Tony stared at the glossy surface of his desk as if it were a mirror.
"So let me know where I go wrong on this, Tony," Maggie said. "Eric was trying to find out who assaulted me and Tanjy, and he wound up on this Web site for rape victims. He saw what Helen wrote, and alarm bells started going off in his head, because he knew that Tanjy and I had one thing in common. Our shrink. So Eric went to see Helen Danning to confirm exactly who she meant, exactly who this Duluth psychiatrist was who raped her back in college. But he knew what she was going to say. She told him it was you, Tony. That's why Eric came to see you the night he was killed. He wasn't there to find out how someone ordinary could be a rapist. He didn't tell you he was going to see someone else after he left. He was there to accuse you of raping me and Tanjy."
Tony looked up from his desk. "The problem with your little story is that I didn't rape you, Maggie. Or Tanjy. Even if Eric suspected something ridiculous like that, why would I care? I was innocent."
"Sure, you may have been innocent of raping me and Tanjy. But what about your DNA?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the Enger Park Girl. Teena. The girl you met at the Aerosmith concert in Kansas City. The girl you raped, killed, and dismembered. You left semen inside her, Tony. You didn't think about that back then, did you? But if we ran your DNA now, it would lead us right back to the Enger Park case. That's why you killed Eric. To make sure that didn't happen."
"Please, Maggie, I've been around the block," Tony said. "I know the standards a court would apply in granting a motion to take a DNA sample. Rumors and innuendo like that wouldn't constitute probable cause."
Maggie pointed a finger like a gun at Tony's right hand, where he was cradling his coffee mug. "But Eric didn't care about that. He just took a sample for himself. You know, I forgot all about the coffee mug. When I came back home the night Eric was killed, I was so drunk. Eric left me a note, and he put it on the counter under a black coffee mug. I didn't think twice about it. The damn thing disappeared, and I never realized it. I didn't even put it together until I saw you holding that coffee cup of yours. Same as always. Like you were daring me to notice. Eric took it from you that night, didn't he? He was going to get me to run your DNA. So you had to get that mug back."
Tony laughed. It sounded odd, laughter bubbling out of the man who never even smiled. He stared at the mug, shook his head as if it were the funniest thing in the world, and then flipped it across the room. The mug twisted in the air, and coffee streamed and splattered on the carpet, leaving a dark trail of stains. When the mug hit the floor, it bounced and rolled to a stop near the far wall.
Tony slid open the middle drawer of his desk.
"Don't," Maggie said. She knew what he was reaching for.
Tony drew out a black Glock from the drawer and cradled it in his hand.
"Take a look at the camera," she said.
He glanced at the monitor that kept an eye on his waiting room. Stride was there, his own gun in his hand, staring back up at the camera as if he knew that Tony was watching him and deciding whether to run.
"And the door," Maggie added.
Tony turned and studied the glass door that led out of the office into the field of birch trees, and Abel Teitscher was there, tall and windswept, looking back at Tony with his grizzled face. He had a gun in his hand, too.
"There are more," Maggie said. "The place is surrounded. You're not going anywhere, Tony. So just put down the gun, and let's go."
Tony held the Glock as if he were measuring its heft and how solid and heavy it felt in his hand. "You know, I was planning to kill you, too, Maggie. That night. But I didn't."
"Instead you used my gun to kill my husband and frame me," she snapped.
"Don't pretend it was such a loss. You didn't love him."
"Fuck you, that's not the point."
"Once I killed Eric, I couldn't risk going back upstairs," Tony said. "Kicking your husband out of your bed kept you alive. That's rather ironic."
"What about Nicole?" Maggie asked. "You framed her, too, didn't you?"
Tony slipped his finger around the trigger of the Glock. "Yes, we had a session together, and she told me about tracking down the girl from the concert in Kansas City. I was stunned. I knew if she looked hard enough, she'd find me."
"So why not just kill her?"
"If Nicole were killed, people would wonder why, but if she wound up in jail for murder, it would all just go away. I knew Nicole. She never wrote anything down. She was always forgetting our appointments because she didn't keep a calendar."
"So you killed her husband and his girlfriend and planted evidence against her."
"She was always leaving hair behind on that couch," Tony said. "It was actually pretty easy. It all went underground again for years until Eric started nosing around. He was raving about me raping you, raping Tanjy, about what a monster I was, about who I'd raped in the past. Can you imagine the horror? All these years, I've kept the secret, I've beat my demons down into a box. Now this fool was going to expose me over something I didn't do."
"What happened?"
"I went over there and waited until you were both home. You're right. I needed to get that mug back."
"Why wait for me?"
"This time, I wanted to kill you both," Tony explained. "I wanted the focus to be on you, not Eric. But like I say, you weren't in bed together. And the frame-up worked with Nicole, so I figured I could make it work again."
"What about Helen Danning?"
Tony shrugged. "Loose ends."
"You bastard."
"If anyone found her, the arrow was going to point straight to me. She had to go. And you know what? It was such a thrill doing it again. To stop fighting the desire and finally give in after all these years. It was like reliving my greatest triumph to lay another body out in Enger Park. It was like yelling it to you and Stride and the whole world. I'm back, baby, I'm back. I told Serena there comes a time when you have to look your past in the eye and decide who you really are. I know who I am, Maggie."
Maggie's skin shivered. She stood up. "Let's go, Tony."
"No, I don't think so."
"There's no way out." She stepped closer to the desk.
"Actually, there is. I've always known the way out. I knew one day the monster would come back, and I would have to exterminate him. I was kidding myself to think I could hold out forever."
"Tony," she said, her voice a warning.
"It's okay, Maggie. I'm a psychiatrist. I know how these things work. You know the trick to committing suicide? Speed. Hesitation is the enemy. If you put the gun in your mouth and think about it, well, you won't do it. I've had lots of people sit on my couch and tell me about it, and the fact is, if you don't pull the trigger immediately, you never will."
"Put the gun down."
"I want you to remember something, Maggie."
She didn't take her eyes off the gun. Her whole body was still, as taut as a cable spanning the towers of a bridge. She was measuring how fast she could run, how far she could jump.
"Cops like you and Stride think you can spot the monster," Tony went on. "You think if you look in someone's eyes, you can see what's in their heart. The fact is, you don't have a clue. You really don't. Everyone wears a mask."
Maggie jumped. She shouted as she took two steps and leaped across the desk, her arms outstretched like the talons of a hawk as it drops toward the earth, her fingers curled, clawing for the gun. She wasn't nearly fast enough. Tony swallowed the black barrel of the Glock and pulled the trigger, just like that, without a millisecond of hesitation, and he was already dead as she came across the desk. The explosion jangled her brain like a marble rolling around an empty bowl. She kept coming anyway, momentum carrying her, and her body spilled into Tony's as they both tumbled head over heels and landed together, and his blood, tissue, and shards of bone spattered across her skin and clothes.