Hunter needed to choose his words carefully. ‘Losing the person you loved the most. Your wife. That was your worst fear, wasn’t it?’
Tyler clapped his hands slowly while cocking both eyebrows and nodding. ‘I’m impressed. You do know more than I thought you did.’ He reached for something on the metal table and Hunter tensed. ‘Did you figure that out by yourself or did she tell you?’ Tyler lifted the copy of the
LA Times
with Mollie’s picture.
For the first time Hunter’s eyes left Tyler’s face and quickly searched the room for a hiding place – nothing.
‘Where is she? Where’s Mollie?’ he asked tentatively.
Tyler frowned. ‘You think she’s here? Why would I have her?’
‘Because she was a threat to you and your plan. Because she knows who you are.’
Tyler threw his head back and laughed a strange, gurgling laugh. Hunter grimaced at the sound.
‘No, she wasn’t a threat, and, no, she doesn’t know who I am.’ His voice was confident. ‘I got close to her, detective. We shook hands. She’s quite a sweet thing.’
Hunter felt a knot start in his throat.
‘Even after touching my hand, there was no recognition. She had no idea who I was. Whatever she was helping you with, whatever she sensed wasn’t clear enough to make her a threat.’ Tyler chuckled. ‘If I wanted to kill her, she would be dead.’
Hunter held his stare with equal determination.
‘You think you figured this out, detective? You have no idea what really happened or what Strutter’s gang was capable of. You didn’t dig deep enough.’ Tyler’s voice had deepened to a chilling tone. ‘This didn’t start in high school. It started on the streets when we were much younger. They used to push and push until we couldn’t take anymore, and then they’d push some more.’ He licked his cracked lips. ‘Almost every day I saw Kate crying on her way back from school. They’d always come up with something to make her cry: name-calling, face spitting, physical abuse, sick humiliation . . . they didn’t give a fuck. Do you have any idea what being laughed at and treated like a worthless piece of shit every goddamn day feels like? What kind of psychological damage that would do to a terribly shy girl like Kate? They were happy to scar her for life just for a laugh. One day they even covered her in human excrement, just for the hell of it.’
Hunter closed his eyes for a moment. Kate had been the same Katherine that James Reed had talked about that day in his house.
‘And then there was Kate’s father,’ Tyler continued. ‘That drunken and pathetic asshole. She’d come home from school with tears in her eyes and he’d scream at her and beat her up even more. Her mother was never around to care.’ Tyler was grinding his teeth in anger. ‘They shot her confidence to pieces. She was made fun of and called “ugly” for so long and so many times she truly believed she was. But Kate was the sweetest and the prettiest girl I’d ever seen and I’d do anything for her.’ He paused to compose himself. ‘I was intelligent, very intelligent. I figured out very early that I could make a lot of money without having to have a job. I could make money from my bedroom or from the street just by using a pay phone.’
Hunter remembered what Tyler did for a living. ‘From the stock market.’
‘That’s right, detective,’ Tyler agreed. ‘I’m brilliant with numbers, better than anyone you’ve ever seen. And my brain understood the market. It was so simple I couldn’t figure out why everyone else wasn’t making money from it. Soon a few dollars turned into hundreds, hundreds turned into thousands, thousands into tens of thousands, and by the time I started my junior year I had almost a hundred thousand dollars in a bank account.’
Hunter read the satisfaction in Tyler’s voice. ‘You had already created a different identity even before leaving school.’
‘You’re quick, detective.’ Tyler smiled. ‘Just like Kate’s father, mine was another drunken, good-for-nothing bastard. After my mother died when I was thirteen, the drinking and the beatings just got worse and worse. If he ever found out that I had money, or that I could make money, he’d no doubt stab me in the back so he could get his dirty hands on it. But he would never get anything from me.’ He paused and wiped his mouth. He was over-salivating with anger. ‘All you need to get a driver’s license in this country is to pass the test and show a birth certificate, which can be easily forged or obtained from a dead child. With a driver’s license and a false birth certificate you can apply for any other documents you’ll ever need.’ He gave Hunter a proud smile. ‘In school I was still Michael Madden, but outside I had already become Dan Tyler.’
