“Where’s Alex? Alex Montero. He’s one of the officers who’s supposed to be on tonight. Where is he?”
She shook her head so fast her long poker-straight hair fluttered around her head like fringes. “He’s not on. He didn’t check in when he came on his shift.”
“So he’s not working?” I asked, panicking even more.
Andie shuffled through a stack of papers on the desk in front of her and read through them, shaking her head again. “No. I don’t have him out tonight.”
I stumbled into her office like a drunk fresh off a bender and grabbed the papers from her hand. My eyes didn’t focus, though, so I couldn’t understand a thing written on them. Throwing them back onto her desk, I tried to keep calm even as my worst fears were coming true.
“Where is Derek? The chief, where is he?”
“He doesn’t work nights unless it’s a serious emergency. I don’t know where he is. Home, maybe?”
“Call him and tell him I need to speak to him now. Tell him to call Poppy on her cell phone. If he asks, it’s an emergency!”
I didn’t give Andie time to ask me any questions and tore out of the building to get to my car. Alex hadn’t shown up for work, which meant he was still at his house, so I’d get him there.
At least I hoped I would.
The light in Alex’s living room glowed a soft yellow through the closed blinds. I stood on his front porch as my heart pounded and my brain spun from fear at what would happen next. I knocked hard on his front door, my adrenalin pumping through me, and I waited to see his face appear in front of me.
“Alex, open the door. I need to talk to you!” I yelled.
But he didn’t answer. I thought about walking around to the back door, but his car parked in his driveway and the light on inside told me he was in there, so once again, I knocked hard enough so wherever he was in the house he’d hear me.
The hair on the back of my neck stood at attention with every second I waited for the door to open, and I looked behind me as I stood in the darkness, feeling like some kind of danger lurked nearby. I’d always hated how secluded his house was out here in the middle of nowhere. During the day, it was a beautiful place, but at night it frightened me.
Finally, as my imagination began to spin out of control with thoughts of deranged killers and wild animals attacking me as I stood defenseless on that porch, the door slowly opened but Alex wasn’t there. Was he injured and only able to open the door before he collapsed behind it?
Quickly, I entered the house but saw no sign of him as I scanned the living room. How had the door opened then?
Before I could look behind it to answer my question, I felt a wet hand cover my mouth. I fought against the person’s hold on me, but it was no use. They were much stronger and determined to force me into the kitchen.
They threw me on the floor, and I saw why Alex hadn’t reported for work or answered the door. There, next to me, he lay in a pool of his own blood from a knife wound to his stomach, his eyes closed. Horrified, I cradled his face and prayed he was still alive.
“Alex, open your eyes. Open your eyes and look at me. It’s Poppy. I’m here. Oh, open your eyes, Alex. Please!”
“I know how to use a knife, dear Poppy. It’s one of the few things I’m skilled at. His wounds won’t kill him. He’s just in incredible pain for the moment. But when I want him to die, I’ll use this knife one more time and he’ll die.”
That voice so familiar and now so evil echoed behind me, and when I turned to look at the man’s face, I saw what I had feared as I sped all the way there from St. Clair’s office. Those eyes that had made me so uneasy when they looked at me that day as I sat with him hoping for help to find who had killed Bethany now flashed hatred like I’d never seen before.
“Alex told you when we first met that I was a knife expert. Didn’t you listen?”
“Why did you do this to him?” I sobbed as I turned back to look at the peaceful expression on Alex’s face as he lay there next to me.
Ken Bryer didn’t answer, but I didn’t need him to. Why he’d done it didn’t matter at that moment. That he said Alex’s wounds weren’t fatal did.
“Alex, open your eyes for me. It’s Poppy. I’m here. I just need you to open your eyes for me.”
“See, that’s the problem with you women. It’s always you need. You need him to give you a baby. You need him to be more serious about the relationship. You need him to live. Need, need, need.”
Ken’s voice verged on manic, his words expelled from his mouth with such venom I knew it was just a matter of time before he took that knife to me. His hatred for the women in Alex’s life meant he wouldn’t spare me like he had his friend, so if I could just get him to confess to what he’d done, maybe Alex would live and see him behind bars even if I couldn’t.
Lowering my mouth to Alex’s ear, I whispered what I hoped wouldn’t be the last words I’d say to him. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’m going to try to get him to admit he killed Bethany. He’s going to kill me. I know it as sure as I know my name, so listen to what he says so if you live you can put him away for what he’s done.”
Alex’s eyes fluttered open for just a moment, and I saw he’d heard me, so I whispered, “I love you. If I don’t get to tell you that again, I want you to know that at least.”
Groaning, he said in a faint voice, “Keep him talking. Get him to confess. Trust me.”
“No more of you two lovebirds sharing secrets. Time for you to go the way the others went, dear little Poppy,” Ken said low and ominously in my ear as he tugged me by my hair across the kitchen floor and slammed me into a cabinet.
My head throbbed where it hit the wood, but I had to try to do as Alex asked, so I said, “At least explain why you killed Bethany before you kill me. Why kill her? What did she do to you?”
“Because Alex introduced her to me.”
