Not JJ. Not the only person in the world who knew her and gave two shits about her. Not her brother.
That grief rose up in a single wail. Then she shoved it back. She’d save it for the police. Save it for her idiot mother when the cops pulled her out of her second job—cleaning the offices of a bunch of lying lawyers.
She’d save it for the cameras.
And when they came, when they notified her and questioned her—with her trembling mother beside her—when they searched the house from top to bottom, talked to the neighbors, they’d see a fifteen-year-old girl in shock. A girl who clung to her mother and sobbed. A girl as innocent as her brother was guilty.
As expected, her mother fell apart, her father raged and picked up a bottle he’d never come out of. She bore up, asked one of the lawyers from the offices where her mother cleaned to help write a statement expressing their shock and horror and grief, a statement, she insisted tearfully, that apologized to everyone.
And because her parents couldn’t handle it, she read the statement herself through choked sobs.
They had to move. She secreted the laptop in a box of stuffed animals. They couldn’t move far—her mother needed her jobs, and her employers kept her on. She finished her high school years with a tutor—her wealthy paternal grandparents paid.
She kept her head down and gathered her vengeance to her, preparing to serve it ice cold.
At eighteen, she carried a sharply honed 112 on a five-foot-four-inch frame. Her family attributed her initial weight loss to stress and grief, but Patricia worked to turn herself into a whippy weapon.
She had people to kill, and compiled dossiers on all of them.
Time, she calculated, remained on her side, and she had college to finish. With her stellar grades and smarts she had numerous choices, and settled on Columbia, as two of her targets—and the one her primary—chose it.
How better to keep tabs on the person she held most responsible—even more than the cop who’d put the bullets in him—for her brother’s death?
Without Simone Knox, the cops didn’t get there so quickly, didn’t enter the movie theater, didn’t kill her brother. He’d have walked out the way he’d walked in, but for Simone Knox.
She could’ve killed Knox and finished JJ’s job on her little Asian friend a thousand times already. But the dish was not cold enough.
And they would be far from the first to pay.
On the food chain of her revenge, she’d placed her parents first. But now, reading McMullen’s blog in the studio apartment her grandparents paid for—she just couldn’t live with people!—she reconsidered.
Not the cop, and not the boy hero who’d become one. They ranked too high to be shifted that far down. But maybe, just maybe, she could pick one of the lessers, run a kind of test.
She munched her hummus and veggie sticks in an apartment across the street from her prime target and began the selection process.
*
On July 22, 2005, Roberta Flisk was thirty-six. She’d gone to the mall with her sister and her young niece to have the ten-year-old Caitlyn’s ears pierced.
They’d planned to conclude the rite of passage with ice cream sundaes. But as Caitlyn with her tiny gold studs, Shelby carrying the bag of overpriced daily cleaner, and Roberta strolled out of the earring boutique, everything changed.
Roberta stopped at a kiosk to buy her little boy some beach toys for his long weekend away with his grandparents. She and her husband had planned their own long weekend on Mount Desert Island in hopes of reviving their troubled marriage.
Later, she’d tell police, her family, reporters, how she’d seen the boy identified as Kent Francis Whitehall come into the mall as she, her sister, and her niece walked toward the same doors.
She’d thought he was wearing a costume for some event. Until he’d lifted the rifle. Her sister was the first victim of the attack.
As she’d fallen, Caitlyn screamed, dropping to the ground with her mother. Roberta threw herself over her niece and sister. Whitehall shot her twice—left shoulder, left leg—before he’d moved on to other targets.
With her sister dead, her niece traumatized, her own injuries requiring two surgeries and months of therapy—physical and emotional—Roberta hadn’t been shy about talking to the press.
She became a passionate, vocal advocate for gun regulation. She helped launch For Shelby, an activist organization dedicated to Safe, Sane Solutions.
Their website and Facebook page ran totals daily of the number of gun deaths in the country—murder, suicide, accidental.
Her marriage died, another victim of DownEast.
She gave speeches, organized rallies and marches, appeared on television—always wearing the heart locket that held a photo of her sister.
In tragedy she became a warrior, a name, and a face, a well-known voice not only locally but nationally.
For that reason, she fit Patricia’s needs perfectly.
Patricia took a full month to study, to stalk, to take notes and photos, to plan. Back in Rockpoint for most of the summer, ostensibly to spend time with her grandparents, she made meticulous records of Roberta’s habits, routines.
In the end, she found it ridiculously easy.
Early one morning, before daybreak, she slipped out of her grandparents’ house, jogged a half mile to the home of one of her grandmother’s friends. After slipping on a short blond wig and latex gloves, she removed the spare key to the car from the magnetic box under the wheel well. She drove, carefully at the speed limit, to Roberta’s quiet neighborhood, parked, took the gun and the silencer—taken from her father during one of his drunken stupors—out of her backpack.
At sunrise, like clockwork, Roberta came out of her back door. On a normal day she would have cut across her own backyard, through a neighbor’s gate, and met up with the first of her two morning jogging companions.
But on this morning, Patricia waited.
She stepped out from behind a sturdy red maple.
As Roberta, adjusting her earbuds, glanced over in surprise, Patricia took her down with two quick shots to the chest. The silencer kept the sound to a harmless pop. The third shot—a kill shot to the head—popped louder, but it had to be done.
She took the sign she’d made out of the backpack, tossed it on Roberta’s body.
HERE’S YOUR SECOND AMENDMENT, BITCH!
She policed her brass, secured them with the gun and silencer in the backpack. Light streaked in reds and pinks across the eastern sky as she drove back to the neighbor’s, replaced the key.
With the wig and gloves in her backpack, she took out earbuds, put them in, and began to jog.
She felt … nothing special, she realized. She’d expected to feel some elation or amazement. Something. But she felt no more than she did when she completed a necessary task well.
A little satisfaction.
She jogged, as she’d made a habit to do since observing Roberta’s morning routines, toward a bakery a full mile away.
She listened for the news reports—and the speculation that Roberta’s visible and vocal advocacy had made her the target for some gun-rights nut.
Time to wait again, she decided. To wait and plot and study. But the test? She’d aced it. Killing was easy if you just made a plan and stuck to it.
She went into the bakery, got a big welcoming smile from the woman—Carole—who opened it every morning. “Hey there, Patricia. Right on time.”
“Gorgeous day!” Beaming back, Patricia jogged lightly in place. “How about three of those apple muffins today, Carole.”
“You got it. It’s real sweet of you to get your grandparents a treat every morning.”
“Best grandparents ever. I don’t know what I’d do without them.” Patricia dug the money out of the side pocket of her backpack, and angling it away, unzipped the main pack to tuck the bag of muffins in with the wig and the gun.
She got home and stowed the wig, the gloves, the gun, and the silencer. After a quick shower, she took the muffins to the kitchen and put them in a little bowl on the counter.