. If the reporter behind the magazine feature had reached out for a comment, I wouldn’t have known it; I’d long since stopped answering calls from numbers I didn’t recognize, could hit ‘Decline’ with record speed. I wasn’t responsible for the sordid story on my desk. Still, my cheeks flushed red when I spied Don Bogle hovering in the window.
‘We could use you out here,’ he said, cracking open the door. The man’s voice was grim.
Every now and then, it occurred to me that Bogle had missed his calling. With his clean-shaven head and the height of a retired NBA power forward, he could have made a killing playing a Bond villain or mob movie hitman if he’d only gone to Hollywood. Instead, the poor bastard had stayed in Alexandria Bay to become one of three Troop D investigators who had to take orders from a vilified minor celebrity.
With a nod, I followed Bogle down the hall.
Jeremy Solomon waved me over when he saw me, mouthed the word ‘wait.’ Ear pressed to his phone, he was jotting notes, interrupting the caller every few seconds. ‘Spell the last name … Sure, I know it – behind the Admiral? OK … Right. Thanks.’ He put down the phone, and looked up.
Fleshy-cheeked and freckled, Sol had the look of an overgrown boy who’d spray-painted his hair gray for Halloween, but he aged rapidly when a situation was dire. There were creases around his eyes now. ‘That was the Alex Bay PD,’ he said. ‘Gorecki. Know him?’
Immediately, my mind went to Tim. Tim, who knew almost everyone in town and helped me navigate the local community. But Tim was out on a criminal mischief case. When I didn’t reply, Sol said, ‘Ivan Gorecki’s a Jefferson County deputy sheriff.’
‘What’s going on?’ I asked. The Alexandria Bay Police Department was small, mostly comprised of part-time officers who worked for other agencies. Officers like Gorecki. The village police took what we called a broken window approach to keeping the peace, shutting down disorder before it got out of control. In little A-Bay, that usually meant noise complaints, security alarms, public intoxication. When a bigger case came in, the state police assumed control. We dealt with narcotics, child abuse, and serial crimes. Felonies. On those rare occasions when our interests overlapped and it was all hands on deck, you could count on it being a major investigation.
A call from Gorecki was a bad sign.
‘We’ve got a missing woman,’ Sol said, staring down at the phone in his hand. ‘She and her husband were staying at the Admiral Inn last night. Tourists in from Oneida County.’
‘They were staying at the Admiral?’
A nod. ‘Gorecki says they had some kind of argument. The wife stormed out and never came back.’
‘I didn’t realize the Admiral was open again,’ said Don Bogle. Decades of smoking had shredded his voice; he would have done well cast as a timeworn cowboy, too. ‘Was it roaches last time they shut down, or rats?’
Honestly, it could have been either. If my family ever came to visit me in Alexandria Bay, a scenario that was looking increasingly unlikely, I’d put them up pretty much anywhere other than the Admiral Inn. Unlike the other hotels and resorts in town, it hadn’t been renovated in at least thirty years, but its biggest offense was that the place was nowhere near the water. While the cheapest motel in town was as likely to attract budgeting families as the uncouth, calls about drunken dust-ups on the ramshackle property weren’t uncommon.
I listened as Sol explained that, the night before, the village station received a call from the motel’s night clerk. Several guests had complained about the shouting, so the couple took their dispute outside. Things escalated after that, to the point where the clerk felt the need to report it. An officer had gone out to the motel, but by then the husband and wife were back in their room. And here we were the next morning, with the husband filing a missing persons report.
Most people think you have to wait twenty-four hours to report a person missing. TV and the movies have hammered that falsehood into everyone’s heads, which is a problem because when someone’s MIA, a swift response is critical. I didn’t know whether the husband of the missing woman knew that was a myth or not, but he’d done the right thing by going to the police. The fresher the trail, the better our odds of locating the wife.
Even so, I didn’t like what I was hearing. ‘This argument,’ I said. ‘Was it violent?’
‘Seems that way. One of the guests told the night clerk there was some pushing and shoving outside. The husband denies it,’ said Sol.
Of course he does.
‘But he knows there were witnesses,’ said Bogle. ‘Right? There’s no covering up the fact that they fought. And he went down to the station this morning anyway?’
‘Yep,’ I said, channeling his thoughts. ‘Which means either this guy’s trying to play us, or he’s genuinely concerned about his wife.’
I leaned against Sol’s desk, the sun angling through the nearby window hot on the back of my neck. I still wasn’t used to that. Where my hair once curled down past my shoulders, there was nothing now but naked skin that prickled at my touch, vulnerable and unfamiliar.
A month ago, while in the shower, I’d soaped my head and watched with detached horror as a tangle of hair swirled like seagrass down the drain. The stress I’d been under was taking its toll, and my decision was a quick one. Sarajane, who ran a salon in the back room of her weather-beaten bungalow, beamed when she set down her scissors and dusted away the stray hairs. ‘Not everyone can pull this off, honey, but you look pretty,’ she’d declared, gazing at my reflection in the mirror on the wall. The cut was almost as short as my brother’s, and significantly shorter than Tim’s, but that was fine. I didn’t care about pretty. All I wanted was to look different. A shot at regaining the anonymity I feared I’d lost for good.
‘They argued,’ I said at length, thinking it through. ‘Things got rough. If this woman was afraid of her husband and what else he might do to her, it makes sense that she’d run.’ Maybe our missing person wanted to be invisible, too.
At the same time, there was something about the account that sat uncomfortably in my stomach like a creamy, overly rich meal. Far too many victims of domestic violence were doubted and ignored as it was; I couldn’t take the chance that this woman wasn’t still in serious danger. ‘Gorecki’s gonna need help locating her,’ I said. ‘Got a name?’
Sol consulted his notes. ‘Rebecca Hearst. The husband’s name is Godfrey Patrick Hearst III.’