Hunter needed to keep him talking. As long as Tyler was talking, no one was dying.
‘But for Dan and Kate Tyler to exist, Michael Madden and Katherine Davis had to disappear,’ Hunter offered calmly, careful not to sound challenging.
Tyler started pacing the room. ‘And it took me a while to convince Kate we could do it. I told her we could go anywhere. I had more than enough money for us to start a new life, and I didn’t need to be in LA to carry on making money. But her fear was stronger than her hope . . . until that day in English Lit class.’
‘English Lit class?’ Hunter pressed, gaining more time.
Tyler’s gaze became distant as he remembered. ‘As a teenager Kate developed a common hormonal imbalance – estrogen and progesterone. Do you know the consequences of such an imbalance, detective?’
Hunter shifted his weight from one heel to the other. ‘It can cause excessive bleeding during the menstrual period,’ he confirmed.
‘That’s right.’ Tyler looked impressed. ‘In Kate’s case, the kind of bleeding that no pad could stop. And that day she was unprepared. It happened four days earlier than expected, inside our fourth-period class.’
Hunter could only imagine the embarrassment that would’ve caused Kate. He sensed the anguish in Tyler’s voice.
‘Blood was everywhere as if she’d been shot. And the word spread around like wildfire. Strutter and his gang had a new weapon to torment Kate with. And that’s exactly what they did. They started a rumor that Kate was a little slut and that she’d miscarried in the classroom.’ Tyler ran a hand through his hair and breathed in deeply. ‘They started calling her “Baby Killer” and making jokes of how ugly the baby would be because she was the mother . . .’ Tyler paused to let Hunter dwell on the gravity in his voice suggesting the subtext. ‘After so many years of abuse she couldn’t take anymore. She wanted to die. She thought about suicide. So I told her we could both die, at least to everyone we knew. Three weeks later we went camping and mountain climbing in Arizona and no one ever heard of Michael Madden or Katherine Davis since. Though they did find traces of an accident.’ Tyler chuckled proudly. ‘Did you know that when a body goes missing in the mountains, rescuers only hold a fifty percent hope of ever finding it?’
Hunter knew the statistic.
‘We started a new life in Colorado. A few years later we flew to Rio for our operations. No one would ever again look at us and laugh at our ears or nose or anything. But there were complications during one of Kate’s procedures.’
Hunter’s eyes narrowed with interest.
‘She almost died, and the fear I felt when I thought I’d lose her was something like I never felt before. It petrified me down to my core. She was everything to me.’
Hunter shifted his weight again. He was slowly seizing up: numb legs, sore spine, cramping muscles.
‘Even though we had a brand-new life away from everything and everyone we hated,’ Tyler continued, ‘we never really managed to escape our past. We tried for years to start a family, but Kate just couldn’t get pregnant. The doctors told us that there was nothing physically wrong with her. The problem was psychological.’ Tyler rubbed his face with both hands in an agitated manner. ‘She was scared that the baby would be born ugly, just like Strutter and his gang had said. She never forgot it. We had our appearances changed, but that didn’t change our genes, which would’ve been passed down to the baby. She didn’t want our baby to go through what we’d been through. Do you see, detective? We couldn’t start a family because of the psychological damage Strutter’s gang had caused.’
The light in one of the brass lanterns went off and the room got a fraction darker. Tyler moved to the front of the metal table, but that was still too far for Hunter to try anything.
‘A psychologist suggested that we relocated back to LA. She said that we should face our fears, that avoiding them would only feed the uncertainty; it would only keep us from moving on. She said that being in Los Angeles could be the first step. It took years for Kate to agree to come back here. But the psychologist was right.’ Tyler’s lips spread into a half smile. ‘Thirteen months ago Kate called me in the office. She was crying. She’d never been so happy in all her life. She said she’d bought a whole drugstore’s shelf worth of pregnancy tests just to be sure. They all gave her the same result. We would finally be a family.’
