Page 85 of Kill For Me Kill For You
Did you get the movie I sent you? Strangers on a Train?
It was subtle, but Amanda could see the patterns. She’d been told the same thing by Naomi, in the same order. The manipulation was all there – practiced, and sure, and yet so light. Felicia never pressed. Neither did Naomi – but all the points were there that had played on Amanda’s pain, twisting it, harnessing it, pointing it down a dark road. In Amanda’s case, it was a road she was already halfway down. She hadn’t needed any persuasion. And that hurt now more than ever.
Billy came back to the table with a Manila folder he’d fetched from the car. Moving aside Amanda’s coffee cups, he opened it, took out about a hundred pages and left the stack on the table.
‘She really knows how to work somebody,’ said Amanda.
Billy sighed then pressed his lips together tightly. Nodded. He’d allowed his own pain to be used against him just like Amanda had. Naomi, or in his case Felicia, hadn’t put the thought of murder in their heads – it was there already. All she did was use it.
Amanda flicked through the rest of the messages. There was certainly enough there to incriminate Billy in a conspiracy-to-murder charge.
‘Is the fact that you didn’t go through with the murder some kind of defense if the cops saw these messages?’ asked Amanda.
‘Maybe, maybe not. I looked it up. I’d taken active steps to murder. I’d loaded my gun, driven to his house, scoped it out. It’s enough to convict me, even if I argue I pulled out. I don’t want to take the risk.’
Amanda understood that. She thought if the cops came for her before she could find Naomi, Billy might be able to back up her story – but would he risk it if it put him in jeopardy of a criminal charge? – probably not.
She picked up the stack of pages on the table, started to flick through them. There was an address for Felicia, but it was different to the one used by Naomi. Different phone number too. The phone number and IP address for the private chat had been linked to Felicia’s address – which of course had been abandoned.
The rest of the pages were internet articles and newspaper clippings on the murder of Saul Benson, and Richard Kowalski’s arrest and trial for that murder where he blamed a woman named Deborah Mallory for manipulating him into killing Benson for her. Amanda took her time reading through them. She made sure the printouts from the internet were genuine by finding the news articles online and checking the website addresses were correct. It all looked legit, and after a while she stopped checking. Billy was on the level.
Billy got more coffee for her, and more tea for him. They’d been in the diner for coming up on two hours.
Amanda found a clipping from theNew York Poston Quinn’s attack. No picture, just the bare details in three column inches. She put it aside. Beneath it was a full color picture of Quinn. But a picture she’d never seen before. It had not been one of the pictures she presumed Naomi had taken, and it wasn’t the one used by the TV news.
He was wearing a pale blue suit, white button-down shirt and a yellow tie, coming down the steps of what looked like a court building.
‘Where did you get this picture of Quinn?’ she asked.
‘Huh?’
She picked up the picture – obviously printed from a news website and enlarged. Turning the photo round, she said, ‘This picture. I looked him up online. I never found a picture of Quinn like this.’
He took the picture, stared at it.
‘That’s not Quinn, that’s Saul Benson – Kowalski’s victim.’
Amanda felt a chill wash the back of her neck. Beneath the picture of Benson was a news article with the same picture in the corner. Billy must’ve enlarged that picture and printed it separately. She looked at the headline, the date, and found the webpage fromThe New York Times.
She clicked on the image to enlarge it.
‘What are you doing?’
‘An image search. I’ve got a theory.’
She selected the picture of Benson, Kowalski’s victim, typed in accompanying search terms – homicide – murder – police – and hit search.
Thousands of images. Most of them of male models. She refined the location of the search to US. Tried again.
The first page had nothing. Same with the second. On the third page, Billy said, ‘Stop,’ and pointed at the screen. ‘Is that Quinn? Or maybe it’s Benson?’
Amanda clicked on the image. A news report.
‘It’s neither of them,’ she said.
She scrolled down the article, and midway there was another image. A woman. Amanda felt a surge in her stomach.
‘That’s Naomi,’ she said.