“That was it?” I asked in shock at his answer.
His pale blue eyes flashed rage at my question, but he held back from striking me, clenching his fists tightly at his side. “He brought her to lunch—the lunch he was supposed to have just with me. She was all over him, just like Helena used to be every time she intruded on our time together. I could tell this one loved him too, but I knew he didn’t care for her because he kept pushing her away instead of fawning all over her.”
“You killed her because she loved him?” I asked, barely able to form those horrible words.
Ken answered my question as calmly as if he was telling me the time. “I killed both the women who loved him.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alex’s face as Ken’s confession sunk in. He’d killed Helena that night behind the restaurant and all these years he’d pretended to be Alex’s friend knowing he was responsible for taking away the woman he loved.
“Oh my God! You killed them both?” I cried out as Alex closed his eyes and turned away in agony.
“Of course. I couldn’t let them live. They had to go.”
“Why? He cared for them. You were his friend. Why would you want to see him so miserable?” I asked, not even sure I wanted to hear this madman’s answer. Whatever twisted logic he’d employed to justify killing two people wouldn’t make sense to me anyway.
“He cared for me, not them,” he answered. “Not them.”
All of a sudden it all made sense. Amazed at the clarity his answer had given me, I said, “You love him. That’s what this is about. You love him and couldn’t stand to see him with anyone else.”
I look over at Alex lying still and wished he didn’t have to hear what I was about to goad Ken into telling me. I didn’t have a choice, though.
“How long have you been in love with him?”
Smiling like he was thinking back on a fond memory, he looked down at Alex and said, “Since the first moment he came into my morgue.”
“But he’s not gay. He wouldn’t be with you. You had to know that.”
Ken snapped his head around to fac
e me and barked, “This isn’t about sex, you provincial little bitch! True love has very little to do with sex. It has to do with one soul meeting another and seeing what they’ve been looking for all their lives.”
As much as I wished I could honestly disagree with him about that, I couldn’t. Somewhere in that mind filled with homicidal craziness was a tiny spot of romantic idealism that made him love Alex.
I needed to get him to tell me the details of how he killed Helena and Bethany, so I silently asked Alex for his forgiveness for what I was about to do and said, “I bet you planned out both their murders to the tiniest detail. You’re that kind of person. You wouldn’t leave any stone unturned when it came to doing it right.”
Picking up the bloody knife he’d left on the counter after cutting Alex, he waved it in front of his face like some kind of murderous version of a metronome, all the while staring down at me with a look that told me I didn’t have long before he used his deadly weapon on me.
“You think you’re so clever, don’t you, Poppy McGuire? Is it because Alex said you have good instincts? I nearly vomited when he told me that. Like some small town nobody like you could have better instincts than he has. You want me to tell you the whole story because you think you’re going to be able to pin the murders on me, but you forget one thing. You two will be dead, so who will know?”
I sat up straight and pressed my back to the wood cabinet behind me, my head throbbing less now so I had my wits about me again. With a smile, I taunted him to reveal everything about his crimes, sensing he was the type of murderer who wanted to brag about what he’d done.
“Humor me then. If I’m going to die, at least give me one last request. Tell me how you did it.”
Ken stepped toward me and nodded before looking over at Alex still lying motionless on the floor on the other side of the kitchen. “He’s going to hear it too. Are you sure you want to put him through that?”
“In a few minutes, it won’t matter what either one of us heard. We’ll be dead and that’s it. So at least let me hear how it all went down with them.”
“I’m surprised not to hear you say you and he will be meeting in some fictitious afterlife in heaven where all your dead friends and relatives hang out waiting for you,” he said, raising his eyebrows in surprise.
“I’m small town, but that doesn’t mean I believe in heaven,” I lied even as I prayed to God I hoped would save me and Alex from going to that very place shortly.
Ken seemed impressed by my lack of belief in an afterlife and leaned against the counter a few feet away from me. Nodding his head, he smiled. “Very well. I’ll give you this last request. I only hope you appreciate my handiwork, especially with your friend Bethany.”
He stopped to take a breath and knelt down next to Alex. Pushing his dark hair off his face, he said something I couldn’t hear before standing again to begin his story.
“Helena knew me as a friend, so when I showed up behind Manger that night, of course she opened the door for me. She thought we were the closest of friends, even though I’d fantasized about the way I’d kill her for weeks before that night. It took nothing to slit her throat, and then I threw her on the ground to watch her bleed to death. It all happened so fast. I’d never killed anyone before, but I’d seen victims on my table every day for years. I never realized how fast life left the body until that night.”
He stopped for a moment before continuing. “The homeless guy who hung out in that alley nearly shit himself when he saw, and I worried that he would tell someone until he showed up on my table three months later. Without Helena to feed him every night, he had to return to stealing and he was found dead from a gunshot to the chest. Problem solved.”
Slowly, as he told me how he murdered her, I inched myself toward Alex until we were only a few feet away from each other. So enthralled with his own story, Ken didn’t seem to notice or care.
“Weren’t you afraid Alex would be charged with her murder since the husband is always the first one they look to when a wife is murdered like that?”
