A Thousand Small Explosions (30 page)

CHAPTER 92

CHRISTOPHER

Christopher suddenly awoke to the sensation of cold liquid being poured over his head.

His eyes opened saucer-wide but everything had a misty haze and he couldn’t make out where he was. The left hand side of his body ached where the taser gun’s darts had made contact and stung like he’d fallen onto a bed of nettles. He wasn’t sure if it were the force of his head colliding with the floor that had rendered him unconscious or the 50,000 volts that’d travelled through his body.

As he came to, he was engulfed by a wave of nausea and retched several times before spewing bile down the front of his jumper. He turned his neck and spat a foul-tasting mouthful to his side. Then as his eyes finally focused and rested on the familiar figure standing before him, he recalled what had happened moments before he blacked out. Amy had put a stop to the death of Number Thirty and a halt to his project.

He looked down towards his wrists and saw two tightly bound ropes securing them to the chair’s arms in Number Thirty’s kitchen. A pair of handcuffs tightly pinched his ankles.

Christopher stared at her trainers wrapped in blue plastic bags, then moved up her dark jeans and black sweatshirt then a balaclava pulled up past her face so it rested atop her hairline. Amy’s arms were folded but he struggled to fathom her expression. However it wasn’t hard to assume from his predicament that it was not favourable.

‘Where’s Number Thirty?’ he asked.

‘Is that what you do, give them numbers? They have names, you know. They are people.’

‘They
were
people,’ Christopher corrected and gave out a long, sigh strewn pause. ‘Where is she?’

A look he recognised as shame briefly passed across Amy’s face. ‘She’s in the bedroom. When she answered the door, I pushed my way in, overpowered her and tied her up. Then I locked her in her room with the TV turned up so she wouldn’t hear us.’

The corners of Christopher’s mouth rose slightly before suppressing what would’ve under ordinary circumstances formulated a smile.

‘Don’t look at me like that, I’m not proud of scaring that poor girl to death,’ Amy firmly pointed out. ‘This is something that will stay with her for the rest of her life and thanks to you, I’m to blame for it.’

‘But you did it all the same. We could’ve made a good team.’

‘It’s better to put her through this than do nothing and have you kill her.’

Christopher shrugged.

‘I’d say it was disappointment you were trying to hide if I thought you were capable of feeling anything,’ Amy continued.

Christopher was no stranger to self-preservation. Thinking on his feet and relying on his canny ability to make his deceptions believable had helped him out of many a close call over the years. But when his eyes met Amy’s for a second time, something inside him shifted dramatically. He couldn’t prevent his barriers from falling all at once and he found himself telling Amy everything.

‘I can
feel
,’ he replied. ‘I do feel… I have felt - and still do feel - for you.’

Amy let out a forced laugh. ‘No you don’t! You played the part - I’ll give you credit for that, and you played it well - but I was always just a pawn in your sick little game as you tried to keep up an appearance.’

‘Is that what you really think?’

‘What am I supposed to think! My boyfriend is a fucking serial killer! How could you Chris? How could you?’

‘You are so much more to me than a pawn.’

‘If that were true, then why didn’t you make an excuse to leave as soon I told you I was a police officer? Why didn’t you just let me go about my life if you cared that much? I was just an extra challenge for you, to see if you could get away with doing this while dating someone in the police.’

Christopher couldn’t disagree. ‘That might have been the case at first, but then things changed.’

‘How was this ever going to end? Or wasn’t it? Were you just going to keep killing?’

‘The girl in the other room, she was supposed to be the last.’

‘How coincidental.’

‘No, really, thirty, that was my target.’

‘Why?’

‘Who knows? It started off as a challenge I set myself and as much as I enjoyed it at first, it ended up becoming laborious.’

Amy shook her head and raised her eyes to the ceiling as if to silently ask God if she’d heard him correctly. ‘
Killing
women …
murdering
innocent people … that was
laborious
to you? Working in a factory production line, washing cars for a living, sweeping the streets, those are laborious jobs, not taking twenty-nine people’s lives!’

‘When did you put everything together?’ Christopher asked, genuinely curious.

‘Six days ago. You were out, killing your twenty-eighth victim, if my timeline is correct. I was at yours, flicking through the psychology and serial killer books on your shelves trying to get my head around what makes a monster tick. And what did I find amongst them? A white photo album containing twenty-seven photographs of each of the murdered girls; Polaroids taken shortly after their deaths.’

