Think Twice

“To up the game, I suppose. I also liked the idea of taking down Cecelia’s scuzzy husband, Lou Himble. He stole a lot of people’s life savings, you know. I don’t want to make it sound like we were Robin Hoods. For the most part, we chose our victims coldly — how easy they would be to kill and did they have someone in their life who would want them dead.”

“To make the frame work?”

“Yes. We moved around a lot. We often worked more than one victim at a time, and more often than not, we aborted when we realized that we wouldn’t be able to pull off both the kill and the frame.”

“So you had no connection to the victims?”

“None. Until Cecelia. But she was so ripe for it, what with her testifying against her husband. Oh, and I knew Cecelia’s first husband.”

“Ben Staples.”

“Yeah, I liked Ben.” Greg puts his hands on his knees and takes a moment. He lowers his voice because he wants Myron’s full attention. “You see, Myron, Cecelia screwed Ben over good. She got pregnant by another man. Can you imagine a wife doing anything worse to her husband?”

Greg stops now and grins at Myron.

“Subtle,” Myron says.

“I’m not trying to be subtle.”

“And Cecelia didn’t cheat. She was raped.”

Greg shrugs. “I didn’t know that.”

“So you planned on killing her and pinning it on her husband.”

“Yes. Except Cecelia’s son Clay showed up. He was supposed to be on a one-week cruise in the Caribbean, but he ended up getting food poisoning, so he came home two days early.” Greg swallows, looks off. “He walked in on Grace and me killing his mother. A fight ensued. I killed them both.”

“And left your DNA behind.”

“No choice,” he says, “but I wasn’t too worried. I was dead, remember? That’s part of why I faked my death. To stay under the radar. So if people maybe ‘thought’ they saw someone who looked like Greg Downing, well, he was dead. It would go nowhere. And then I figured, well, even if they somehow track the DNA of a dead man, I’m hidden under another identity. There is no way they’re going to find me on my little farm in Pine Bush.” He leaned forward. “How did you find me?”

“The bank account in North Carolina.”

“Ah.”

“Still,” Myron says, “you’re a planner.”

“I am.”

“So you came up with a scheme in the event you got caught.”

Greg smiles again. “You’re good at this.”

“No, not really. But I can get in your head a bit.”

“It is what made you a tough competitor on the court.”

“Right after I found you in Pine Bush,” Myron continues, “you were arrested. Your DNA was at the murder scene. You’d be convicted. You knew all this. So your only play was to do what you’d always done — pin it on someone else. Grace called the FBI pretending to be an anonymous source. She pointed to the other killings. She said it was all the work of a serial killer who framed innocent people — and that you were the killer’s latest mark. Grace even went so far as to kill Ronald Prine because then the FBI would know for sure that you, sitting in a jail cell, couldn’t be the serial killer.”

“It worked.”

“Except Grace wasn’t as good at planning as you.”

“No, that was my forte.”

“She decided to set up Jeremy for all of it. She’d make him out to be the serial killer.”

“Stupid.”

“She planted the phone in his room.”

“Grace probably thought I’d approve.”

Myron makes a face. “She thought you’d approve of framing your own son?”

“Grace found out that Jeremy wasn’t really mine, Myron.”

Greg gives Myron that smile again and waits for Myron to take the bait. When Myron doesn’t, Greg continues. “Grace probably saw what she was doing as poetic justice. In her eyes, Jeremy was the evil spawn of my cheating enemy. Why not kill that enemy and pin it on his evil spawn?”

The two men sit there for a long time. Neither speaks. The silence is strangely comfortable. Both know that they’ve reached the endgame, but neither feels the need to rush it.

Finally, Greg slaps his thighs with both hands and says, “So now you know.”

“Now I know.”

“You also know me,” Greg says. “You know me like no one else does.”

“Meaning?”

“You know that I’m no longer a danger.”

This seems to reach Myron, but he still asks, “How do I know that?”

“Because we both get love and loss.”

Myron stays silent.

“Do you know what the problem is when two hearts become one?” Greg asks.

Myron shakes his head. Greg stands up and crosses the room.

“It means when one of you dies, the other does too. Whatever was in me that made me kill — it’s gone. We both know that.”

He moves to the window and looks out.

“So you think I can just let this go?” Myron asks.

“You?” Greg just stares out the window. Then he says, “I don’t think so.”

Myron waits. Greg still has his back to him.

“We’ve done a lot of damage to one another,” Greg says. “Grace thought that whatever was broken inside of me was broken by you that night you were with Emily.”

“Greg?”

“What?”

“You don’t get to put that on me,” Myron says.

“Maybe you’re right.”

Then Greg takes two steps back from the window.

“Greg?”

“It’s okay.”

“What’s okay?”

“It ends now.”

“Greg?”