Page 54 of A Talent for Murder

“I’ll be dead then. What will I care?” I said.

He said, “It’s nice to think about what people will write about me after I’m gone. I’ll have killed a hundred people and gotten away with it, and everyone will be looking for the reason that I did it. Was it his parents? Did something go wrong in his childhood? Was it a sexual thing? And it’s none of those.”

“You kill people because you can,” I said.

He smiled. “See, you get it.”

“I’ve killed people, too,” I said.

He tilted his head, still smiling. “Have you? You’re not just telling me that because you think it’s what I want to hear?”

“No, I’m telling you because it’s the truth, and seeing as you’re either going to kill me or I’m going to find some way to kill you, it doesn’t matter if you know.”

“Who have you killed?” he said.

“How old were you when you murdered your grandfather? I know you told me, but I’ve forgotten.”

“I was eleven.”

“I was fourteen when I first killed someone. His name was Chet, and he was one of my parents’ summer guests, an artist.”

“He was a pervert,” Ethan said, not asking, and leaned in.

“He was a pervert,” I said. “He hadn’t done anything to me yet, but he was thinking about it. I killed him to protect myself.”

“How did you get away with it?”

I told him the whole story, about luring Chet to the well and pushing him in, and how I’d packed up his things to make it look like he’d left our guesthouse. I told the story as truthfully as I could tell it.

“That’s quite a story,” Ethan said when I’d finished. “Now you’re going to tell me how much you enjoyed killing him, right?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “It was a lot of work, and I’d rather have been reading, to be honest. There’s a big difference between us. I’ve killed people because I don’t mind killing. There’s probably always been versions of me running throughout history. I’d be the one in the village who was tasked with drowning the bag of kittens when there were too many of them. Someone has to do it, so give the job to the person who isn’t skittish. This is a bad example, because I’m not sure I could actually drown kittens, but killing Chet was not a problem for me. I didn’t enjoy it, though. I’ve never enjoyed killing anyone.”

“Who else have you killed?”

“I’m tired of talking,” I said, hoping to end the conversation while he was still interested in talking with me. “I’m just tired, actually. Maybe I could lie down, and you could tell me about all the people you’ve killed.”

“It’s a long list.”

“Tell me about some of them. Tell me about the people you killed trying to frame Alan Peralta.”

He told me his stories, and I listened. I could feel the joy in his voice, not the joy that he had taken in killing people but the joy he was taking in telling me the details, telling me how clever he had been. I was particularly interested in what he told me about the murder of Nora Johnson down in Fort Myers, Florida, how he’d killed her right next to Alan Peralta.

After he’d spoken for a while, I said, “It seems clear to me that after you killed your grandfather you discovered that you liked it.”

“Why do you assume that?”

“Because you’ve kept doing it, and you kill strangers, people who have done nothing to you, or, presumably, the world. It’s obviously something you like.”

He lowered his brows a little and I thought he was thinking about what I’d just said, as though it had never really occurred to him. “I do enjoy killing people,” he said at last. “I’m not a psychopath, though. I don’t love to see blood spurt from people and hear screams or things like that. I just like it as a game. It’s hunting, I suppose.”

“You don’t think hunters get off on the act of killing?”

“Hunters are sick people. They’re playing a game that is far too easy. When I kill someone, I’m compelled to do it in a way that will ensure I never get caught. Do you know how hard that is?”

“I do,” I said, as I lay back down on top of the cot. I really was tired, but I was also thinking that it made sense to fade out of the conversation while I still had Ethan’s interest.

“Killing is hard, but you know that.”

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