But would I have known about Brooke? Would I have found that piece? Probably not. And John had been smart. He had been calculating. He had known exactly what to tell me and what line to toe without alarming me to the point of calling the authorities.
I may have made mistakes, but nothing that I had done, or not done, had been intentional. My deception, my evasion . . . all that had happened after Brooke’s and John’s deaths and wouldn’t have changed any of these horrific events.
Robert lifted the knife, but I kept my attention on his face, searching for a hint of compassion in his eyes. There was none, just tired and unfiltered hate. He wasn’t a killer. I knew that he wasn’t a killer. He was hurt. He was angry. But he would not harm me, not if he knew everything.
I believed it. I had to believe it.
“Robert,” I whispered, “I didn’t know John was the killer.”
“Bullshit,” he spat. “You told me you knew. John Abbott was seeing you while he had my son tied up in his attic. He was seeing you when he killed my child. He was seeing you when he stole Scott Harden away from his family.” He gritted out the words and repositioned the knife in his hand, getting a better grip. I thought of Detective Saxe’s somber tone when he had delivered the news of John’s death.
The man was stabbed in the stomach. The angle and situation lead us to believe it was self-inflicted.
“No!” I shook my head, searching my desk wildly for something to prove my innocence. “When you asked if I knew what John had done, I thought you were asking about Brooke. He killed Brooke. That’s what I was hiding from you. That’s what I should have told the police.” I pressed my palms together, pleading with him. “And I was treating John because he was behaving violently toward her.”
He paused, and at least he was listening. Human nature would dictate that he wanted to believe me. I just had to give him the pieces to justify it in his mind. I tried not to look at the knife. Now was not the time to give him a reminder of it.
“No,” he said tightly. “No. You said clients confessed things to you. You said you could have stopped him from killing, and you didn’t.”
“I was talking about Brooke. All we ever talked about was Brooke,” I said firmly, then placed my hand on John’s file. “This is his file. It has every session I’ve ever had with him. Read it. All my notes are there. Brooke was cheating on him, and he was furious over it. He was worried he would hurt her, and we were working on it.”
“Working on keeping him from killing his wife? What about my son?” He clenched his free hand into a fist.
“I didn’t know about Gabe,” I said softly. “I had no idea.” I gestured to the profile and my notepad, still mostly blank. “I just saw the news, about the attic, and came right home. I needed to go through everything and see . . .” I faltered, emotion coming over me, and I pinched my lips together and attempted to swallow the emotion. “I needed to see—” I tried again. “How I had missed something so horrible. Had he given me clues and I hadn’t caught them?” My voice caught. “I’m sorry, Robert.” I gasped out the apology. “I’m so sorry.”
He swallowed, and I saw the raw crumble of his features, the loss of control from a man who was so tightly wound that he was going to break. He slowly sank into the chair, his gaze tight on mine. His eyes intense and searching. “Don’t lie to me, Gwen.”
“I’m not.” I held the eye contact and took a deep breath, needing to collect myself, to control my emotions and stay levelheaded. His anger was receding, but he was still very dangerous and emotionally volatile.
I thought of the time we’d been in this room. When he had been standing over my desk, the slow turn of his head toward me when I’d entered the room. The continual questions about John Abbott that had fed my fear that he’d known about Brooke. But he hadn’t. His anger was over the Bloody Heart Killer, not Brooke’s death. So if . . .
My mind whirred through all the suspicious moments, the constant feeling that he was two steps ahead of the game, his steadfast insistence that Randall Thompson was innocent and Scott Harden was lying. “You knew,” I said quietly. “You knew that John was the BH Killer.”
His face didn’t change. He didn’t nod. He didn’t acknowledge it. He didn’t deny it. But I knew I was right. The clues were all there—I had just been missing a few cards.
“What did you think?” I asked slowly. “You thought I knew John Abbott was the killer and I still put together this ridiculous profile?”
“It was pretty spot-on for him,” he said quietly. “And I asked you if it fit any of your clients.”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking about my dead clients,” I said, frustrated. “And my interview with Randall Thompson was what—a test? Every conversation I had with you, where I argued about Randall’s innocence . . . you thought that was what? Me pretending to be an idiot?” My voice rose, and getting into an argument with an emotional, armed man was the number one way to get killed, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“I needed to know what John had told you.” Some fire was coming back into his eyes, and this switch in topic was either the smartest or the stupidest idea I’d ever had. “And you were cagey about it, so I finally just came out and asked you.”
I resisted the urge to check and see if the knife was still in his hand. “You didn’t come out and ask me if John was the BH Killer. You asked me something . . .” I blew out a frustrated breath. “Something like . . . did I know what he did, or something that was general as hell that I took as a reference to Brooke. Do you think if I was hiding the BH Killer’s identity that I would have let you get within a hundred feet of me? Hire me? Sleep naked in my bed?” I lifted my hands in frustration. “I think we can all agree that my powers of intuition and deduction as far as John Abbott was concerned were . . .”
“Horrendous,” he provided unhelpfully.
“Flawed,” I allowed. “But I’m not an idiot. I’m not stupid. Tell me you believe that.”
In response, he slowly placed the knife in between us, on my desk. He paused, then released his grip on it. An olive branch with a four-inch blade.
I stared at it and felt every muscle in my body give way to relief. It wasn’t safety, but he believed me.
“Robert,” I said carefully, “when did you find out that John was the one?”
His face tightened, and there was more there. I had confessed my crimes, and he needed to confess his. “October second.”
I looked down at my desk, clicking through the timeline in my mind.
“It was the day before he died.” His voice was flat and matter-of-fact. When I studied his face, it was grim but without remorse. “The day before I killed him.”
And there it was. The confession.
“I—uh—I came in the kitchen and found him kneeling over his wife. He was crying. Shaking her. Performing mouth-to-mouth, but she was dead.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear that John had regretted the action. I told him, so many times, in so many sessions, that killing her wouldn’t solve anything. That it was a brief moment that would ruin his entire life. He had loved her fiercely, unnaturally so, in the sort of rare attachment that the selfish reserve for their toys.