by Chris Carter
Those had been Derek Nicholson’s exact words to Olivia when he confessed to her.
‘Maybe she hit her head or something,’ Scott continued. ‘She couldn’t have died from only a few slaps.’
Olivia looked at Hunter before returning her attention to Scott. ‘Carry on.’
Scott spit out a mouthful of blood. ‘When we realized she was dead, we panicked. We didn’t know what to do. No one was thinking straight. Too much booze and acid. I suggested we just left her there and got the hell out, but Andy said that was no good. The amount of evidence the cops would find in that room and on her body would put us all away for good. We could try cleaning it up, but there were no guarantees. Then Andy came up with a plan.’
Hunter felt his stomach tighten. He knew what that plan would be.
‘Andy went out and brought back several thick plastic sheets, a meat cleaver, a long, thick chain, padlocks, and a large, square metal toolbox. It was big, but not big enough to fit a body.’ Scott paused and looked away.
‘Don’t stop now,’ Olivia said, not allowing the momentum to settle. ‘Tell him what you did.’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ he pleaded.
Olivia slapped him across the face. The gash on his lower lip ripped a little more, sending another spray of blood flying across the room.
Scott shivered, taking in quick gulps of air to steady his body.
‘Tell him.’
‘Nathan had worked part-time in a butcher’s shop. He was good with a meat cleaver,’ Scott said.
Olivia didn’t flinch. She had heard the whole story before.
‘Derek and I couldn’t watch. We went outside while Andy and Nathan did what they had to do. Derek was messed up. He was freaking out about the bit— . . . the woman’s daughter – what would happen to her and all. He was more concerned about her than he was about us. Something to do with him having lost his mother when he was really young. He wanted to go to the cops, but he knew that if he did, we would all go to prison for a fucking long time. He was in his last year of law school. He was engaged to get married in a month’s time. He didn’t want to throw his life away. Besides, if he’d gone to the cops, Andy would’ve killed him. He would’ve killed any of us. He told us all that.’ He paused for breath. ‘When Andy and Nathan were done, all that was left was this chained and padlocked toolbox. My father had a boat, which I had the keys to. So I was left with the job of dumping that box as far off the coast as I could. Andy came with me while the others went home. The box was too heavy. It would’ve never surfaced.’
The last victim, Hunter thought. The one who had disposed of the body.
‘Derek was left with the task of getting rid of the woman’s purse and all her documents.’ Scott’s gaze turned to Olivia. ‘I guess that was how he found you. He never threw the purse away. He kept her things.’
Olivia said nothing.
‘After that night we saw each other less and less, until we just drifted apart. We all moved on with our lives. But we all kept our secret.’
‘Not all of you,’ Olivia said, slamming the butt of Hunter’s gun into the back of Scott’s head, knocking him out cold.
One Hundred and Fifteen
Hunter twitched on the ground again and Olivia aimed the gun at his head. ‘Don’t, Detective. Trust me, I know how to shoot. And from this distance, I won’t miss. If there was one thing my fath—’ She cleared her throat angrily, ‘Derek taught me, it was how to shoot.’
‘My neck hurts. I was just stretching it.’
‘Well, don’t.’
‘OK. I won’t.’
Olivia moved to the left side of the room. ‘You still haven’t told me how you got to me. I know you figured out what I was telling you with my shadow puppets, but how did you figure out it was me?’
‘After I heard the story Jude told me about what happened to her, things started moving in my head. I suspected I had read the second shadow image wrong. It wasn’t a fight, it was a gang rape. I didn’t know Roxy was your mother, but I guessed that, if they had done what they did to Jude and Roxy, there probably were others. Others who, like Roxy, also had a child. And that that child had found out about everything. From the first shadow image you left us, I was certain that the only way that child could’ve found out was through Derek Nicholson. A confession on his deathbed.’
Olivia chuckled angrily. ‘He was able to live with it, but not die with it. How ironic is that?’
Hunter knew how common it was for human beings to endure unspoken guilt throughout their entire lives, but to die with it was something few were prepared to do.
