All Chapters of The Killer Who Found Me : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

53 Chapters

The First Morning

Saoirse POVI woke at six twelve AM on Friday morning with the name in my mouth.Not in any literal sense the name was not the first word I said, because the first word a person says on waking is usually a word the body produces without consulting the conscious mind, and the word my body produced that morning was the same neutral *oh* it had been producing on waking for some time but in the small, present, located way a name lives in a person’s mouth when she has, the night before, used it on the man it belongs to and not yet decided how often she is going to use it again.*Marcus.*I said it once, into the pillow.I noted, lying in my own bed in my apartment with the trees outside the window, that the name had a different weight in my mouth than the names of the people I had known across the rest of my life. It was not a heavy weight. It was the weight of a word I was, even now, in some small fundamental way, still deciding whether to fully accept.I got up.I made coffee in the Fren

The Message Goes Out

Marcus POVI sent the message to Doyle at seven oh-three AM.I had set the timer the night before. The message was already composed, encrypted, queued in a routing system that would deliver it through a sequence of services that did not require my hand on a keyboard at the moment of sending. I had wanted, in advance, to remove the small superstitious pleasure of being able to second-guess myself between waking and the act of sending. The act of sending was already done before I got out of bed.I made coffee. I checked the message had gone through. It had.I dressed.I went down to the kitchen. Faraz was already there. He had, I understood, been there since six — had let himself in with the key he had kept for seven years, had started the coffee in the small machine I had stopped using in favor of the French press, and had been sitting at the kitchen island with the *New York Times* opened to the business section.He had not, in seven years, made coffee in my kitchen before I came down

The Quiet Day

Saoirse POV Saturday I did what I had told myself on Friday I was going to do.I bought the book on Friday afternoon walked into the store on Cortelyou, went to the back, took it off the shelf at the Cs, and carried it to the counter and paid for it like a woman buying a book, which is a small ordinary act I had not performed in three years. The girl at the register put it in a paper bag. I carried it home. I put it on my own shelf, in my own apartment, in the spot I had cleared for it.I did not open it Friday night.I had decided the book was for Saturday.On Saturday I took it to the café.──I want to tell you about the reading, because the reading was the entire point of the day, and the day was the last fully quiet day I was going to have for a long time, though I did not know that yet.I sat at the window seat at the café on Cortelyou my window seat, the one I had been sitting in on Saturdays, the one I had been sitting in when his attention had come in behind me two weeks ago

The Good Curry

Saoirse POVPriya arrived at seven with two bags and the good curry.The good curry came from the Thai place on Church Avenue that she had been getting it from for the eight years we had been doing this the panang she liked and the drunken noodles I liked and the spring rolls neither of us admitted to ordering for ourselves and both of us ate. She came in out of the November cold with the bags and her cheeks pink and her scarf still on, and she put the bags on my kitchen counter, and she turned around and she looked at me, and the first thing she said was not about the curry.The first thing she said was: “You said you wanted to talk to me about something.”I had forgotten, in the four hours since I sent the text, that I had announced the conversation in advance. Priya had not forgotten. Priya had carried the sentence on the train from her apartment, and she had walked in the door holding it, and she was not going to let the curry happen on top of it.I said: “Let’s eat first.”She lo

Sunday

Saoirse POV I drove to Brooklyn Heights on Sunday at seven thirty PM, the way I had told him I would, and I did not, on the drive over, rehearse the gentle version of the evening I had imagined on Friday.On Friday I had imagined Sunday as a soft thing. I had imagined arriving at his house and being given tea and sitting in the front room and letting the two of us begin, slowly, the work of being two people who were choosing each other with both sets of eyes open. I had imagined the quiet. I had earned the quiet, I had thought, and so had he.That version of Sunday had died on Saturday night, at my kitchen table, when Priya told me about the compliance question.I drove over with the dead version of the evening in the passenger seat and the live version the one where I walked into his house and detonated the careful architecture he had spent two months building in my hands on the wheel.Faraz opened the door before I knocked.He had, I understood, been watching for the van. He looked

