“Yeah. I told her exactly what we planned. I said you tried to convince me to help you kill her, and that I told you I’d think about it, but that I thought we should double-cross you. I told her I’d be willing to kill you for her. She bought it.”
The night before, when I’d approached Brad in the parking lot of Cooley’s, my plan had been simply to get Brad to bring Miranda to the house on Micmac Road. That was step one. Once I was alone with Miranda, I knew that I could kill her, using my stun gun first, then either smother her with a plastic bag, or use my knife. But when I began to talk with Brad outside Cooley’s, I recognized that he was a man on the verge of breaking. In the dim light of his truck’s cab, I could see that his eyes were haunted and scared. I was reminded of an animal with his leg in a trap, half-starved and desperate. I changed plans immediately, telling him that I’d known Miranda since college, and I knew what she had done, and that he’d been set up all along.
“She’s going to turn you in, Brad. You know that, don’t you?” I said to him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Brad, I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. Miranda is an evil person. Is there any proof whatsoever that Miranda had anything to do with killing Ted? Besides your word, that is. All she has to do is say that you did it on your own accord. You won’t be able to prove otherwise. You’re going to go to jail for the rest of your life, and Miranda is going to get off scot-free. You’ve been used.”
“Oh, God,” he said, and wiped at an eye with one of his large hands.
It had been that easy to get him on my side. It was clear that he had not been completely fooled by Miranda. Far from it. I told him we should go back to his house and discuss options. I followed him in my car to the rental unit where he lived. Ted had described it to me, telling me how sterile and bleak it was, and he was right. The furniture was solid but uninteresting. Magazines had been fanned across the coffee table, and the whole place smelled of cleaning products. I wondered if it was even cleaner than when Ted had seen it—wondered if Brad, in his distress, had been compulsively straightening his apartment. We sat on the couch. I had turned down the offer of a beer but Brad had got himself a Heineken from the tiny alcove kitchen attached to the living room. He emptied half the bottle with his first sip.
“Are you in love with her?” I asked him.
“I thought so,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know. You’ve seen her. You saw her. She’s going to be fucking rich.”
“Yeah, she’s going to be rich, but she’s not going to share that with you. Trust me. This is how she operates. She gets men to do what she wants them to do and then she eliminates them. She got you to kill her husband for her, and she got you to do it when she was a thousand miles away.”
He nodded at me, his face slack. “That’s the worst part,” I continued. “She turned you into a murderer, and that’s something that you can never reverse. But it wasn’t you, Brad. It was Miranda. She manipulated you. You never stood a chance.”
I watched as tears spilled in two steady streams from Brad’s eyes, falling down his leathery face. I had told him what he wanted to hear: I had told him that he wasn’t responsible for the murder of Ted Severson, and that Miranda was. I had absolved him. When he stopped crying, I asked him to get me a beer. I wasn’t planning on drinking it, but I wanted to give him something to do, and I wanted him to feel like I was now on his side. He came back with two bottles, sat down, and uncapped the bottles with an opener that was attached to his key ring.
“What should I do?” he asked. “Should I just go to the police and confess. Tell them everything that happened?”
“That’s not going to help. You’re still the one who killed Ted. She was nowhere near when it happened, and she’s going to say she had nothing to do with it.”
“So what should I do?” He drank his beer, dribbled a little down his chin.
The way he was looking at me I could have told him to break his own fingers and he would have done it. So I took a chance, and said to him: “I need you to help me get rid of Miranda. It’s what she deserves, and it’s the only thing that’s going to get you off the hook. Can you help me do that?”
“What do you mean, get rid of her?”
“I’m going to kill her, Brad.”
“Okay.”