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And when he’d dumped them, taking even the money she’d tucked away under her cheap, serviceable white bras and panties, she’d made excuses.
He loves us too much to stay.
So he—her gift—saw weakness, a woman’s weakness, ripe for mining.
For her, he became the loving, devoted son while she worked menial jobs for assholes who barely paid her enough to make rent. A simple clutch of dandelions or a heart cut out of construction paper ensured she waited on him, hand and foot.
And either didn’t notice, or never mentioned, the five or ten bucks he’d take out of the coffee can she kept tucked in the kitchen cabinet.
He did well in school. He had a good brain, comported himself with absolute politeness. And used the trust he’d carefully built to run short cons on students and teachers alike.
He had a knack for computers and, honing it, destroyed his eighth-grade history teacher’s life.
Bastard gave him a B-minus!
The hacking proved remarkably simple once he got going. Loading up Mr. Stockman’s home computer with child porn had presented a challenge he’d accepted.
Stockman lost his job, his wife, and his children and did six years in a federal pen.
There’s your B-minus, asshole.
His speech as valedictorian at his high school graduation brought his mother—and others—to tears. He accepted a scholarship to Michigan State. Though he’d had several colleges to choose from, he’d claimed he needed to stay close to home, near his mother in Detroit, so he could drive back regularly to help her.
He did so, faithfully, waiting until the spring of his second semester to make her his first kill.
A shock! A tragedy! The senseless murder of a forty-one-year-old woman during a break-in of her rattrap of a rental house while her only son, her loving and devoted son, slept ninety miles away at college.
Her nineteen-year-old son, who’d broken to pieces at her funeral. And at nineteen, of age, clear of any risk of foster homes or legal guardians, he’d tasted freedom.
He cashed in her life insurance policy, one he’d convinced her to take out—only fifteen dollars a month for peace of mind—and Gavin Rozwell, a natural-born psychopath, hit the road.
He thrived.
For a while he just traveled, lived high. But the insurance money couldn’t last forever.
He ran simple cons for a while, and that proved fun and profitable. Then he moved to identity theft, and that brought more profit and satisfaction.
But it lacked a genuine thrill. No big kick. No wild buzz.
So while he traveled, he planned, he plotted, and found his true calling.
He knew he killed his mother over and over with the termination of each mark. He’d aced his psyche courses, after all. But so what? He enjoyed it, each time, every time. Ending them, looking into their shocked eyes when he choked the life from them, brought back the moment of looking into his mother’s.
Who said you can’t go home again?
And it served as the culmination of the thrill, the pleasure of taking everything they valued first, just the way his father had taken everything his mother had valued.
Well, except for him, of course.
Now, on a lovely spring morning, going by Oliver Salk, he sat on the terrace of his hotel suite in Maui, taking in the air, the view while he sipped his second cup of coffee.
In the twelve years since he’d murdered his mother, he’d lived well, lived high. The quarter-million term policy had given him the means and the opportunity to pursue the lifestyle he’d been born for.
He lifted his cup, toasted. “Thanks, Mom.”
He’d earned it, just as he’d earned every penny since, because itwaswork, and work that required time, skill, brains. The weeks, often months of research and planning took a toll. Then add in the expense of maintaining his looks while changing them just a bit along the way, the cost of acquiring new identities and the wardrobe to suit them.
Some of the marks expected sex, something he’d honestly never enjoyed. But he considered it the cost of doing business.
