“ I’m always in a good position.”
Gary shook his head and walked carefully around the table. He kept the weapon loosely trained on me. That was a good decision on his part.
“ Doesn’t matter,” he said. “This ends now, anyway.”
“ For some of us.”
Gary looked at me curiously from above his still-swollen nose. Curiously, because I wasn’t acting the part of a scared and cornered victim. He shrugged. “So you found me, Knighthorse. After twenty years. Funny how I always knew you would. So how did you find me?”
“ I Googled ‘murderous scumbags.’”
Gary tilted his head slightly. “I’m not as murderous as you think, Knighthorse. Sure, there was your mother and another woman who shall remain nameless. But that’s it. Just the two of them. You see, killing is more troublesome than it’s worth. There’s the cleaning and the hiding and the worrying. Not to mention I happen to like my current lifestyle…although things can get a little boring.”
“ So you mix things up with a little rape and murder?”
“ Actually, yes, although I’ve discovered other…outlets.”
“ Spoken like a true psychopath.” I didn’t want to know about his other outlets.
He shrugged, then nodded toward me. “You wired?”
“ No.”
“ Prove it.”
I needed him to believe I wasn’t wired. So I made a show of irritably pulling up my shirt and turning around. He seemed satisfied.
“ You’re a big boy, Knighthorse.”
I dropped the shirt, ignored him. “So why my mother?” I asked.
“ Why not?” he said. “Before your mother, there had been another girl-”
“ The girl you raped.”
He shrugged. Rape. Murder. It was all the same to him. “Anyway, I had found that experience…unfulfilling.”
“ So you wanted to rape and murder.”
“ Not in so many words…but I wanted to take things…further, if you will.”
“ But why my mother?” I asked again.
He shrugged. His gun shrugged with him. It was all I could not to lunge at him. I knew lunging at him would probably not end up very well for me.
He said, “She seemed…vulnerable. She was cute. She was an older woman. I was, what, nineteen or twenty? Her hubby, your dad, I guess, didn’t seem too interested. Sure, they were holding hands, but she seemed to be trying twice as hard as he was. I thought I would…satisfy her.”
“ So you followed them home.”
“ Not at first, but something odd happened. As they were leaving, I was leaving, too. And we all just sort of headed out to the same area. And when they exited just a few streets from my own…it was like…destiny.”
He trailed off. I waited.
“ So I circled around the street a few times. It was a quiet street. A quiet time of day.”
“ And then my father and I left.”
He nodded. “And then you left…and she was alone.” As Gary spoke, he did so in an emotionless monotone, a strong indication of psychopathy. That his words might have an effect on me, did not occur to him. Or, if it did, he didn’t care. “I knocked on the door and she answered. I told her my car had broken down and asked if I could use her phone. She said sure without thinking. Stupid of her to let me in.”
I briefly closed my eyes. That sounded like my mother. So trusting.
I nearly told him to stop, but I needed his confession on tape. Gary Tomlinson went on in agonizing detail. Once or twice he paused when he saw me wince or take in some air, and he looked at me curiously. Lacking real emotions himself, he would find my own display as something strange, something to be studied and processed.
He described her running from him through the house, of her nearly tearing his eyes out as she fought back. And as he described raping and killing her, I let my mind go somewhere else. Where it went, I don’t know, but I could only barely hear his droll monotone. When he was done talking, I came back.
“ Since then, there were a few other incidents, and, like I said, one other killing.”
“ And who was that?” I asked.
“ A girlfriend in Anaheim. I was tired of her.” He shrugged like, what are you gonna do? “So that’s it. Just two killings. Hardly a serial killer.” He took a step toward me. “When I described raping your mother, when I described killing her and leaving her to die, how did you feel?”
“ Fuck you.”
“ I can see you’re upset, Knighthorse. Angry. Horrified.” He frowned, seemed to have a thought, raised the shotgun toward his father and fired. His father, whose face had been buried in his hands, never saw it coming. The shot blasted the back of his head clean off. Bert Tomlinson convulsed, then fell backward where he landed on his back, eyes wide open.
“ You see,” said Gary. “Nothing. My own father. He protected me all these years. Shielded me. Permitted me to get away with some heinous shit, all because he said he loved me. All because he said he knew I was a good boy. Look at him now. Dead. Stupid man. He should have put me away. It’s his own fucking fault.” He turned back to me. I was, admittedly, too shocked to do much else other than to stare. “You see, Knighthorse, if I don’t give a fuck about my own dad, why the hell do you think I would give a fuck about your own slutty mother? I saw the way she looked at me. She was practically begging me to rape her. The bitch.”
He was still too far away for me to lunge at. Any lunging would result in his whipping his rifle around and blasting the top of my own head off.
“ I guess I was wrong, Knighthorse. That’s three. With you, that’ll be four. I guess I really am an honest-to-God fucking serial killer. How cool is that?”
I said nothing. The stench of fresh blood filled the air. It was all I could do to breathe normally.
“ And here you are, Knighthorse. Big, bad fucking Knighthorse. Football hero. Private fucking detective.” He gently stroked his swollen nose. “You thought you were pretty cute the other day, didn’t you?”
“ Cute is rarely used to describe me,” I said.
But he wasn’t listening to me. “So what did you hope to accomplish tonight? Maybe talk my dad into turning me in? Maybe get some answers? Get some closure, as they say?”
I said, “Tonight’s about one thing only.”
He began to bring his shotgun up toward me. “And what’s that, Knighthorse?”
“ It’s about killing you.”
He paused at that, but only briefly. The shotgun continued up, and he would have fired it a split second later, if I hadn’t raised my own hand.
As soon as I did, I heard a muffled sound, followed by a red hole that appeared in his forehead just above his right eye. Gary Tomlinson looked briefly confused, and then he looked dead as he collapsed to the ground.
I stood above him, staring down, as my father appeared from the brush wearing his sniper’s gilly suit. Camouflage. His face was painted black and his eyes were wide and empty as he came over and looked down at the man laying dead at my feet.
“ Over the right eye,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m losing my touch.”
Chapter Fifty-one
I was sitting with Jack.
It was late, nearly eleven p.m., and the golden arches was about to close for the night. Sometimes they would let us stay after hours, as they cleaned and polished and mopped. I think the manager took a liking to Jack. It was hard not to like Jack.
We were both drinking decaf coffee.
Jack had listened quietly while I summarized the other night, about the two deaths, about the tape recorder that had captured it all, about how the police had all the evidence they needed to close my mother’s case, and the case of the murdered girlfriend in Anaheim.
I finished with something that had been on my mind since the incident at Irvine Lake. “I smelled my mother’s perfume,” I said. “It was like she was with me that night.”
Jack gripped his steaming coffee with both hands. There was a smudge of dirt on his chin, and his fingernails seemed especially dirty. But he didn’t seem to care about the dirt. And since he didn’t care, I sure as hell didn’t care. He looked at me for a good twenty seconds before speaking.