The Kind Worth Killing Read online

  My phone was charging on my bedside table. I went and lay down, scrolling through the missed calls and listening to the voice mails. One of the messages was from Detective Kimball, letting me know that the coroner was done with Ted’s body, and I could alert the funeral home that they could pick him up at their convenience. He also asked if I knew of a good way to get in touch with Brad Daggett. Hearing that was a relief; Brad was doing what I’d told him to do, and disappearing for a while. I thought of calling the funeral home but decided against it. Instead, I sent text messages to a couple of friends letting them know that I was okay, just lying low. I called my mother, and we spoke briefly. I told her I was overwhelmed by all the little chores associated with a husband’s death. “Tell me about it, sweetheart,” she said. “Divorce is no picnic either. All that paperwork.” I tried to sleep, falling into a doze as thin as tissue paper, but thoughts of Lily kept rippling up at me. I tried to remember what she looked like, and all I could see was her slender, hipless frame, her shiny red hair, her unsettling stillness. When I tried to picture her face, I could get a general sense of it, but I couldn’t picture any specific features. What did her nose look like? Her mouth? Every time I thought I had it, it flew away from me, like a butterfly I couldn’t quite net. I realized I was chewing at the edge of my thumb, and made myself stop before I drew blood. I was wearing yoga pants, and I touched myself through them, thinking of a featureless man, someone rich, in Italy, a married neighbor who came over to my lakeside villa to fuck me. It started to work, and I shucked the yoga pants halfway down my thighs, but before I could come, I started to think of Ted, how on the first night in this house, on this bed, he had sprinkled rose petals, and laid out an expensive negligee for me, and how much it had turned me off.

  I parked my car in the back alley behind the restaurant in Portsmouth where Brad and I had agreed to meet. It had turned cold, and I wore a long coat and a cap with my hair tucked up under it. One of the streetlamps in front of the restaurant was busted, and I stood under it, watching for Brad’s truck. It was a bright night, though, and I still felt exposed. Brad showed up, exactly at the time we had planned, and I hoisted myself up into the passenger seat, hoping that he was relatively sober.

  “We still doing this?” I asked as he pulled away from the curb.

  “Fuck, yeah,” he said, and I recognized from his overly loud intonation that he was at least partly loaded, but not wrecked.

  “Tell me again what we’re going to do.”

  “On Micmac Road I’ll turn off my lights and drive up to the house. You get out and go in the front door using the key. I’ll go around to the back of the house and come in through the patio doors. Then I’ll walk up to both of you and hit her on the head with a wrench.”

  “Why don’t you just shoot her?”

  “I don’t have that gun anymore. You knew that.”

  “Right. I forgot. Then what?”

  “I left plastic wrap in the house. You help me roll her up. She goes in the truck and I take you back to your car. I can get rid of her body.”

  “Tell me again why I need to be there.”

  Brad turned his head slowly toward me. We were heading north on Route 1, and the lights of an oncoming car lit up his features. For one moment, I saw real hatred in his eyes and I involuntarily flinched. “Because she’s coming there to see you. If I show up alone, who knows what will happen? And because you need to be part of this. I did the first one on my own, but I need you for this. I’m not doing this alone again.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. I knew that what he really wanted was for me to see someone die. I hadn’t forgotten the haunted look in his eyes the first time I’d seen him after he shot Ted. He probably thought I couldn’t handle it, but I was prepared. I was nervous about things going right, but I wasn’t nervous about seeing Lily Kintner get her head bashed in.

  We were a little early, so Brad drifted through the empty streets of Kennewick. Along the beach I looked out toward the ocean, a swath of it sparkling with silver moonlight. I really did like Kennewick, not to live all the time, but as a place to get away from the city. But after the estate was settled, and all of Ted’s money was solely in my name, I’d sell the house along the bluff. There were better places to live. I pictured islands in the Mediterranean. I pictured palm trees and beach bars that didn’t look like Cooley’s. I’d wasted my life in New England for far too long.

