Apprentice in Death (In Death 43)

“You were lying in wait. They’d come home eventually, right? And there you’d be. How did you figure to do it? Just walk down, ‘Hi, everybody,’ and blast them where they stood?”

When Willow shrugged, Eve leaned in. “Not much skill required for that. An ambush, three unarmed civilians. And not much fun from where I’m sitting. Over and done so fast. Is that the best you could do?”

“I can do what I want!” Willow shoved the fizzy aside. “Maybe I was thinking—because I’m allowed to think—how it would be after they came back, after they all went to bed. Maybe I was thinking how it might feel to take out a target up close, with a knife. Like I almost did you.”

Eve held up her bandaged hand. “Not even close.”

“Close enough.”

“Take out the kid first—he’s the prime target.”

“You don’t know dick about tactics. You take out the biggest threat first, moron. I’d slit Stuben’s throat. That’s quick, that’s quiet. And he’s nothing. He’s always been nothing.”

“And then?”

“Then good tactics say I incapacitate Zoe, then restrain her. That gives me time to get the kid, wrap him up, haul him down.”

Her eyes glowed as she spoke, as she, Eve was sure, saw it all so clearly. “Hurt him a little—just a little so when she comes around she sees he’s hurt, sees he’s bleeding. I let her beg—the bedroom’s soundproofed. Hell, she can scream if she wants. But if she screams, I’ll just slit his throat. But she can beg, she can tell me why in the hell I shouldn’t kill him. Why I shouldn’t kill this runt she should never have had. This whining little baby she had to replace me.

“Then she has to watch me gut him like a deer, just the way I’ve wanted to since he was born. I save her for last so she can see. With her? I slice her wrists so she bleeds out slow. So I can watch her die, inch by inch.”

“I was wrong. You hated her most.”

“She threw my father away. She took him away from me. She tried to replace him and me with Stuben, with his ugly little spawn. She deserved to see them dead and to know she caused it. She’s the reason why.”

Willow gestured with her cup. “I could be set up for the school the next morning, before anybody knew they were dead. I could make history.”

“Because you know the school, the routine, when students start arriving.”

“I guarantee I could have taken down three, maybe four dozen targets before they managed to lock it down. Recalibrate, take out maybe a dozen a couple blocks over to add some confusion, and then? Cops, reporters, parents, idiots who just want to look—plenty of them would be in range. I’d have a clean hundred before I broke it down. Nobody’s ever done that many alone, at that distance. But I could.”

“Making you the best.”

“I am the best. That would just be the mark in history.”

“Your father wouldn’t have gone for it.”

“I could’ve brought him around if everything had gone the way we wanted with his agenda. I do his, I get mine. It’s fair. He was weak, and this was making him strong again. I’d even have given him a year or two in Alaska for it. But I deserved mine.”

Eve waited a long beat. Color had flashed in Willow’s face, as it had in her father’s. But hers was both rage and pride. It wasn’t madness in her eyes—not the kind that didn’t know right from wrong. It was the kind that didn’t give a damn.

“You’re saying that conspiring with your father, you killed the twenty-five people named during this Interview, and had planned to kill others, also named herein.”

“That’s right, and I’m not saying it all again.”

“That won’t be necessary. You’ve also stated that you, individually, planned to murder Zoe Younger, Lincoln Stuben, and Zach Stuben—additionally torturing Younger and Zach Stuben before ending their lives.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wasn’t I clear enough? I can plan all I want.”

“You additionally stated you planned to attack Hillary Rodham Clinton High School and other areas in its vicinity in the hopes of killing one hundred people.”

“World record. You cost me the world record. Being a cop’s a dangerous job. Something bad could happen to you, like a year from now. Or, say three years from now.” Willow laughed into her fizzy. “Three’s a good number.”

“You think so? How about I pay you a visit, let’s say three and a half years from now. In your cage on Omega.”

“I won’t be there. You, all of you, you’re so stupid. You’re all morons.”

Now she threw back her head and laughed loud and long.