The Good Lie by A.R. Torre

CHAPTER 38

I drove home, speeding down La Cienega and cutting through the back of my neighborhood. I parked in the carport and missed the key slot twice, my hands shaking as I finally got the key in the side door lock and turned. Clem mewed at me from the windowsill, and I ignored her, dropping my purse and keys on the counter and practically jogging to my office. Flipping on the light switch on the wall, I sat at my desk and pulled John Abbott’s file to the center of the desk. It had only been a week since I’d opened it, a week since I combed the section that Robert had seen, fearful of what he’d read.

Now, I had an entirely different reason for opening the file. I reached forward, my fingers trembling over the top of the manila cover, then stopped. Pulling open my drawer, I flipped through the tabs and found the second item I needed. I pulled it out and placed it beside John’s file.

THE BLOODY HEART KILLER: A PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE AND ANALYSIS

DR. GWEN MOORE, MD

I didn’t know where to start. John’s file would take me a full day to properly review, but it would give me a deeper look. The psychological profile could be wrong. After all, I’d written it, and if the last twelve hours had proved anything, it was that Dr. Gwen Moore was a horrific judge of character. Still, right now, I needed to organize my thoughts and really explore this possibility. I took a deep breath and opened the psychological profile. Selecting a gold Cross pen and fresh notepad from the drawer, I wrote along the top of the page:

Is John Abbott the Bloody Heart Killer?

I stared at the line, unwilling to believe it could be true. All this time, as I watched the news reports and worked up possible scenarios and motivations—could he have been right there? Sitting across from me. Sharing.

I flipped past the introductory pages of the report, past the bullshit disclosures and history of the crimes, and slowed when I got to the first real meat.

The killer will research and stalk his victims prior to taking them. He will know their schedules and social life. He will be ultra-cautious in his selection of when to take the victims, and plan it down to every detail.

Detective Saxe had shared the Peeping Tom citations. John had been caught several times. All wealthy women. At the time, I hadn’t believed the news, certain that John Abbott wasn’t sexually interested in any women other than his wife, and maybe I’d been right. The police had assumed the most likely scenario, but John hadn’t been interested in the rich middle-aged women. Even without knowing the women’s information, I’d be willing to bet that they were mothers. He’d been spying on their teenage sons.

I read farther down the page, to my section on BH’s personality traits.

Fastidious in his appearance and grooming. Neat and analytical in nature. Has a job that requires attention to detail. Precise in his lifestyle. Conscious of what other people think.

It was John to a T, as if I’d written the analysis just for him. I cupped my forehead in my hands and inhaled, feeling my palms tremble against my forehead. “Oh God,” I whispered. “This is bad.”

Where had the signs been? Had I missed them? Had he mentioned the victims in our sessions? Had he wanted treatment for those inclinations and used Brooke as an excuse?

No. While I might have missed some references to the boys, I refused to accept that he hadn’t truly struggled with violent inclinations toward his wife. The emotion he had shown in our sessions, the heated anger that had come into his face, the crack of his voice . . . he had been vulnerable and honest in those moments. I know he had.

I closed my eyes and thought of my last session with him. He’d started screaming, spittle flying out of his mouth as he had ranted about Brooke and their neighbor.

“I can see it in the way she looks at him.” John had sprung to his feet, pacing the area in between our chairs with short, stiff strides. “The way she talks about him. She’s thinking about him during sex, I can feel it. She’s glowing like a damn high school girl,” he’d sneered. “And she’s home alone all day? They’re screwing—I know they are.” He kicked at the small wastebasket next to my desk, and it flew across the room and banged against the wall.

That had been just two weeks before Scott Harden’s release and Brooke’s and John’s deaths. John had told me that the guy was a new neighbor, but looking at the timeline . . . what if it had been Scott Harden?

I inhaled deeply, trying to slow down my thought process. If John’s jealousy had been about Brooke’s interactions with Scott Harden—and, prior to that, Gabe Kavin—then that meant that Brooke was interacting with the victims. That she was aware of what John had been doing.

I had thought John was paranoid, but maybe he hadn’t been. Maybe Brooke had been sleeping with the men. The rapes . . . Had she been involved?

The salve. The kind gestures. I had assumed it was a dissociative identity, but what if it hadn’t been a second personality? What if it had been a second person?

Brooke.

An awful foreboding hit in the center of my soul like a knife as the possible implications sank in.

A woman might explain why Scott Harden had lied. An inexperienced teenager, sleeping with a grown woman—it was a much easier leap to Stockholm syndrome, especially if she was a good cop to John’s bad. Had she developed true feelings for Scott Harden? Was she the one who had let him go? And was that why John had killed her?

The dates lined up. I had never put two and two together, but Brooke and John died the same morning that Scott Harden reappeared. My hand trembled, and I squeezed my pen to stop the motion.

I thought of John’s repeated insistence that she was developing feelings for the neighbor. What had he said the morning of their deaths? That he thought she was going to leave John and run away with him. Maybe he’d been right.

Dread suddenly settled as a half dozen pieces clicked into place.

I told him to get rid of the landscaper.

I practically tore the front of John’s file open and flipped furiously through the pages, skimming my finger down my notes from our first month of sessions. Background info . . . his history with his wife . . . there. The landscaper.

John had been concerned they were getting too close. Had heard them laughing together. Holding eye contact with each other. Had found dirty dishes in the sink and speculated that she had fixed him lunch.

My neat script recorded my solution to his agonizing insecurities.

I suggested he solve the problem by firing the landscaper.

Those initial meetings with John had been dominated by his concerns over her and this landscaper. John had wanted to kill Brooke over the fear of her alleged affair and feelings for the man. So I had pushed him down the path of least resistance. It was easy. Remove the landscaper from the equation and focus on rebuilding and strengthening his relationship with his wife.

But if the neighbor in our most recent sessions had actually been Scott Harden, then the landscaper was . . . I let out a pained sob and fisted my hands in my hair. Gabe Kavin. I told him to get rid of Gabe Kavin.

The dry drowning. The death that was different from the others.Had his furious jealousy been the trigger for the violent manner of death? Ohhhh, and I had handed him the solution, my voice soothing, the opinion delivered with confidence.

I pinched my eyes shut, trying to block out the autopsy photos. His glassy stare. The blood caked around the heart. He was so young. So innocent.

“Hello, Gwen.”

I flinched, my hands jerking away from my head as I looked up to see Robert in the doorway of my office. Loose at his side, the blade catching in the light, was a knife.