  It was close to 10:00 P.M. when Ted doused the lights on his truck and turned off Micmac onto the gravel driveway of my property. He drove slowly, the truck seesawing, the driveway more rutted than ever after the recent rains. The house loomed up, looking simultaneously massive, its dark outline dwarfing the landscape, and small and fragile against the expanse of the ocean. Brad parked next to the Dumpster and killed the engine. A steady wind buffeted the truck. “She’s probably already inside,” Brad said. “Watching us.”

  “Don’t waste time, okay,” I said. “Once I enter the house, then you should start to move. I don’t want to be fending off a psycho bitch in there.”

  “I’ll be fast. I want this over with.”

  “Okay,” I said. Even in the dim light of the truck’s interior I could see that Brad was trembling slightly. I pressed a hand against his prickly cheek, and he jumped as though a snake had bit him.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Jumpy?”

  “You scared me. I can’t see a thing in this truck. You should go.”

  I opened the door and Brad put his hand over the cab’s light. “See you in there,” I said, and shut the door. The engine ticked, cooling down. I pulled the keys from my pocket and walked toward the stone front steps. The moon was behind the house, and as I got closer, the house was like a black wall with nothing beyond it. I breathed deeply, shocked by how cold the air had become. I fumbled with the keys, finding the right one, and unlocking the door, swinging it inward and stepping inside. For a moment, I had the surreal sense that I had merely passed through the facade of a house, and I was still outside. I looked up to see stars, but there was nothing there.

  “In here,” a voice said, and Lily materialized briefly in a pool of light, then disappeared again. “Come in,” she said. “Your eyes will adjust.”

  I let the door shut behind me. The lofty ceilings of the foyer began to take shape in the gray light.

  I tested my voice. “Isn’t this dramatic?” I said, and it echoed sharply in the house.

  “Did Brad tell you what I wanted?” Lily said.

  I moved toward the voice, one of my hands going instinctively to my pocket. I’d brought the small canister of pepper spray that I sometimes carried with me in the city. I told Lily I’d been surprised to hear that she wanted money. I asked her if it was to help her father, hoping that was a sensitive subject and that it would piss her off.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, her voice sounding calm, almost casual.

  “He killed someone, right? In England. He must have legal fees.”

  “No,” she said, “the money is for me.”

  I told her I couldn’t get her money right away, and she told me she just wanted to meet me face-to-face, to hear that it wouldn’t be a problem. We were about a yard away, and I wasn’t planning on getting any closer. My eyes had adjusted, but Lily was still just a featureless blob. She hadn’t moved since I’d come in, as though she were rooted in place. If she moved toward me, I was planning on bolting. I knew every square foot of this house, and it was an advantage I planned on using.

  “Were you sleeping with Ted?” I asked her. Brad would be arriving any moment, and I genuinely wanted to know. “How did you two even meet?”

  “We were on a flight together. He knew everything about you, you know? He knew you were cheating on him with Brad. You didn’t fool him.”

  “So why didn’t you just turn me in?” I said. “If you’re so sure I’m this awful person.”

  “I will turn you in, Faith, if you don’t do everything I say.”

  It was strange to hear my
old name, and it brought me back to college, to the smoky rooms and boozy parties. Suddenly I could picture Lily’s face, her cold green eyes.

  “Is this about Eric?” I asked as I saw a dark figure moving toward us. Brad, coming to kill Lily. I almost wanted to make him wait a moment. I wanted to know if Lily had killed Eric in London all those years ago. I needed that.

  “No,” Lily said, amusement in her voice. “It isn’t. This is all about you.”

  And then Brad was there, his face ghostly, lifting his large wrench. I watched, fascinated, then realized that both faces, Brad’s and Lily’s, had turned toward me. The wrench came down, a sharp pain exploding in my head. My knees buckled, and I was suddenly on the cold sawdusty floor, a hand on my head. Brad was over me. He grasped my hand and moved it away from my head. My hat had fallen off. I’m about to die, I thought. I heard the whistle of the wrench as Brad swung it again.