‘For Derek Nicholson to be able to call that child to his home in order to reveal everything,’ Hunter continued. ‘It meant that he had to have somehow kept tabs on who and where that child was. I was running through possibilities in my head when Jude called me again last night. She had remembered the name of Roxy’s child – Levy.’
Olivia twitched on the spot.
‘At first I thought it was a last name, or maybe a male name. It sounded vaguely familiar, but when I looked at the picture your sister had given me of Nicholson and his wife I remembered where I had heard that name before. It was a nickname. Allison had called you by it that day in your house. Not a common nickname for Olivia, but it was your nickname.’
Olivia gave Hunter a melancholic smile. ‘My mother always called me Levy, never Liv, or Ollie, or anything else. I liked it. It was different. Allison was the only other person who called me that.’
‘First I checked your background. You went to medical school.’
Olivia shrugged. ‘UCLA, but in the end I decided I didn’t want to do it. The knowledge came in handy, though.’
She offered nothing else, so Hunter continued.
‘I called someone I know who could access the California Department of Social Services’ database. I found out that Nicholson had adopted you during his first year of marriage. An odd choice for a young couple that had no known problem bearing children. In fact, Nicholson adopted you the same year his wife became pregnant with her daughter, Allison.’
‘So you know that he adopted me out of guilt for what he’d done.’ The anger was back in Olivia’s voice. ‘Guilt for being part of the group of animals who raped and killed my mother. Guilt for allowing it to happen. Guilt for not telling the police.’
Hunter didn’t reply.
‘How could I live with all that knowledge, Robert, can you tell me? Because I struggled with it. He called me to his deathbed to tell me that my whole life had been a lie. I was adopted not into a family who wanted to share their love and care for me, but into a family who wanted to bury their guilt.’
‘I don’t think Derek’s wife knew about what happened,’ Hunter said.
‘It doesn’t matter!’ Olivia spat the words out. ‘He convinced her to take me. He told her that my mother was a drug addict who had left me. He told her that I was this poor kid, unwanted, unloved. But I was loved, and I was wanted, until they took her from me. He was the one who didn’t want me. All he wanted was to lessen the guilty feeling that was eating him inside. I was his daily feel-good pill. His anti-guilt drug. All he had to do was look at me, and in that sick heart of his he would find some peace. He would tell himself everything was OK because he gave the poor hooker’s child a better life. You know what? I never wanted this better life. I was happy. I loved my mother. But he made me believe that she didn’t want me. That she had run away. And for twenty-eight years I hated her for walking out on me.’
Hunter understood now where Olivia’s incredible violence came from. Displaced rage. Twenty-eight years hating her mother for something that she didn’t do. When she learnt the truth, and that she’d been lied to for most of her life, that rage was woken up, gaining a whole new intensity and purpose. Twenty-eight years is a long time to bottle up rage.
A tear ran down Olivia’s cheek and her voice croaked for an instant.
‘I still remember her – my mother. How beautiful she was.
I still remember how we used to play shadow puppets every night when I went to bed. She was so smart at creating them. She could come up with anything – animals, people, angels . . . anything. She didn’t have much money, so I never had any real toys. Our shadow puppet theater was my toy. We would sit for hours making up stories of our own. Creating silly plays against the wall. All we needed was candlelight and our hands. We were happy.’
Hunter closed his eyes for an instant. That was why she had created shadow puppets from her victims’ body parts – a macabre tribute to her mother. Another way to expel her anger.
‘He never played with me, did you know that?’ Olivia said, shaking her head. ‘When I was a kid, he never played with me in the park or anywhere. He never read me a story, or put me on his shoulders, or had pretend tea with me like any father would. I played shadow puppets by myself.’
Hunter couldn’t reply.
