Page 119 of Little Deaths

Is this what you thought you were getting when you came here to fuck me?she wanted to ask him.Did you think I was a dark princess languishing in a high tower?

Did you ever stop to think that maybe I could be the dragon?

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“So let me get this straight.” Officer Lambert had unbuttoned his shirtsleeves and rolled them up, looking every inch the clichéd fatigued cop.All he needs is a cigarette.“Janus Staal is actually Jason Steel, who is the son of deceased film producer Johnathan Steel, who wanted you dead?”

They were all squeezed into one of those cramped conference rooms. Rafe’s arm was in a sling and he had forty-two stitches in his chest and shoulder. “You’re lucky,” the female doctor told him, while sewing him up. “It went up and out after glancing off bone. If the trajectory had been even slightly different, you might not have a heartbeat.”

“I am lucky,” Rafe said.

Donni hadn’t needed stitches and after the doctor had ascertained that she didn’t have a concussion, they had been released back to the police for questioning. Rafe was wearing a blanket draped over his bare shoulders. They’d had to cut his shirt off to look at the wound.

“Janus is Jason,” Donni said firmly. “I think if you showed a picture of him to Denise Banner at the Old Veranda, she’d be able to confirm that.”

“I don’t see why we have to keep going over this,” Rafe said. His lawyer, listening in on speakerphone, echoed his agreement. It was four in the morning and everyone wanted to go back to sleep. Everyone except Officers Lambert and Corcoran, it seemed.

“Christ.” Lambert rubbed at his eyes before picking up his notepad. “Okay. So Staal—Steel—was after you because he thought you were responsible for the disgrace of his father. Why kill four other people if you were the target?”

“Because they weren’t targets,” said Donni. “They were casualties in his little game. Opal saw him at the funeral. He was taking photographs—you saw some of them at the crime scene. There’s one of me standing in the parking lot, because he was there. He’d snuck in. Opal didn’t recognize him so she had questioned him, like the busybody she was, and told him to get out. I think he was afraid she was going to become a risk, so he followed her home and killed her.

“He killed my housekeeper to get her keys and access to the house, so he could leave even more calling cards, while searching for the perfect opportunity to strike. Apparently Christophe had caught him outside my house, probably after he’d broken in. Jason killed him before he could warn me away.”

“I think he was living in the gauging station,” Rafe said. “Perhaps he was living somewhere else, as well, but that seemed to be his main base of operations. I saw a figure out there down by the quarry when I drove into town. I didn’t think much of it at the time since that’s where the kids hang out, but knowing what I know now, I think it may have been him I saw that night.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about this,” Officer Corcoran said. “What about you, Mr. Nicastro? There are reports saying that you roughed up Mr. Walters just before his death. Isn’t there a possibility that you might have seen something that night, too?”

“Don’t answer that,” said Anton Graves from the phone.

“All right, let me rephrase. I have four—now five—dead bodies to explain, and your side of the story. I believe that Steel was the perp behind the fireshow, and I believe that he was—most likely—behind the majority of those murders. But it’s difficult to believe that a man so focused on the future, a man who had planned for so many contingencies, would conveniently jump off a cliff.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” Donni said, in a tight, cold voice.

“Again,” the lawyer said. “Don’t answer that.”

“Johnathan Steel was a rapist,” Donni said. “He raped and abused me for years, and then he went on to do the same to countless other women. Jason Steel couldn’t stomach the idea of his father as anything other than the visionary he had been raised to see him as. In his twisted mind, I had—figuratively—murdered his father by coming forward and needed to be punished for it. You should Google him,” she said. “He’s given plenty of interviews about it. They’re the ranting words of a man poisoned by his own grandiose self-delusion. You call him forward-thinking and a planner. I don’t think that’s what he was at all. He was an impulsive psychopath who’d hacked and stabbed his way into a corner, and I’m sure he was thinking all about that when he jumped. That he’d do anything to escape justice, just like his father.”

When she had finished speaking, there was a long silence. Rafe could hear the clock ticking and the sound of Anton drinking his coffee, slurping into his phone’s speaker.

Bravo, my little actress, he thought, as the two officers exchanged a look.

“The other photographs,” Officer Corcoran began, but Officer Lambert silenced her with a look. Rafe’s lawyer had already chewed them out before for relevance and reasonable expectations of privacy. It was clear that neither of them had ever experienced a case like this, with a woman like her, and didn’t know what to do.

“We told you everything,” Rafe lied smoothly. “And I’m sure the rest of the answers you need are at the bottom of that quarry. You have your killer. What more do you want?”

“What more indeed,” Anton echoed, his voice crackling on the receiver. “So, can they go or not?”

“You can go,” said Lambert. “But not far. We may have some follow-up questions.”

Which meant, as far as Rafe was concerned, that they were completely free.

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The police drove them back to the house. After Rafe’s lawyer hung up to go back to sleep, several hundred dollars wealthier for his efforts, Rafe called for an emergency tow of his father’s Mercedes. The rain had abated but the sidewalk was slick with water, and their feet made small splashes as they walked to the door, the events of the evening weighing down on their shoulders.

They’d had to cut Rafe’s shirt off to sew him back up. Like many flesh wounds, the blood was worse than the actual damage, though his arm had been bandaged up in a sling. He was still wearing the blanket the police had given him to wear around his shoulders—a nasty, dirty old thing that looked like it had spent several seasons buried in a shed. He shrugged it off with a wince and Donni saw him touch the bandage instinctively, running his fingers along the edges.

“Don’t pick at it,” she said, before she could help herself. “You’ll pop the stitches.”

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