  CHAPTER 26

  LILY

  Brad brought the wrench down on Miranda’s head. She dropped first to her knees and then to the floor, her hat coming off. She brought a hand up, touched herself where she had been hit. For a second I thought that Brad wasn’t going to be able to finish, but he crouched and hit her several more times. Without the hat to block the blows, the wrench made sharp thunking sounds against her skull. The last time he swung it I heard a raspy crunch, the sound of someone punching his hand through a wall. I gently pulled him away when it was clear that she was dead, when, even in the fuzzy light of the house’s interior, I could see that the side of her head was caved in, and that a black pool of blood had spread out across the floor.

  “Leave the wrench here with her. Let’s step outside for a moment,” I said.

  Brad did as I said, laying the wrench almost gently beside Miranda’s inert body. I gripped him above the elbow and led him to the front door and through it. The air outside was the same temperature as it was inside the house, but it felt cleaner, filled with the salty smell of the ocean. I let the door shut behind us. “It’s done,” I said to Brad.

  “You think she’s dead?” he said.

  “Yes, she’s dead. It’s over. You did a good job. Did she suspect anything?”

  “No, I told her everything just like you told me to. She saw you, though.”

  “What do you mean she saw me?” I asked.

  “Last night. After you left my house, she was there. She’d come up to see me and saw you there. She recognized you.” Brad had pulled his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and was unsuccessfully trying to extricate one from the packet.

  “Let’s sit in the truck for a moment and have a cigarette,” I said. “Then we can deal with the body.”

  We got inside Brad’s truck. I’d pulled my backpack off and held it in my lap. “You cold?” Brad asked. “I can turn the heater on.”

  “No, I’m fine. But I’m going to have a drink.” I unzipped my backpack and pulled out the flask of apricot brandy. “Do you mind? I’m freaking out a little.”

  “No shit, right,” Brad said, and barked out a short unnatural-sounding laugh.

  I tipped the flask at my lips but didn’t drink any of its contents. “You want some?” I said. “It’s apricot brandy. It’s good.”

  He took the flask from me and took a long pull, handed it back. “Have another,” I said. “I’ve had plenty tonight.”

  “If we can’t drink tonight, then I don’t know . . .” he said, and tipped the flask again. I listened to him swallow twice. He’d drunk enough. I’d hoped the apricot flavor would mask what was in the brandy, and it had. I didn’t know how long it would take for it to kick in, but I wanted to hear more about Miranda’s visit to Brad the night before.

  “Tell me about last night,” I said. “Then we’ll deal with the body.”

  Brad flicked his lighter and lit his cigarette, blowing a blue plume against the windshield. “She scared the shit out of me is what she did. You left the house, and about five minutes later she showed up. I thought it was you returning at first.”

  “Why was she there?”

  “She came because she didn’t want to call me on the phone. She said the police have some kind of witness and that they are going to question me, and I needed to keep my shit together. We didn’t talk about that much because she was so freaked out about seeing you.”

  “And you told her what we talked about?”

  “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.”

  So I presented the plan. I told him to tell Miranda that I wanted to meet with her, that I knew all about the murder, and that I wanted money. We would meet in the house the Seversons had been building, sometime the next night, after dark. “She’ll be suspicious,” Brad said.

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. So instead of telling her that I’m going to blackmail her, tell her that it’s a setup, that I told you to tell her it was blackmail, but that I’m planning on killing her, that I’ve been waiting for my moment since college. She’ll come. I know she will. Then I’ll get rid of her, and you can help me bury her body. If she gets discovered I’ll make sure that you have a solid alibi. I’ll say that you and I met up here in Kennewick, and we hooked up, and you came back down to my house in Massachusetts. You’ll be fine, I promise.”