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It hadn't hurt as much as he thought it would when his wife asked for a divorce. And there had been no terrible heartbreak or feelings of loss when they had signed the divorce papers in her attorney's office. Back in those days, there had only been unimpressive sadness… a struggle to even find a reason to get out of bed in the mornings. The true anger hadn't come until a bit later when the first headaches had really started to take him out.
James Dickerson had remained in the house he and his wife had purchased together just two weeks after they were married back in 2010. And from those first few months, James had always felt that the lives they were sharing together weren't quite enough for her. Pamela hadn't been a snob by any stretch of the imagination, but there was something about the way she would talk to him or even look at him sometimes that made him feel inferior. He spent a lot of his time feeling inferior... that he wasn't enough for her. And when she left, she had somehow made him feel that living in their house by himself was an enormous step-down.
In the two years that passed, while he had struggled with the tumor and the sicknesses and pain that came with it, he had kept track of her. She'd moved to Baltimore with her sister for a few months, but it ultimately came back to the Richmond area. From what she had gathered on her Facebook feeds and things he managed to hear from mutual friends, she'd come back because her old employer had offered her another job—a better-paying job, at that.
When the headaches had gotten very bad, and he had started thinking of manageable ways to kill himself, James had reached out to Pamela. The conversation had gone smoothly at first, her voice familiar yet distant over the phone. But it came back around to the same old thing. She'd asked him if he had changed his mind about getting treatments even though she surely knew it was probably too late if you considered them.
When he told her he still felt the same, she had laid into him. He was glad it had happened on the phone because had they been face to face, he was pretty sure he would have killed her then. No one had ever spoken so harshly to him. And though he could hear the pain and hurt in her voice as she tore him down, something in him had unlocked. The anger he had felt and done his best to curb became this whole new creature. For a while, he had learned how to bring it to the forefront when the headaches and sickness were at their worst. He had used the anger as a blanket of sorts, a denial of what the headaches in weakness meant.
And then, one day, when the pain was at its worst, and he wondered if it might be his final day alive, he understood that he needed to release the anger somehow. And that was how he'd started it all.
He thought about that day now as he slid on his sunglasses and pocketed the keys to the small apartment he had been renting out for the past month. When he had decided to start releasing his anger through murder, something about staying in the house he had shared with Pamela felt wrong. He would go back there from time to time just to get some rest around familiar spaces. After killing Dr. Matthews, he'd even gone back to get the blood out of his clothes and hair.
But for the most part, head stayed in this apartment, hiding away in the darkness and planning out the last few weeks of his life. He almost wished he hadn't killed the nurse, Donna Newsom.He hated her because she had brought him back from his suicide attempt, but at the same time, he was now beginning to understand that she had done him a favor. He supposed he had tried to deny that Pamela needed to die, too. He didn't understand it until after the fact, but the suicide attempt had been more than just a way to escape the pain. It had been his way of trying to ignore the fact that he wanted Pamela dead. He didn't think he had it in him. Or, rather, he hadn't thought he had it in him before being brought back from the suicide attempt.
As he stepped outside into the afternoon sun, he felt an approaching doom. Pamela would be the last one... the end of it all. After that, he supposed he would try killing himself again. He didn't have a gun, and with his luck, any news he tried to fashion wouldn't hold, or whatever beam he hung himself from would break. Maybe he'd go downtown and find a way onto the roof of one of those high rises.
But all of that would come later. For now, there was Pamela. Like the doctors and the nurse, he had studied her. He had followed her and learned her schedule. He knew where she lived and that on Fridays, she left her cozy desk job at the bank around 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon. She usually rolled into her apartment between 2:45 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.. It depended on whether or not she stopped by the little tea shop five blocks away from her apartment building.
Even with the sunglasses on, the sun seemed to burn his eyes. It sent a spike of pain directly through his head, and for a moment, he thought he could actually feel the shape of the tumor pressing down on everything: nerve centers, rational thought, morality,everything.
She lived in Chesterfield, which was a twenty-three-minute drive from his dank little apartment. He had clocked it at least ten times. Twenty-three minutes wasn’t so bad. He could stomach that much time in the bright light of day if it meant bringing this sad and bloody chapter to an end.
He thought of the knife beneath the passenger seat—a knife he had selected specifically for the job. It was a dull butcher’s knife, the same knife Pamela had used to cut up chicken breasts and roasts….one of a million memories she’d left in their house. It would be a special little touch. Using a knife would be delicate, almost intimate—a far cry from how he’d bludgeoned the others, using a hammer in all three cases.