I asked the question like nothing about where I sat had changed, and for a moment, Ken looked down at me like he knew there was something different but couldn’t put his finger on it. Then he appeared to forget anything about it and answered, “He didn’t do it, so how would they charge him for her murder?”
“You never know. It was a bold move. You risked everything, but in the end, you got what you wanted.”
He smiled that evil grin for a second and then it faded away as he remembered he didn’t get what he’d hoped for. “For a little while. He was all mine, but then he said he had to move away from the city because there was too much haunting him there.”
“You saw him grieve every day and knew you’d done that. It takes a strong mind to be able to handle that.”
I hated complimenting him, but I had a feeling he wanted someone to say he’d done well, no matter how twisted his actions had been. I also suspected he wanted Alex to see what he’d done had been all for him.
“But you did it because you loved him, right?”
Ken nodded, and with a tilt of his head, stared down at Alex with what I imagined was love for him. “I was willing to be patient. I knew he needed to put the past out of his mind, and what better way to do it than move to the middle of nowhere and start over? I knew him as well as I knew myself, so I wasn’t afraid he’d find new people to go with his new life. That wasn’t who he was anymore.”
Alex stirred next to me, but I needed him to remain silent, and for all intents and purposes, not there, so I touched his arm and quietly said, “Shhhh.”
“But then another one of them popped up. This one was even worse than the first one. I blamed myself, though. I’d given him too much time alone out here.”
“So once you realized another woman cared for Alex, you had to kill her too?”
“Helena’s had been more spur of the moment, but this one was planned out to the second. I heard from Alex that they weren’t together anymore, but I knew that would only be temporary. She’d find some way to insinuate herself back into his life, so I had to do it.”
I gently stroked Alex’s arm to let him know I was there with him and prodded Ken to continue his terrible tale. “It was you who went to Carson’s florist and sent the flowers to Bethany, wasn’t it?”
Waving the knife around again, he smiled. “Of course it was. I knew she’d think Alex sent them and would call him, thinking he wanted to get back together. When she went to her car to go to see him, I’d kill her. But then he showed up there and fought with her. She was already upset, but Alex’s usual way of not showing much emotion really sent her over the edge. It’s what they always say. No matter how well you plan these things out, something always comes up. She really wasn’t a terribly stable person, as it turns out. So I had to wait a few hours longer, but I knew she’d eventually go running after him. They always do.”
Bethany had been going to see Alex when Ken killed her.
My stomach roiled at how easily he dismissed Bethany’s feelings for Alex. I could only imagine how confused she must have been to get those flowers and think he wanted to get back together with her after all those weeks of only being able to tell her diary of her love for him and then to have him act like he was there to see her only because she’d asked him to come and not because of the desire the card had promised.
I wanted to lash out and hurt Ken for all that he’d done, but I had no way to do that. Alex lay injured next to me, and without a weapon, I’d be dead before I even got to my feet. He’d slit my throat just like he planned to but before he’d told his whole story, and even though I didn’t understand how Alex intended for anyone to know about what he’d done when we were both dead, I had to keep going and get Ken to tell me everything.
“She must have been beside herself with confusion about how he felt,” I said, hating how true that was.
Puffing out his chest, he no longer merely told the story of how he was Bethany
’s killer but bragged of his prowess at murder, even in the fact of unseen obstacles. “Then her sister left her alone, and the stage was set. The sister had been a tiny snag in my plan, I admit. I would have just killed her too, though. Kill one. Kill two. Whatever. She left her apartment and I planned to get her, but then she had to run back in for something, leaving the car unlocked, so I took my opportunity and jumped into the back seat to wait. I mean, she left the car wide open. It was like providence was smiling down on me. She came out with a book in her hand, and as soon as she settled in and put her seat belt on, I leaned forward and slit her throat before she could say a word. I picked up the book from the passenger seat and grabbed the keys out of the ignition to put the book back inside before coming back out to put the keys in the ignition again. And then I left.”
Morbid curiosity filled my mind at why he bothered to do anything with the book at all, so I asked, “Why put the book in the house? Why not leave it on the seat?”
He nodded his head quickly and crouched down beside me. Pointing the knife toward my face, he explained, “It didn’t belong there, so it had to be put back where it belonged.”
I had no idea what that meant, if it meant anything at all except to him, so I tried to make it look like I understood. Remembering the old adage, I said, “A place for everything and everything in its place.”
“Yes! You do get it!” he said excitedly. “I bet your house is neat like mine, isn’t it? Everything and everyone has a place in this world. Mine is with Alex, but I’m sorry to say you don’t have a place here.”
And in a flash, we’d gone from two people who understood one another to murderer and his next victim. Pulling me by the hair, he thrust my face near Alex’s so close I heard him breathe and behind me Ken said, “I’m going to finally let you watch a woman you care for die. You don’t love her, but I can see you care for her. This is my gift to you.”
Tugging me backwards, he sat me down on the floor in front of Alex and placed the knife to my neck just below my ear. “Open your eyes, Alex. I’ll let you say your goodbyes before I slit her throat.”
The Darkest Hour Page 22