“It’s impolite to sneak up on people.”
“It’s impolite to withhold personal information from a client.”
“So we’re both rude.”
“Yes, we are.” Noone blinks and repeats his question. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
Nomi holds for a few beats longer. But this confrontation was inevitable, and in the end, none of this matters. She releases the tension in her arm, uncocks the revolver, lowers it. Lets it thunk on the coffee table.
“Tell you what?” She continues cleaning up: wipes and dries her tool, shoves arrowhead, Kleenex, the bottle of rubbing alcohol into her kit bag with practiced rapidity, zips up. Her stomach is still bleeding; she licks a finger and jams it over the wound. “That I cut? It’s really none of your—”
“That I’m a mass murderer.”
He’s washed out, his cheeks hollowed, posture stiff; it’s not the loose, easy way he usually occupies space. He looks like he’s in shock. But how can she tell what’s real with him? She thinks of his panty-dropping grin at the bar, thinks of his face contorted in a snarl as he confronted Ameche on the stairs. She slaps a dressing on her cut, rearranges her shirt.
“You’re not a mass murderer.” Nomi realizes she needs to clarify. “That’s more like when someone kills a whole lot of people in a spree event—”
“Jesus Christ.” Noone scrubs his hair back with one hand.
“You killed a lot of people over about five years.” There’s no good way to say it.
“Simon Gutmunsson—” He stops, presses his lips together until they’re white. “Me.I was a serial killer.”
“Yes.”
“Twenty-one people. I murdered twenty-one people.”
“Including six law enforcement officers. Yes.”
“That’s why you’ve been avoiding me. Because I’m a serial killer.”
“Yes.” She pauses. “Also because I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“Okay, I need to sit down.” He finds the brown lounge chair and drops into it.
The coffee table is clean now, but hanging above it, in the air between them, are all the words Nomi remembers from the file: “multiple victims” and “evisceration” and “dangerous” and “statewide search” and “most wanted” and ...
There are a lot of words. None of them are good.
Still feeling the sting on her stomach and a mild high, she pushes her Schlitz toward him across the table. “You have this. I’ll get another.”
She knows he doesn’t like beer, but apart from schnapps, that’s all she’s got. She stands and goes to the kitchen, fetches a second bottle of Schlitz from the refrigerator, sits back down on the sofa just as Noone takes a swig from his own bottle, shudders.
His voice comes out hoarse. “So where have you been hiding?”
“I waited until you went to work before I came back here,” she admits. “I left you a message with Sofia Rosa so you wouldn’t chase around after me.”
“I got the message,” he notes. “And I still chased around.”
She’s not going to apologize. “Today, I’ve mostly been at the library, getting verification and doing additional research.”
“What other details did you find out?” His tone is dry, but the words are halting.
Nomi uses the edge of the coffee table to pop the cap on her beer. She doesn’t need to consult her notes to give him a broad outline. “You came from a wealthy Massachusetts family—privileged life, educated in Europe ... That’s how you’re fluent in the Romance languages. You started young. Eleven homicides before you were caught and tried as an adult in 1980. Insanity defense got you incarcerated in a hospital.”
“I’ve been declared legally insane?” With each new revelation, he pales further.
She nods, short and once. “You participated in a juvenile-offender interview program run by the FBI in 1982. As a result, you were transferred to—and then escaped from—a Pennsylvania jail.”