The Lunch

Marcus POV Eddie Doyle was already at the table when I arrived.He had chosen, of the several tables the restaurant had available at one PM on a Monday, the one in the back corner with its back to the wall and a clear sightline to the door the table a man chooses when he has spent thirty-one years making sure he sees who comes in before they see him. He had a cup of coffee in front of him. He had no notebook, no folder, no phone on the table. He had his hands folded on the table in front of the coffee, and he watched me cross the room to him with the unhurried completeness I had read about in the trial transcripts and had now, for the second time, the experience of being on the receiving end of.I sat down across from him.I did not offer my hand. He did not offer his. We had, two nights ago on a sidewalk in Ditmas Park, already exchanged the only greeting our relationship was going to be built on, which was a man letting another man photograph him.Doyle said: “Mr. Reed.”I said: “M

The Board, Cleared

Marcus POV Saoirse was at the house when I got back from the lunch.She had not gone home after Sunday. She had, on Monday morning, driven to a job in Red Hook and then come back to Brooklyn Heights rather than to Ditmas Park, and Faraz had let her in, and when I came through the door at two forty PM she was in the front room with the book her book, the one she had bought open on her knee, not reading it, waiting.She looked up when I came in.She read my face the way she had learned to read my face.She said: “He didn’t take the story.”“No,” I said. “He didn’t take the story.”I sat down across from her. I told her the lunch. I told her about Anneke Vos the woman Doyle had buried in 2009, the case the system failed, the fifteen years Doyle had been carrying her. I told her that Doyle was not, it turned out, trying to catch me, but was trying to determine whether I was a man who deserved to be allowed to stop on his own terms. I told her what I had told Doyle, which was the whole tr

Everything

Saoirse POVI went to Priya’s apartment on Tuesday night.I did not bring curry. I did not bring wine. I brought nothing, because I had understood, lying awake on Monday night beside the man who was writing his own confession in the next room, that what I was going to do at Priya’s apartment on Tuesday was not a thing you brought food to. I drove to her place in Kensington and I climbed the stairs to the third floor and I knocked, and when she opened the door I said, before I was even inside: “I’m going to tell you the whole thing. The thing I couldn’t tell you Saturday. I need you to let me get all the way through it before you say anything.”Priya looked at me for a long moment in her doorway.Then she stepped back and let me in, and she said: “Okay.”──We sat at her kitchen table.And I told her.I told her about the night. The door coming off its hinges. The man in the silver mask. Derek on the kitchen floor. I told her what I had asked the man for not to kill Derek, not at first

The Shorten Clock

Marcus POV Saoirse came back from Priya’s at eleven forty PM.I had been at the desk in the study with the statement, which was now eleven pages and most of the way to complete. I heard the van. I heard Faraz let her in. I heard her come up the stairs, and I turned in the chair, and I read her face, and her face told me two things before she said either of them.The first thing her face told me was that she had done it. She had told Priya everything. The telling had cost her something, and the cost was visible in the specific exhaustion of a woman who has spent an evening handing the worst truth of her life to the person she loves most.The second thing her face told me was that something had changed about the timeline.I said: “Sit down. Tell me.”She sat. She told me.──She told me that Priya now knew all of it. The night, the count, my name, the second queue, the fact that her own escalation fourteen months ago had been the first link in the chain.She told me what Priya had said

The Hand Off

Marcus POV I gave the machine three days, and on the fourth I gave it Lena.The three days compressed into a kind of work I had not done in years sustained, total, uninterrupted, the work of a man assembling a thing whose deadline was real and whose specification was unforgiving. The statement reached its final form: eighteen pages, every sentence routing culpability to me and away from everyone else. The evidence package neared completion the records of the twenty, sourced individually, structured so that a prosecutor receiving them would have a complete case requiring no further investigation, and therefore no subpoenas, and therefore no threads pulled through Priya’s compliance question or Saoirse’s three sentences or the data of a company that was about to belong to someone else.Saoirse worked beside me for most of it. Not on the package the package was mine, the twenty were mine, and I was not going to let her hands touch the record of them but in the room, at the second desk,

1 2 3 4 5 6

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP