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For confirmation, we asked his wife's name. From the way he snarled the answer, I knew we had Robin MacKenzie.
He could only manage to rise onto his elbows. "Is she dead?" he asked, voic
e hoarse from disuse. "Please tell me she's dead."
"She is," I said.
His tongue slid across his cracked lips, eyes feverish.
"Did she suffer?"
"We'll get to that," I said. "Not very happy with the missus, are you?"
"Do you know what she did to me?"
"No, but I'm sure you're going to tell me."
"It was her idea, all of it. Everything we did, she thought of it first. But when they caught us, she cut a deal. She told them I did it. That she was just another victim. The abused wife, forced to go along with everything I said. And they bought it. They bought it!"
"Of course they did. No one wants to believe a woman is capable of things like that."
He pulled himself upright. "That's it exactly! The evidence was right there, on the tapes, her laughing, egging me on."
"You got played," I said. "But I'm here to offer you a chance at another round. See, your wife is dead, right? But she's not in hell."
"What?"
"A serious injustice, I know. But you can set that right."
"You want me to prove she did it? I can--"
"No, we've already established that. What we need now is more detail, to give the celestial court a better picture of the defendant, her state of mind at the time of the crimes."
"State of mind? She was fucked-up. Crazy. Obsessed with that Scottish bitch--"
"What Scottish bitch?"
"Suzanne Simmons. She killed some kids back in the sixties."
Now, that sounded familiar. "This Simmons. Did she have a partner?"
"Yeah, her husband or boyfriend. They killed a bunch of kids and buried them out in these grasslands or something."
"And Cheri was interested in this case."
"Interested? She was fucking obsessed. Wouldn't stop talking about it. She'd always been into that kind of stuff, serial killers and shit. We both were. But then, all of a sudden, she starts going on and on about this Scottish chick, telling me all about her. It was spooky. Almost made me think maybe she was some kind of reincarnation of this Suzanne Simmons, but I looked it up, and Simmons was still alive."
"So Cheri talked about those murders."
"And talked and talked and talked. She kept going on about how this Simmons had found the key. That's what she called it. The key. We had to stop pissing around--talking about it, fantasizing about it--and do it."
"Kill someone."
"Only we couldn't just kill them. If we wanted this key, we had to do it a certain way."
"The way Suzanne Simmons had."
"See, that's what didn't make any sense. The stuff she said, it had nothing to do with Simmons. What we had to do was different. She had these instructions--"
