“You just left me there. All by myself. How the hell am I supposed to figure this crap out without help?” Dane told him that was the fucking point. “You said we’d find her for me. And I’m going to help you find your son. We can part ways when we’re both satisfied.”
“What’s her name?” Joel looked at the woman. He knew that she wasn’t like him. But there was a circle around her that made him think of evil things. It was black and red with streaks of what appeared to be animals running around her. “Her name? The woman that you want found and killed.”
“Her name is Addison West. She’s my fiancée. She ran off and left me at the altar a few years back. I’m Joel Delaney. Who are you?” She told him and he took a step back. “Ellen Wooten, the child murderer?”
“That’s me. How’d you know? I mean, none of these idiots have a clue who I am. I think they have it in their head that I’m just a wimp and they’ll have to do all the work.” Joel looked at the seven or so men standing with Dane. “I’ve been locked up for a while and I have a lot of time to make up for.”
Joel nodded before speaking. “Did you really do that? All those things that the newspaper said, did you really do all that to those people?”
“I’m sure I did. What did they call me? When I was locked up, I wasn’t allowed to read the papers.” Ellen was excited. Someone who’d not just heard of her, but actually might know something too. “I had to act like I didn’t care. You know, make them think I was over whatever it was that had led me to kill them all. It was hard at first. Then I made it a sort of game. Only three times in all those years did I slip up. Nobody ever knew, of course, that I killed those people, but they’ll find them soon enough, I guess. I heard they were tearing the place down.”
“Is that how you got out? You slipped through the cracks?” She shook her head. “Then how? I’m sure that…that with your reputation, they wouldn’t have just let you go.”
“Oh yeah?” She sat down again in the kitchen, and was thrilled beyond words that he came in the kitchen with her. “I might have had a few things hanging over the woman who typed stuff up. She had a problem and I took care of it for her. Best whole night of my life, I’ll tell you that. So she had no more problems and she had to let me go. Had all the right things signed off on and out I was. What did you do to be in the predicament that you’re in? Fuck another man’s wife? Or did you piss off some investor that done you in?”
“I was killed by one of us. A ghost protecting his own.” She nodded. “And you? What will you do first now that you’re out?”
“First? Oh honey, I’ve already sharpened my claws, so to speak. I’ve killed over a dozen people already, and I’ve only been out for a few months.” She leaned back in the chair and wondered if she had time to tell him what she’d done. It had been such a letdown when she’d told the doctor when they’d first arrested her. “I took care of the little typist when she got off work that night. It wasn’t as much fun as I’d remembered with her problem. But she told me when she was in the parking lot that she was having second thoughts. That maybe I shouldn’t have been freed so readily. I wasn’t going back inside. Not after getting out for only one day. I’m not stupid, you know. I know that they’re going to find me and kill me, but I don’t really care so long as I can do that with a smile on my face and blood on my hands.”
“You killed her.” It wasn’t a question from Joel, but she answered him anyway. “I thought you had a deal. You got out if you took care of her problem.”
“I told you, I wasn’t going back.” Her temper got the better of her for a couple of seconds, and she took a deep breath before talking again. “Don’t you want to know what I did? Everybody usually asks. But I’ve never been able to tell them before.”
“Sure. Tell me. I’d love to hear it.” Ellen wasn’t sure he did, but she nodded. “Start with the murders at your house. I want to know all the details from that. They said that you were immature when you started out, but when you got to the Weeks family, you had perfected it. That was something I remember my friends saying about it. How you’d learned your craft so quickly.”
“I didn’t learn it all that fast. I had been practicing on the animals around the neighborhood. Cats and dogs mostly. Then I started out on bigger things that I could find. There was this homeless guy that I killed, but I don’t think that should count. He was almost dead anyway.” He had been when she’d gotten him to the family shed. “My dad was very unhappy with that mess.”