Christopher nodded slowly, satisfied that at last, he could share his work with her.

‘It didn’t make sense, at first,’ Amy continued. ‘Why would
my
Christopher have those pictures, and how did he get them? I went back to the station briefing room and compared them to the photos that’d been left on the bodies and they were almost identical –
almost
being the key word. Because each photo had been taken from an ever so slightly different angle, meaning the ones in your album weren’t reproductions or copies. And that poor waitress, her nose ring was in your book. Whoever took that and the pictures must’ve been at each of the crime scenes.’

Christopher made no attempt to defend himself and continued to maintain eye contact with Amy. She began to pace around the open plan kitchen and diner, shaking her head.

‘Can you even begin to imagine what went through my head when I found them?’ she continued, but her question was rhetorical. ‘I refused to believe what it could mean, so I searched your house from top to bottom. Then I found all these smart phones in a bag in your broken freezer in the basement … I stopped counting after eighty. I turned enough of them on to see the only App installed on each phone was that dating one, UFlirt, and that every victim had sent you their number. Of course your computers were password encrypted so I didn’t get anywhere with those.’

‘No, you wouldn’t have,’ Christopher replied conceitedly.

‘Look at yourself Chris,’ Amy replied sharply. ‘You’re in no position to be smug. And even after all of that, I still wanted to believe that the Chris I loved was not a killer. Despite my job, despite every bit of evidence staring me in the face, I still needed more proof. And I got it from the only piece of DNA you left at a murder scene.’

Christopher shook his head. ‘That’s not possible. I never left any DNA at any of the scenes. I’m sure of that.’

‘Number Twenty-Eight.’

‘Dominika Bosko.’

Amy arched her eyebrows. ‘So you do know their names?’

‘Only hers.’

‘Why, because you killed her baby too?’

Christopher glared at Amy, and for the first time during their confrontation, she recognised regret in his eye.

‘There was one tiny piece of DNA the forensics team found on the child,’ she continued. ‘At some point when you went back to the scene of the crime, you stood over her and cried because they found teardrops on his head and chest. I had your DNA results from the swab you sent to Match Your DNA and I paid a private lab for some fast-track work to compare the tears on the baby to your results. They were 99.97% identical. I have to know, what was it about them that made you cry?’

‘You,’ he whispered, picturing the child’s lifeless body.

‘Me?’

‘I imagined somebody doing that to you, and me standing over your body having lost you. For the first time in my life, I had no control over my emotions and they got the better of me.’

Christopher watched Amy’s arms began to unfold and her shoulders droop slightly. Then just as quickly, she tensed up again.

‘Do you know why I can never believe a word you say? Because I’ve read passages in books that you highlighted and which you have quoted to me verbatim about how you feel, and passed them off as your own. You tell me what you think I want to hear.’

‘It’s only because I’m not used to expressing myself. This is new to me, Amy. I didn’t even know people like me could fall in love.’

‘You mean psychopaths, right?’

Christopher nodded.

‘My boyfriend, the psychopath.  The one thing your books have taught me is that it’s second nature for psychopaths to lie and that they’re master manipulators.’

‘That’s true, but not when it comes to you. How have I ever manipulated you?’

‘You knew what you were and what you were doing and you still let me fall in love with you.’

‘Be honest with yourself, I didn’t do anything … we were Matched … we were predetermined.’

‘You chose to take the test and to meet me. If there was any humanity inside you at all, you’d have stayed the hell away.’

‘I’m sorry but to begin with, I was curious as to who’d be Matched with me, and then when I met you, I felt something I’d never experienced before … something that was completely alien. I needed to get to know the person having that effect on me to try to understand why it was happening. I even read up on it because I didn’t think it was possible to … but I’d fallen in love with you.’

Amy shook her head. ‘Please stop lying to me,’ she said, but from the quiver in her voice, Christopher knew she was beginning to believe him.

‘I know what I am, Amy…. or at least I know what I
was
. I was a man who craved infamy for my crimes and I felt a pleasure I can’t describe from ending other people’s lives. I was selfish, I was devious, I was Machiavellian, I cared for nothing and no-one, I was everything that you were not. But when I am with you, I’m … better. At least, you make me want to be better.’

