AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Tick-tock, Dick,” she said as she headed for the door.
She was just grabbing the handle when she heard him speak.
“Wait.”
*
If they hadn’t sedated her, she wouldn’t have slept at all that night.
Kallas’s words echoed in her mind all the way to the hospital after the interrogation and resumed again the moment she got up. She replayed them once more as she stood in the shower, letting the warm water massage the twisted muscles in her back.
He had gone through every detail of the crime meticulously, from the moment he’d decided to kill Michaela until he drove off afterward. His description of the murder matched the video he’d taken perfectly.
But it wasn’t the actual killing that made it hard to get the case out of her head. It was Kallas’s demeanor. She still recalled his answer when she asked why he’d killed her.
“You don’t get it,” he’d said as he sat in the interrogation room, his body still coiled in excitement at recalling what he’d done. “I’d seen her movies. I could tell from the bored look in her eyes that she needed something more. So I sought her out. And I found her. We found each other. And it was better than I could have imagined. One time she wore a nurse’s uniform. The next she pretended to be a patient. We used almost every room in the office. It was a delight.”
“So what changed?” Jessie asked him.
“She lied to me.”
“What did she lie about?” Jessie had asked, working hard to keep judgment out of her voice.
“I told her that I would take care of her, that she should stop having dates with those pathetic fans. I also told her that after she’d completed whatever movies she was contracted to do, she should stop shooting them entirely. I would make up her lost income. She said she would make the changes. But she didn’t stop.”
“She still saw other clients?” Jessie prodded.
“Several. I confronted her about it and she acted as if she thought I was kidding. She said I couldn’t possibly be serious. When I told her that I was, she said I was weirding her out and that we couldn’t see each other anymore. That wasn’t right. So I made things right.”
“Richard,” Jessie asked, knowing it would probably be her last question, “looking back, do you feel guilty at all for what you did?”
“For what exactly?” he replied, genuinely perplexed.
“For raping and killing a seventeen-year-old girl, for stabbing her nine times, for ending the life of another person just because she wouldn’t be exactly what you wanted her to be? I almost understand losing yourself in the moment. But afterward, in the days since, have you felt bad at all?”
She pictured Hannah lying on that bed instead of Michaela. The two of them were so alike—troubled, smart girls, damaged by the world but still with promising futures.
Kallas looked at her like she was speaking a foreign language.
“Jessie,” he said slowly, as if he was talking to a child, “she lied to me. She wronged me. She ruined the plans I’d made for us. Why should I feel bad for something she did? Ask her if she felt bad.”
“I can’t,” Jessie reminded him. “She’s dead.”
She turned off the shower, unsure how long she’d been standing there reliving their conversation in her mind. As she wrapped a towel around herself and stepped out, her brain continued to circle around some truth that she couldn’t quite pinpoint. It was right there, at the edge of her consciousness, teasing her.
She closed the shower door and as it clicked shut, something in her mind clicked too. She realized what had been bothering her, the itch she couldn’t quite scratch. She had been imagining Hannah in Michaela’s position, a potential victim of a horrible crime.
But the more she thought about it, the more Hannah reminded her of someone else. The bold, pointless lies told so easily, the utter disregard for anyone’s well-being besides her own, the seeming lack of empathy for those around her.
Hannah reminded Jessie more of Richard Kallas than of Michaela Penn. And though she’d just spent ten minutes in a hot shower, Jessie suddenly felt horribly cold.
