Page 5 of Still See You Everywhere

“Big lie. You knew they’d leave. That’s an excuse for what you did, but not your motive. You wanted something, needed something way more personal than that to butcher eighteen strangers.”

Keahi stills. She tilts her head to the side, studies me all over again. And for just a moment, her beautifully sculpted face loses its cold veneer. Her eyes remain dark pools, but they’re no longer sheened in ice. Her mask slips, and behind it…

I have to look away. Her pain is less an emotion than a primal scream. It slices to the bone, too awful to behold. I have seen grief in many forms, but I’ve never encountered anguish as terrible as this.

“I am empty,” she states softly. “When I am standing behind them, holding my knife, knowing their lives now belong to me, I feel less empty. The pulse on a man’s neck, racing beneath my fingertips. The feel of his blood, pouring hot and thick down my arms. The last choking sound he makes before crumpling at my feet… I need it. Without it, I would have nothing at all.”

Twanow’s pen punches through the legal pad.

I decide never to ask a serial killer about her motivation ever again.

“You’ve lost someone.” I’ve heard enough to fill in the pieces. “You want me to find them.”

“My baby sister. You must locate her. I need to know that she’s safe and sound. This is my dying wish. You have three weeks to get it done.”

She smiles again, triumphant and arrogant, and filled with quiet menace.

I go with the obvious answer. “No.” Then I sit back with some triumph and arrogance of my own.

CHAPTER 2

YOU WOULD DENY A DYING woman—” Keahi leans forward, features already darkening. I wonder how fast the guards can move. “How dare—”

“Stop it!” Twanow slaps the table, startling both of us. Keahi and I both blink in surprise. We’d already dismissed Ms. Idealistic from our conversation. Our mistake.

“You came.” Twanow turns her attention to me first. “You responded to my note by spending nearly twelve hours on a Greyhound bus. That must mean you have some interest.”

“Curiosity, yes. Interest, TBD.”

Keahi’s turn. Twanow pins her client with the same gaze she just used on me. “You are a woman about to be put to death due to your own horrible actions. You don’t get to make demands of others now.”

“Feisty, aren’t you?”

“Stop. Just stop it. With the exhausting displays and endless manipulations. Three weeks, Keahi. That’s it. Three weeks left here on earth. You really want to find your sister, gain some sense of closure? Then cease with the drama and get down to business.”

I take it all back. I’m incredibly impressed by young gun Victoria Twanow after all.

Since I hadn’t lied about my curiosity, it’s easy enough to play along. “Tell me about your sister. Her name?”

“We called her Lea, but her secret Hawaiian name from our mother was Leilani, or heavenly child. She was a miracle baby, born fourteen years after me. There’d been other pregnancies in between, but none of them…” Keahi rolls a white-garbed shoulder. “From the very beginning, Lea was different. Happy. Sweet. Almost… sparkly. She laughed all the time. Offered up hugs and kisses just because. Would break into this huge smile every time she saw me even if it had been only five minutes before. My mother loved her best. She would spend hours in the kitchen brushing out her hair and plaiting it into elaborate braids. I understood. I loved Lea best, too. And the kitchen was the safest place for her; Daddy rarely ventured there.”

Keahi regards me seriously. “I am my father’s daughter. But Lea was my mother’s child.”

I get the picture. “What happened?”

“In the beginning, it was easy to keep Lea away from my daddy. He had no interest in a baby. But as she grew older, could toddle about, of course she came to his attention more and more. Daddy had no patience for sweet and kind. The sound of laughter would throw him into a rage. It was his nature. Anything light and pure must be beaten into something dark and twisted.”

“He beat her, too,” I fill in. “Like you, like your mother.”

“Not if I was around.” Keahi raises her chin. “If I saw him lift a hand, I got there first. He wanted to beat the shit out of me, what did I care? Nothing that hadn’t happened before. By seventeen, I met my father hate for hate. The more he beat me, the more I defied him. The more I bled, the more I promised to make him bleed. The nights I lay awake, picturing every horrible, sadistic thing I would do to him…”

“You murdered all those other men in lieu of killing your father?” I ask drolly.

That curl of her lips again. “How do you know I didn’t?”

“Keahi,” Twanow warns, but she doesn’t need to continue. I’m already making a note to never ask questions I don’t want the answers to.

“My mother was no match for him,” Keahi states flatly. “Weak. Small. A tiny little mouse that spent her days scurrying about to fulfill his every demand, while keeping her head down and lips sealed. Sometimes, when he was away, I would hear her sing softly in Hawaiian. When I was young, I wanted more. When I grew older, I wished she would just shut up already. But then Lea came, and not only did Lea like her singing, Lea would sing along; I’d come upon them in the kitchen, humming these little duets. It was… painful.” Not the word I was expecting. Keahi clarifies: “The sound of hope in a house where no such thing exists.”

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