‘After he told me, I went home and cried for three days. I had no idea how I could go on living. My life had been a lie, a good deed to allow my father to sleep at night. I was never loved the way a child is supposed to be loved, except for when my mother was alive. And now I knew that all four people who had mutilated her body and thrown her into the ocean like unwanted garbage had gone on to raise their own families, to prosper in their careers – to live without an ounce of remorse for what they’d done. And worst of all, they had gone on living without ever being punished.’
Hunter knew that very few minds wouldn’t break after being faced with what Olivia had been faced with. And the few that didn’t break would certainly be damaged forever.
‘You know as well as I do that there was nothing I could do with that information that would bring justice to those people. It happened twenty-eight years ago. I had no proof, except for the words of a dying man. No action would’ve been taken by the police, the DA, the state, or anyone. No one would’ve believed me. I would just have had to carry on living as I had for the past twenty-eight years.’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t do that, could you?’
Hunter thought back to when his father was gunned down inside that branch of the Bank of America. He wasn’t a cop then. But he remembered his rage. A rage that was still inside him, dormant somewhere. And cop or not, if he came face to face with the people who had shot his father, he would kill them – no hesitation.
‘I came this close to killing myself.’ Olivia brought Hunter’s thoughts back to the room. ‘And then I realized one thing. If I was able to kill myself, then I was able to kill. Full stop. And I decided that, whatever happened, I would have my version of justice. For my mother. She deserves justice.’
For a moment her stare wandered around the room.
‘Everything just came to me like in a dream. As if my mother was there, telling me what to do, guiding my hand. My fath—’ Anger was back on Olivia’s face. ‘Derek Nicholson loved mythology. He was always reading books, quoting passages. It was only fair to make him into a mythological symbol.’ She pulled back and released the slide mechanism on Hunter’s gun, manually loading a round into the chamber.
It was time for the final act.
One Hundred and Sixteen
Hunter looked up at Olivia again. There was no way he would be able to get anywhere near her without her seeing and shooting him. The room was too big, and she was too far away for him to mount any sort of challenge. Plus, he’d been on the floor, in that star-position for too long now. His muscles wouldn’t respond immediately, at least not with enough dexterity.
‘Would you like to see the last sculpture?’ Olivia said. ‘The last shadow puppet? The conclusion to my justice play?’
Hunter placed his chin on the floor again and looked up at her and then at Scott, who was still unconscious. ‘Olivia, don’t. You don’t have to.’
‘Yes I do! For twenty-eight years Derek Nicholson soothed his heart and guilt by taking pity on the poor prostitute’s daughter. For twenty-eight years those assholes lived a life without punishment. It’s my turn to soothe my heart, while I still have one. Get up,’ she ordered.
Hunter hesitated.
‘I said, get up.’ She pointed the gun at him.
Slowly, with all his muscles and joints aching, Hunter got up from the floor.
‘Walk over there.’ She pointed to the left side of the room, just past the pedestal lights. ‘Place your back flat against the wall.’
Hunter did as he was told.
‘See that flashlight on the floor, to your right?’
Hunter looked down and nodded.
‘Pick it up.’
He did.
‘Hold it about chest height and turn it on.’
Hunter paused, trying to understand what was going on.
‘I had to improvise,’ Olivia said. ‘I had something a lot more gruesome and painful in mind – my grand finale – but given the circumstances, this will have to do. I hope you like it. Turn the flashlight on,’ she repeated.
Hunter brought the flashlight to his chest and switched it on.
Olivia stepped out of the way. Behind her, Scott was still out cold on the chair, his head slumped back, exposing his neck. His mouth was open as if he’d fallen asleep in that position and was about to snore. A few feet past him, while he had his face against the ground, Hunter hadn’t noticed that Olivia had attached a thin but rigid piece of wire to the second pedestal lamp, about four-and-a-half feet from the ground. It was around two feet long, and it shot straight out horizontally. Attached to its end was Scott’s severed index finger.
Hunter was confused for a moment, until he saw the shadow image projected onto the far wall. It showed the silhouette of Scott’s head, tilted back, with his mouth open like he was mid-scream. The finger on the wire, a few feet from him, cast a shadow that looked like some sort of crooked cylindrical tube, positioned at an angle. Because of the absence of perceptible depth, it looked like one shadow was right in front of the other. The cylindrical tube was pointing down at Scott’s head-shadow – directly at his open mouth.
