Page 82 of Kill For Me Kill For You
‘Did you find her?’
‘Nope. Everything seemed to be a dead end. But I did know one thing. She wanted this man dead, and she had tried to con me into killing him. For whatever reason, this man was a target . . .’
His voice trailed off, and his face softened as he looked at Amanda.
She had a question she wanted to ask, but she was afraid of it. She already knew the answer, but it wasn’t enough. It had to be said out loud. She had to face that fear, and meet it head on, no matter what the cost.
‘What was the name of the man she told you to kill?’ asked Amanda, her voice dry and cracked.
‘Frank Quinn,’ said Billy softly, ‘but you already knew that.’
She nodded.
‘I couldn’t tell him. Too risky. He’d call the cops on me and then I’d be toast. I did the next best thing. I watched his house. Then I got an alert on my email. I’d been searching for anything I could find on the web for Frank Quinn, so I set up an alert to tell me if anything about him was published. I clicked on the link in the alert and I found new fake-news articles on Quinn. But this time he was accused of killing a girl named Rebecca Cotton. There were fake articles about that murder, and her mother – Naomi Cotton. I knew then that Felicia, or Naomi as she was now probably calling herself, was trying to con someone else. I knew someone was going to come for Quinn. Two nights ago, I was sitting in my car searching the internet on my laptop while I watched his house and I found something,’ he said, lifting the laptop onto the table and opening it. He pressed a few keys, and Amanda saw the screen glare reflected in his glasses as he brought the thing to life. He pushed his finger around the track pad, typed, scrolled, then took hold of the laptop screen.
‘I’d been searching for her online. There’s nothing about Felicia Silver, only the fake Naomi Cotton stuff – all the websites about Felicia and her husband’s murder had disappeared. Everything she told me was a lie, apart from one thing.’
‘What was that?’
‘She liked the movieStrangers on a Train. It’s based on a book. I didn’t know that either at the time. So I searched for fan pages, forums, news articles. Anything that might give me a lead on Felicia. That’s when I found this . . .’ he said, and turned the screen round.
Amanda leaned forward and saw a news article from theNew York Post. The headline readKiller Claims He Has a Copycat Accomplice.
The piece was a year old.
Today a Manhattan court heard an extraordinary tale from Richard Kowalski, a thirty-nine-year-old librarian from Harlem, who pleaded guilty to the murder of Saul Benson. Mr. Kowalski’s attorney claimed that his client entered a murderous pact with a woman named Deborah Mallory whom he met in an online support group. The victim, Mr. Benson, was unknown to the defendant prior to the murder. The defendant is claiming that he and Mallory copied the murder plot of the movieStrangers on a Train– Mallory would murder the defendant’s boss, and the defendant in turn would kill Mr. Benson for Mallory. The district attorney has confirmed that police have no information on the whereabouts, nor evidence of the existence of a person named Deborah Mallory matching the description provided by the defendant, and it is only the defendant who claims this woman exists at all. The hearing continues tomorrow.
Amanda swallowed. She let go of the knife in her pocket and put both hands on the table.
‘The cops found Kowalski’s DNA at the murder scene in the victim’s apartment. When they caught him, they couldn’t find any connection between Kowalski and the victim. They didn’t work together, had no friends in common, didn’t know each other – probably never met before the night of the attack. I think this was Felicia. I think she’s done this before.’
‘Jesus,’ said Amanda. ‘What happened to Kowalski?’
‘They never found Deborah Mallory and Kowalski is dead. Lasted a month in Sing Sing before somebody put a shank in his lung.’
Amanda leaned forward to reach for her glass, but her hands were shaking too much. She put them in her lap, tried to focus. She could have the exact same fate as Kowalski if she didn’t find Naomi. She knew that much, but she wasn’t completely convinced Naomi, Felicia and Deborah Mallory were all the same person.
‘How do you know that’s Felicia?’ she asked.
‘It would be one hell of a coincidence if two women were going around the city under false names, meeting men and women in online support groups and persuading them to swap murders.’
Billy made sense. He made a lot of sense in a situation that was way too fucked up to begin with.
‘I was waiting for another poor idiot to show up and try to take out Quinn. I wasn’t expecting a woman. No offense. When I saw you there that night, I thought you might be Felicia. You’re the same height, same build and you were all covered up in that hood. That’s why I tailed you,’ he said.
Amanda shook off the thought. She had bigger concerns.
‘If it is her, then what the hell is she doing? She’s just killing people randomly?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Far as I can tell there’s no connection between Quinn and Benson, the man Kowalski killed. I’ve had a private investigator helping me with some pieces of this puzzle. He doesn’t know the whole story, just for my own protection, you understand. He helps out with access to databases, credit-card information – deep background, that kind of stuff. The victims were not friends, not as far as we can tell. Quinn is kind of a mystery. He runs a lot of companies – every one of them seems to fail. But none of them are connected to the other victim.’
Amanda thought of the rolls of cash from Quinn’s lockbox, now safely in her backpack.
‘What do you want from me?’ asked Amanda.
‘I need you to tell me all about the woman you’re looking for. That’s why you went back to the house, right? To find out who Quinn really was and hope that it led you to her. That’s a smart move. That’s the logical move – the one I would’ve made. You want to know what the connection is between Quinn and the woman who told you to kill him. I’m not a detective, and I can’t tell the private investigator the whole story because he would report me to the cops. I could’ve been you. I could’ve pulled the trigger on Quinn. We’ve both been conned, but we can help each other. Tell me everything you know about her. And maybe we can find her together.’
What Billy had told her felt like the truth. No one else could know those details unless they’d been one of Naomi’s victims. And yet she’d just met this man. As kindly and as sad as he seemed, she didn’t quite trust him yet. Maybe that was fair? Or maybe it was because she’d just been betrayed.
