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“If I show you a video of him doing it, will you help me then?”
He considers that.
“We don’t have time,” I say, desperation edging my voice.
He looks at me suspiciously. “What’s in it for you? Why are you doing this?”
“Because I care about Tamara, and because every minute that passes, my brother is hurting her.” I allow emotion to leak into my voice; I need to be convincing. I don’t have to fake the fury and panic that roughens my words. “You think I’m a bad guy? My brother is the love-child of the Marquis de Sade and Vlad the Impaler.”
“Get me the video.”
I grab the pair of crutches that are leaning on my desk, limp out of my office and down the hall to my bedroom, where I open a wall safe and remove a USB. I shove the USB into my pocket.
I limp back and jam it into my laptop.
“What the hell happened to you? Your brother do that?” Carter is staring at my bandaged nose, and he flicks a glance at my foot.
“Yes,” I lie smoothly. “And then he took Tamara.”
I turn the laptop to face him and play the video, which was taken in a seedy motel room where Baxter had the motel clerk on his payroll. I impersonated a repairman and put a camera in an air duct.
The teenage boy is face down, tied hand and foot, screaming and crying as Baxter violates him with a dildo the size of an elephant dong. Poor, impotent Baxter.
Baxter reaches for the sharp knife on the night table. I watch with flat affect, uncaring. The boy is dead, nothing to be done about it, and he was nothing to me. Baxter was a problem. I took care of the problem.
“Turn it off!” Carter yells, his eyes practically bulging out of his head. “Fuck! Fucking hell!” He grabs me by the shoulder. “Tell me you killed him.Tell me you killed him!”
I shrug his hand off irritably and turn off the video. I’m not a fan of being touched, unless it’s by a woman I’m fucking, and even then I do most of the touching. “He and I met up in the woods,” I say. “He won’t be ass-raping any more boys.”
It takes him a few moments to compose himself, and I struggle not to snap at him.
“Tell me what you know so far,” he says warily. He flicks a horrified glance at the laptop, then looks away, grimacing. I can see he’s still shaken up by the video. Thank God I’m not like that. How would I ever get anything done if I was a weepy, sentimental little bitch who cried every time someone got a boo-boo?
“Tell me why your brother took Tamara Bennett, and what you know that might help me track him down.” He grits out the words. “And I’ll tell you if I think I can help.”
I start talking fast. Seconds count. “My twin brother, Charlemagne, was being held in a mental institution in California called the Blackthorne Institute for the last six years. Or rather, five and a half. He escaped about six months ago, as best I can tell. He blames me for the fact that they kept him there.”
“Why?” Carter interrupts.
“He’s crazy. Paranoid. He’s always blamed me for anything that went wrong.” I’m certainly not going to tell Carter the truth. “From what I understand, he’s concocted some idea that I was conspiring with Dr. William Barnard, the CEO of the Blackthorne Institute, to keep him locked up there.” Nobody will ever find proof; all my payments were from shell companies to an offshore account that can’t be traced to Dr. Barnard. “Since then, he’s been staying in New York City at least part of the time, impersonating me and sabotaging my company.”
“This sounds like something from one of my wife’s shitty soap operas.” He pauses, mutters something that sounds like, “Sorry, Valentina,” and crosses himself. Actually, crosses himself. This is a man of faith. A man who still believes in a higher power, and not only that, one who stands for ultimate good.
For the first time in my life, a faint wisp of envy drifts through me. What would it be like to have that kind of comfort? Would it lend me strength? Would I feel less isolated? But the practical reality is, I’ll never know. I don’t believe in good and evil. My world is a cruel Darwinian jungle of survival of the fittest, of predators devouring prey.
I pull up yet another video for him, this one of my brother pacing around his enormous padded room. I paid for him to be imprisoned in comfort. He had books, he had movies, he had a closed-circuit computer. Apparently, he didn’t appreciate those special touches.
“That’s him. His name is Charlemagne, but I’m sure he’ll be going under something else now. As you can see, he looks exactly like me.”
Carter stares at the screen. “Why was he in the mental institution?”
“He had a public mental breakdown and stabbed a stranger to death at a coffee shop. Used a ballpoint pen. Broke a police officer’s jaw, shattered another one’s eye socket. He was taken into custody and placed under a psychiatric hold.”
Charlemagne’s breakdown was a hundred percent my doing. He was living in California at the time, under an assumed name of course. Only a week had passed since he’d killed the last of the social workers who’d left us to be tortured as children. The social workers had been in Oregon, where we grew up. It was still all over the news.
But I knew there were other people he could find to blame. Police who had come out to the cabin and just made a cursory inspection. Their bosses. Their bosses’ bosses.
Would he ever stop killing? I knew I couldn’t control my urge to kill, so why would he?