Amy wiped her eyes with her sleeve as she listened. She’d cried so much over the last few days it felt like a storm had washed the colour from her eyes. She wanted so much to hate the man in front of her tied to the chair, but their Match was too strong. She couldn’t hate the man, she could only hate his actions.

She took a few hesitant steps forward then crouched down so their eyes were level.

‘Do you love me Chris?’ she asked. ‘Do you, in your heart of hearts, really love me.’

‘Yes,’ he replied firmly and without missing a beat. ‘Yes, I do love you.’

It wasn’t that he was securely fastened to the chair that made him appear vulnerable, it was that for the first time, Amy recognised an emotional honesty in his face. She saw a lost little boy, someone who had probably spent his life unable to fit in, someone who was aware of the difference between right and wrong but chose to do wrong anyway. She saw someone who needed her stabilising influence. She saw their shared future.

Amy slipped her hand in her pocket and pulled out the keys to her handcuffs.

CHAPTER 93

BETHANY

Bethany took the keys to Kevin’s truck from the hook in the kitchen cabinet, climbed into the vehicle and turned the ignition on.

The stereo played the opening bars of a Michael Bublé song and she smiled to herself, reminded of how she’d tease Kevin during one of their long phone conversations for having the musical taste of a housewife double his age. He didn’t care, he said, music was music and as long as it made you respond, it didn’t matter who was singing it. Bethany turned up the volume to Feeling Good and drove along the dirt track drive towards the highway.

She drove for ten minutes from memory, recalling where Kevin had taken her to watch her first Australian sunrise the day after she arrived on the farm. Then she climbed out of the truck and sat on the front bumper watching the sun begin its ascent into the sky. 

After the revelation that Kevin was not her DNA Match and that his brother Mark was, Bethany had stormed off back to the guest house and spent the next hour pacing around the bedroom trying to gain a handle on her emotions. She was angry at herself for having allowed things to go so far with Kevin when she knew early on during her visit that she hadn’t loved him. But she was also furious with Mark for lying to her about who she had been Matched with. It was because of him that she’d felt like such a rotten person for being attracted to someone who was out of bounds. Without trust, was being Matched enough to keep two people together?

While Bethany hated Mark’s deception, she found it hard to remain bitter at the man responsible for her confusion as it had come from a place of love for his brother. Mark’s plan had been innocent and selfless and he had never intended for her to fly across the globe and settle into his family.

Sleep proved impossible, so Bethany hoped that by driving to Kevin’s favourite spot, the calmness of a new day might help stop her mind from racing at a hundred miles an hour. She turned her head when a car pulled up behind hers. It was Susan.

‘I hoped you might be here,’ Susan began. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’ Susan’s tone was much softer and less confrontational than it had been a few hours earlier when she’d discovered her post-coital son and daughter-in-law.

‘It’s been quite a night, eh? I used to bring Mark and Kevin up here when they were boys,’ Susan continued. ‘Kev liked to see as far into the distance as he could … he wanted to travel the world one day. But in the end, there was so much he couldn’t do because his body wouldn’t let him.’

Bethany closed her eyes and tried to remember Kevin’s voice. It had only been a few weeks since his passing and already she was beginning to forget how he sounded. And despite everything she felt for Mark, she missed her daily conversations with his brother. Susan stretched her arm out and wrapped it around Bethany’s.

‘So you married my son even though you didn’t love him?’

Bethany nodded.

‘Why?’

‘Because I knew how happy it would make him. I wasn’t in love with him but I was very fond of him. I wanted his last days to be happy.’

‘You wanted the same thing for him as Mark did. And Kevin’s last days
were
happy and for that I’ll always be grateful. The both of you placed his needs above your own, I see that now. Please don’t hate Mark for it.’

‘I don’t hate him Susan, I just feel very muddled. My head is all over the place and I don’t know what to think or how to feel. The only thing I know is that after everything that’s happened in the last two months, I need some space and to get away from your family. I don’t mean that to sound as horrible as it does.’

‘No, it doesn’t sound horrible. And I’m not going to pretend I know what it’s like to be unable to be with the person you love, but I know how it feels not being able to see someone you love ever again. Please take some advice from an old ‘un; don’t let the chance to be happy pass you by. If you’ve got the opportunity to love someone as much as they love you, then grab it with both hands and never let go.’