The joy in Tyler’s voice gave Hunter goose bumps.
‘We celebrated every day. But I made the mistake of taking her out to a restaurant in Santa Monica Boulevard one night.’ He paused and Hunter saw anger in his eyes. ‘As we were having dinner, we heard a customer curse at a waiter who’d made a simple mistake. He made sure everyone in the restaurant heard him humiliating the poor kid. I saw Kate go rigid. She recognized his voice before I did.’
‘Strutter,’ Hunter said, already knowing he was right.
‘He never changed.’ Tyler was fidgeting. ‘After all that time he was still a fucking bully. He made a scene and the manager asked him to leave. Everyone was staring at him, but for some reason he noticed Kate. He walked over to our table and said, “
What the fuck are you looking at, you ugly pig?
”’ Pain and anger erupted through Tyler’s body and he shuddered. ‘He made the same pig noises he used to taunt her with all those years ago, as if he’d recognized her.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘Stupid me. I froze and didn’t do anything. I just sat there and watched him walk away after humiliating my wife once again. Kate wouldn’t stop crying after that and a week later she miscarried.’
Hunter shivered.
Here comes the
‘
last straw
’.
‘She wanted that baby more than life itself. And to numb the pain, last New Year’s Eve she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.’ Tyler stood before the pictures on the wall, drooling with anger. ‘The psychological damage they did to Kate when she was young had been such that even after all those years it took only his voice and a few seconds to rip her apart.’ Tyler turned and faced Hunter. ‘I thought I had nothing else to live for. My nightmare had finally become a reality. And then I saw an article in the paper with a picture of a smiling priest – Brett fucking Nichols.’
Hunter remembered he and Garcia had found that same article inside Father Fabian’s room.
‘I realized that while I suffered, while Kate took her own life because of what they did to us, Strutter and his gang were living normal lives. All of a sudden I had a reason to live again.’
‘Revenge,’ Hunter whispered.
‘Yes.’ Tyler smiled. ‘The strongest reason of all. I swore I’d find them all and I’d make them pay. By the anniversary of Kate’s death, they’d all be dead. I’d mark Strutter with the blood of the family he killed, my own blood, and number the rest of them with their friends’. I’d make them suffer in the most grotesque way I could. I had money, lots of it, and in my world money is power. I hired people to dig into their lives. To find out where they were and what scared them to death. Everyone is scared of something, detective. Not necessarily a phobia, but if you dig deep enough you’ll find that everyone is scared of something. They had no right to destroy our lives.’
Tyler’s voice started to quiver. He was losing control. Hunter shifted uncomfortably on his knees, tugging at his cuffed hands.
‘Kate and mine were only two, but how many lives do you think they destroyed? Did they think they could do anything they wanted with no consequences? Well, they can’t. I’m their fucking consequence,’ he shouted while punching his chest with a closed fist. ‘They created me. They created the anger and hate that run through my veins. Hatred gave me something to live for again. Seeing the fear in their eyes as they recognized Kate’s picture, as they realized they were about to die their worst imaginable death, filled me with a mind-boggling pleasure. It changed me. And suddenly I wanted more than their lives and their fears. Torturing and killing them alone didn’t satisfy me. I needed to taste their blood and savor their flesh. It made me feel . . . powerfully different. You should try it sometime, detective. It’s a high like no other. Literally consuming your enemy – very addictive.’ Spit flew from his mouth as Tyler lost control. He approached the table and grabbed Hunter’s gun. ‘And no one will stop me from finishing this. No one will stop me from having the rest of their blood. NO ONE.’
Time was up.
Tyler took a step forward, aimed the gun at Garcia’s head and squeezed the trigger.
Mollie Woods closed her eyes and allowed the strong jet of hot water to massage her stiff muscles. A thin gauze of steam had filled the tiny bathroom and was now creeping under its door and into the small hallway. It’d been a few hours since she had the vision, and still she couldn’t stop shaking. She knew he was coming for her. She saw blood and panic and fear, and she had to run away.