He drove to her apartment in a daze. His head felt numb from the pain and the sun, his eyes feeling like they might melt right into his skull. The cars, streets, buildings and trees and people that he passed by were just blurs. Even the road in front of him didn't seem quite real. There was a hazy quality to it as if he were looking at the horizon along a brutally hot desert floor.
At some point, he started crying and had no clear idea as to why. He was pretty sure it had nothing to do with what he was moments away from doing to Pamela. When he thought of that, his heart seemed to skip a few beats, and he was filled with excitement and bloodlust. The sadness was, he supposed, a product of knowing that his work was nearly done, and if he decided to do so, he could end everything afterward.
He had reached the turn into her apartment complex before he was even aware of it. He came upon it so quickly that he had to slam on his brakes just to make the turn. A horn blared out from behind him, and in his already aching head, it sounded like the detonation of a nuclear bomb. James made the turn and felt a flutter of anticipation in his stomach when he saw Pamela’s car parked directly in front of her apartment.
He found a visitor spot several spaces down and parked his car. There was no hesitation of any kind as he reached under the passenger seat. He made no real attempts to conceal the knife as he got out of the car and walked directly to his ex-wife's door. When he raised his hand and knocked, he was smiling and weeping at the same time, and all the while, the wall of unending pain continued to throb in his head as if it were applauding him and urging him on.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Despite Rachel’s growing excitement, there was also a growing sense of defeat that was trying to overcome everything. There was no movement on the search for Dickerson’s car and no results on the APB. She knew that to expect results in such a small window of time was a bit in heard of, but she felt that so much hinged on those things.
Probably because you’re now hyper-aware that this is the last time you’re going to be part of a case,she thought.
But that was yet another thought she knew she had to keep out of her mind. She was already too beginning to worry that she would not be back home in time for Paige to get off the bus. In the grand scheme of things, it seemed like a silly thing to worry about. But things were different now. Six weeks ago, Paige’s bus schedule would have been incredibly low on her list of things to care about. But right now, as Jack sped toward Pamela Dickerson 's address, it seemed to be the one thing her entire world was revolving around.
It was actually a surreal feeling... to know that they could be this close to capturing their killer but somehow more worried about getting her daughter off the bus. In a strange way, it made her heart swell with love and in a way, she didn't understand and was sure she would need to process much more in the future; it made her all the more certain that she did indeed want to go through with chemotherapy.
It was exciting. It was encouraging. There was a nervous energy that began to buzz within her, and she had no idea where the charge was coming from—maybe from the absolute peace and certainty of her chemo decision or maybe in knowing that, finally, she was going to be capable of getting her priorities straight.
Of course, it did seem rather contradictory to come to these conclusions while she was on a case she had no business being a part of.
The nervous excitement that continued to swell inside of her had her reaching for her phone as Jack closed in on the address. With less than a mile remaining, Rachel pulled back up the pictures she had taken in Dickerson 's house. She had saved the most pertinent ones to their own folder, so it took her no time at all to find the image of the auto insurance document containing his license plate number. She kept it pulled up as Jack came barreling to the turn and made his way into the parking lot.
He coasted along as they looked for Apartment 133. Rachel kept her eyes open for a car of the same make and model as what was listed on the insurance documents—a silver Ford Focus. She spotted one after just a few seconds, and it just happened to be at the same moment Jack angled their car into an available parking spot.
Rachel read the license plate number on the car, and it was a match. She double-checked just to make sure, and when she saw that she made no mistake, she began to open the passenger side door before Jack had properly stopped the car.
“That Focus… that’s him,” she said. “That’s Dickerson!”
Jack cursed under his breath as he got out of the car and started rushing toward Apartment 133. Rachel noticed that there was a single moment when he hesitated and looked back at her. That old, familiar concern was still in his eyes, but he didn't say anything. Perhaps he understood the urgency of the moment or that it would be a waste of time and breath to even ask her to sit this one out. Whatever it was, she stayed a few steps behind him as he came to the sidewalk that ran in front of the apartments. Dickerson 's car was in a spot just three spaces away from Pamela 's apartment. As far as Rachel was concerned, that alone told the story of what was currently happening.
Jack was knocking on the door as soon as Rachel caught up to him. Right away, there was a response—and it wasn’t a promising one.
