“What happened, Greg?”
He shrugs. “I fell in love. That’s all it was at first. The same as I said to you — I was burned out. I wanted to leave the game, run away with Grace, see the world with her. But first, her son needed help.”
“Bo.”
“You know the whole sordid story. Jordan Kravat got him strung out on drugs, pimped him out. I mean, that guy was killing Bo a day at a time. Grace and I talked it out. We couldn’t find a way to extract Bo from the situation. And then suddenly Grace suggested the obvious and yet forbidden.”
“Killing Jordan Kravat.”
Greg nods. “And once the idea was spoken out loud, once we used the word ‘murder’... it’s like we crossed a line and there was no going back. I started planning like, well, for a big playoff game. Scouting. Sizing up the opposition. Trying to guess what they might or might not do. That’s when I came up with the idea of framing Jordan’s mob boss.”
“Joey the Toe.”
“Right. We would eliminate our biggest threat and it would divert attention. Kravat, Turant. These were bad people, Myron. This felt like our only way.”
“So that was your first team kill?”
“Yes.”
“And what, you liked it?”
He chuckles. “More than that. Much more. How do I explain this?”
“Let me help you. You’re both psychopaths. One psychopath walking down the road of life alone, well, that’s bad. But when the two of you — what’s the term you used? — collided...”
“That’s not far off,” Greg says. “It was, well, it was a high, sure. A rush like no other. But it was more than that. It was like we both went through a complete transformation. We were heightened in every way. Food tasted better. Sex was more intense. We experienced something mere mortals could never comprehend.”
“So cutting to the chase,” Myron says, “you went on killing.”
“Yes.”
“And framing people.”
“Yes.”
“As a team. The two of you working together.”
He nods. “Grace was the more violent of us. She loved to watch the life force leave the person’s face. Ending another human being’s life — she described it as the closest thing to being a god. I got that, but I was more the plotter. I loved working on the frame-up, the slow burn of sending someone to prison for a crime they didn’t commit. But we both did both. I killed some, she killed some. I did most of the planning, but she contributed a lot. We were a team in every sense of the word. My point is, many of us have the potential to be killers, but once Grace and I tried it—”
“Yeah, Greg, I think I get it. You just went on killing.”
“Yes.”
“How many, Greg?”
“More than they know. That’s all I’ll say for now.”
Myron can see that it won’t pay to pursue that line of questioning right now. “You planned carefully.”
“Yes.”
“You always made sure someone else took the fall. You took your time. There was pretty much zero chance you’d get caught, until you messed up with the Callisters. I don’t get it. Why go after someone you knew, even tangentially?”
“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.