AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chris nodded.
“And you killed Madison and Helen to make it look like Naomie wasn’t the real target.”
He nodded.
“But if you wanted to distance yourself from the killing, why did you pick one of Naomie’s friends?”
“I didn’t realize they were that close, I just thought Madison was someone from Triple-B. Lots of people from there came around.”
“But why use Triple-B at all?” Arnett asked.
“That’s how the whole idea came to me in the first place. Naomie talked about Triple-B endlessly, about all these women out there having babies nobody wanted.”
“She said that? That nobody wanted the babies?” Jo asked.
“No, she’d never say that, but it was the truth. She was always talking about their situations under the guise of how our social system fails women. Some of the women were married and excited about their babies, yeah. But most of them were going to be single mothers because the fathers didn’t want anything to do with the children. I’d bet you anything they begged the women to have abortions. In some cases the women themselves don’t even want the kids, but for religious reasons or whatever they don’t want to abort.”
Jo nodded, careful to keep her disgust hidden.
“Then Naomie had a couple of the women over for some sort of get-together with Julia. I listened to their chatter from the other room while I played Borderlands. And I realized—all three of the pregnant women in that room, the fathers didn’t want the babies. Three babies that were going to come into the world unwanted.” He pointed to Jo with an intimate gesture of understanding. “I don’t have to tellyouhow Chelsea got herself knocked up by a married man who doesn’t want to have anything to do with her. Yeah, he shouldn’t have cheated, but everyone makes mistakes. He shouldn’t be tethered to a child for the rest of his life becauseshe alonegets to make a decision about having the baby. So when I was figuring out how to get rid of Naomie, I knew I’d be doing him a huge favor by getting rid of that child. And, it turns out, doing your sister a favor, too.”
Jo shoved the horrible layers aside to deal with later and tried to tug him back on track. “But you didn’t kill Chelsea, you killed Madison.”
“Originally I wasn’t sure which one of them would be better. So I followed both Madison and Chelsea to find out more about them and their schedules, and what I found out stunned me. Chelsea at least had the money to take care of the baby on her own. The kid could have had a decent life, even if his whole existence was one big manipulation tactic. But Madison—when I followed her, I found out she was a stripper. No money, no nothing. How was she going to take care of that baby? She’d have been on public assistance for the rest of her life, and the kid would have been raised in the back of strip clubs surrounded by sex and drugs and God knows what else. She wasn’t in a relationship, and I heard the women talking about it—they were sure she didn’t evenknowwho the father was. She added nothing to society, and had nobody to miss her or the child other than a mother who’ll be dead herself within a few months. So I killed her first, and planned on killing Chelsea after Naomie.”
“We believe Madison got pregnant by someone who forced themselves on her,” Jo said, struggling to keep her voice above a whisper.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Let me guess. By someone at the strip club?”
“What does that matter?” Her hands clenched at her chair under the table.
He stabbed a finger toward her. “Because if wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t put herself in that situation in the first place.”
“You said Chelsea’s baby was a manipulation tactic. What did you mean by that?” Jo asked.
He shook his head and laughed. “When I first started following her, I was in my car waiting outside her house. She came out her front door talking on the phone, upset and loud, on speakerphone. She was talking to someone called Pierce, defending her decision to purposefully stop taking birth control so she’d get pregnant, begging him to understand her side of things because he was the only friend she’d ever had. He told her she’d crossed a line, and that as a guy he found it the ultimate betrayal to trick a man into having a responsibility like that.” Chris shook his head and stared at the wall. “He’s not wrong. It’s not right that men don’t get a say, especially when a woman can just trick them like that.”
When Jo didn’t speak, Arnett shot a quick look down at her clenching fists and took over. “And so you kept following Madison.”
“I scoped out her and Chelsea’s schedules for a couple of weeks, and overlaid them with Naomie’s to find something they all had in common. They all took walks in parks, so that seemed like the most convenient way. Then all I had to do was ‘run into’ Madison at Crone Ridge, which wasn’t hard to do. I followed her, let her get a little ahead of me, then ran up and pretended to be surprised to see her.”
“And she just agreed to go into the woods with you?” Arnett’s tone was skeptical.
Chris grimaced at him. “She may not have had morals, but she wasn’t stupid. I walked with her for a bit, chatting with her about her pregnancy and pretending to be oh-so-happy about Naomie’s. Scratched the dog’s head and fussed over her so she was sure I was a friend. Right about the time we approached the target section of the path, I could tell she was starting to wish I’d go away, but my Smith & Wesson took over from there.”
“So you led her into the woods at gunpoint,” Jo said.
“Yep. Once we were out of earshot—or so I thought—I had her tie up the dog to a tree, then brought her farther into the woods, to the location I’d selected and set up.”
“And you gave her a roofie so she wouldn’t struggle,” Jo said.
An odd look of triumph gleamed in his eyes. “I did, but I didn’t even need to. From the moment I produced the gun, she was resigned, like a child who knew they’d done wrong. She knew what was happening and that it was for the best.”
Jo shoved that delusion into her to-be-processed later compartment. “And then you staged the scene to throw suspicion on Lucifer Lost.”
He shrugged. “I knew that wouldn’t hold water for long. But I needed something to make sure you linked the two attacks, so I did all the staging and put the little babies into their hands knowing that would just tear at everyone’s hearts. I also needed you to find them quickly, because I couldn’t risk killing Naomie until you found Madison. So I left her phone on so you could track them. I still can’t believe it took you almost a full day to find her—what do we pay taxes for if it takes you that long to track a phone?”
Jo refused to take the bait. “And that’s why you left Helen’s clothes up on the bank of the culvert. Because it took us too long to track the phones.”