Right at that moment, the sound of distant sirens reached them. Hunter had called for backup before entering the warehouse, but from the sound, he knew they were at least three-to-five minutes away. Too long.
Olivia looked at Hunter. Her face displayed reassuring calmness. ‘I knew they were coming,’ she said, pointing the gun at Hunter again. ‘But you being alive when they get here will depend on how fast you can figure this last piece out.’
Hunter kept his eyes on the gun.
‘Don’t look at me. Look at the shadow.’
Hunter concentrated. His first impression was that the whole image looked like someone waiting with his mouth open under some sort of liquid dispenser, ready to drink from it. Was she going to pour something down his throat? Kill him that way? That would be a complete change from her entire MO so far. Confusion was all that was going on inside Hunter’s head.
The shot that came out of the gun in Olivia’s hand sounded like a nuclear explosion. The bullet hit the wall inches from Hunter’s head and he winced defensively, dropping the flashlight.
‘C’mon, c’mon, Robert,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to be the clever one. The experienced cop. Can’t you work under pressure?’
The sirens were getting closer.
‘The shadows,’ she said. ‘Look at the shadows. Read them. ’Cos you’re time is about to run out.’
Hunter picked up the flashlight again. He was looking but he couldn’t see it. What the hell did all that mean?
Bang!
The second shot hit the wall to Hunter’s left. This time even closer to his face. Concrete shrapnel flew in all directions. Some of it grazed Hunter’s cheek, burning and ripping through his skin. He felt warm blood starting to run down his face, but he didn’t let go of the flashlight. His eyes were still on the shadows.
‘I promise you, Detective, the next shot will find your head.’ She took a step closer to him.
Hunter’s brain was trying to cope with the threa
t of dying in the next few seconds, while throwing possibilities around.
From the corner of his eye he saw Olivia aim the gun again.
He couldn’t think.
And then he saw it.
One Hundred and Seventeen
‘Recording,’ he said, as Olivia’s finger tightened on the trigger. The image was showing a microphone pointing down at Scott’s mouth, not a drinks dispenser. ‘You recorded it. While he was telling the story, you recorded the whole thing. A confession.’
Olivia lowered the gun. A smile almost stretched her lips. She raised her left hand, showing Hunter the mini digital-recording device. ‘I recorded them all. I made them tell me what happened every time. The stories are all identical. Their voices are all here, telling how they all took turns beating and raping my mother, before dismembering her, shoving her mutilated body into a box, and dumping her in the ocean. All except Andrew Nashorn. His jaw was broken. He couldn’t speak. But none of it matters anymore.’
Hunter couldn’t think of what to say.
Scott mumbled something incomprehensible and his eyes slowly flickered open.
‘Catch,’ Olivia said and threw the recording device to Hunter.
He caught it in mid-air. He stared at it for a moment, doubtful, before looking back at her.
‘You can keep it,’ she said.
‘This might help, but I won’t lie to you,’ Hunter said. ‘In our less-than-perfect justice system, it won’t make much difference, Olivia.’
‘I know. I already made the difference I wanted to make. I’ve had my justice.’ She gestured towards the recording device in Hunter’s hand. ‘I thought I would send that to the press, expose the whole thing. Not for me – I know what’s going to happen to me – but for my mother.’ Olivia wiped a tear from her eye before it could run down her cheek. ‘She deserved justice. Do whatever you think you should do with it.’ She placed Hunter’s gun on the floor and kicked it towards him.
‘Arrest that fucking bitch,’ Scott yelled from his seat. ‘And get me the fuck out of here, you moron.’ He started jerking his body in his chair. ‘That slut cut my fucking finger off, did you see that? I’m gonna make sure you fry in the chair, you hear me, you motherless bitch. My brother will rip you into little whore pieces in court.’