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“We decided together. We’re a team, we’ve always been a team.”
“So he could do some of the research, the stalking on one target while you worked another. Very efficient.”
“We’re a team,” Darrin repeated. “We’ve always been a team.”
“Plus he could go to Colorado to research the APA while you stayed here to work Deena. How did he decide you’d plan to kill the sister there, and not the mother, for instance?”
“For Christ’s sake, the sister’s in New Jersey. It’s basic geography.”
“He did the preliminary stalking there then, right? Until the contact.”
“Didn’t I say we’re a team? He’d start the field- and e-work, gather the data, then I . . .” His face tightened. “I’m not saying anything else about my father.”
“Fine. Protect him like your mother did. You go down, he walks. There’s déjà vu. Only you don’t go away for a year and a half like she did. You’re going away for two life terms, no possibility of parole, with the extra twenty-five for intent on Mrs. Mimoto.”
“Long time,” Peabody commented, “when you go in this young. You know, Dallas, I bet Vance had alibis set up for himself each time the kid here went on a kill. That’s his pattern.”
“Doesn’t matter, the old man’s got no balls. We’ve got the big fish here, and he can flop and gasp on the shore alone.”
“If you think I’ll turn on my father, you’re crazy. And you’ll never find him.”
“Couldn’t care less. You’re all I need, Darrin. You’re young, and that just makes me want to sing and dance. Because that means you’ll be in a cage on a rock off planet for about a century. You’re going to have a really, really long time to think, to figure out how you’ve been screwed with.”
“You think you scare me? It was worth it, just to see MacMasters standing there, and his dead daughter in a box. It’s better, even better, because now he knows why. He’ll know why, every day he sucks in air, that he killed his own daughter the day he killed my mother.”
“I’ll give you the bonus. Make him suffer even more. Walk us through what you did to Deena.”
His lips twitched into a smile. “You were right. She was easy.”
It made her sick, turned her stomach into a raw, churning mass of revulsion. She’d seen it, most of it, in her head already. But now he spoke for the record, relaying every detail. Not reveling in it, Eve noted. Somehow his pragmatic step-by-step was worse than glee.
He’d done what he had to do. What, she believed, he’d been created to do.
When he’d finished relating the murders of Deena and Karlene, his framework and intentions for murdering the others, he sat back, eye ing Eve quietly.
“Is that enough for you?”
“We’re done. You’ll be taken back to a cell. The court will appoint counsel for you if you don’t select an attorney of your own.”
“I don’t need a lawyer. I don’t need a trial. Your laws mean nothing to me. I’m young, like you said. Eventually I’ll find my way out, my way back. And I’ll finish what I started.”
“Sure you will.” Eve rose. “Record off. Peabody, get someone to take Darrin back to his cage.”
She waited until Peabody stepped out. “He set you up, Darrin, this man you worship. He twisted your mind from the time you were a baby, so he could cover his own actions, maybe his own guilt. He set you up, like he set your mother up, his brother up. He set your mother up, here in New York, and again in Chicago. Because he wanted quick money. Because he wanted her to do the work. Because he was, is, a coward.”
“You’re a lying cunt.” He spat at her, with that vicious smile in place.
“Why would I lie? You’ll ask yourself that eventually. Vance Pauley? He’s a user.”
“You don’t know shit.”
“More than you can imagine,” she said, thinking of the first eight years of her life. “The reason I’m telling you this is because sometime in the long, long decades you’re in that concrete cage, you’re going to think about it. You’re going to think, and wonder, and maybe realize the truth. I really hope you realize the truth. Because it’ll make you suffer. Your father killed your mother.”
“You’re a liar.”
She only shook her head. “No gain in it for me. I’ve closed this case, and you’re finished. You’ll have a long time to think about that.” She turned to the door, nodded to the pair of uniforms who stepped in. “Take this worthless shit back to his cage.”
Eve stood where she was, pressed her hands to her face. Rubbed hard as if to scrub away a film of ugly memories.
