“P… please,” she whispered. “Stop. It’s the… safe word. I’m saying, ‘Stop.’”
Her body clinging to mine was as light as a tiny, trembling bird. She tried to swim ashore again but didn’t get far before she began to drown. Somehow, she made it back to me. Gripping on for dear life. Her nails dug into my shoulders. I ran my hands over her nipples.
“S-s… stop,” she begged through chattering teeth. Her whole body shuddered against me. She tried to scream but she was close to passing out. “Please… s… stop.”
I liked her. I admit it. I liked a lot of my victims, to be truthful about it.
I didn’t want Amy to die without me fulfilling her initial desires. I’d feel bad about that later… maybe. Then I made sure I stayed with her in the water until I’d been unable to find a pulse for a good ten minutes. In my sentimentality, I kissed her on the forehead and bid her a gentle goodbye. The fish would take care of her now.
I flew home to the UK and didn’t read or watch the news for a while. A few months later, though, I did do some searching. Amy had wound upmangled in the propeller of a fancy yacht coming into harbor at Marina del Rey, just south of Venice. The news article was short. There was no picture and that made me genuinely sad as I can’t remember her face. Nor, indeed, any of their faces.
I’d very much like to see them all again.
Chapter Fourteen
Amy is stunning. Dark skin and multicolored dreadlocks, with piercings aplenty and a bright, white smile. The woman speaks in a creamy American accent and Chloe Spears blushes from her neck to her forehead. Sam takes in Chloe’s mirrored body language as Amy explains that she believes she has met Denver Brady.
“Firstly, Amy, before we get into that,” Sam interjects, “does the name Charlotte Mathers mean anything to you? Other than what you may have seen on the news.”
“No, ma’am,” Amy says, “I’m here about Denver only. I believe I am the Amy character in his book.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I wasn’t sure at first,” Amy says. “To be honest, I skimmed the whole thing for a book club I joined. I just moved to London and wanted to meet new friends, so, I figured… Anyway. Sorry. Why do I think I’m Amy? Firstly, the location is right: Venice Beach. I still have a place there, as well as the one here in London. I’m a professor. I split my time between UCLA in the States and, here,at London Birkbeck.” She flicks a pink dreadlock back over her shoulder. “That said, the ‘Amy’ person isn’t explicitly black and, as you can see, I’m a woman of color. Plus, the Amy inHow to Get Away with Murderis a hustler, a poor drug addict, and I’m far from that.”
“Yet you’re here, claiming to be Amy?” Sam presses.
Amy doesn’t respond but smiles and reaches with her forefinger to tap her pearly front tooth. Sam gets it immediately, but she can see that Chloe is confused.
“Denver says that Amy had a gold incisor,” Amy explains to Chloe.
“I paid a small fortune to have my gold tooth replaced with white enamel. Plus, other details in the chapter match a really dodgy date I had several years ago with a British guy. Finally, Denver is a rare name and my date was with a guy named Denver.”
“Tell us about the date,” Sam says, leaning forward in her chair.
“I knew from the get-go something was wrong,” Amy sighs. “He looked nothing like his profile picture. Then again, they never do. This is why I don’t date guys anymore.” Next to Sam, Chloe nods eagerly, as if there’s some kind of second conversation happening between the two women that Sam can’t hear.
“His profile name was Denver. No surname. We chatted a little before the date and he said he had no social media presence, which I quite liked, but that also meant I couldn’t check him out in advance. He said he ran a business in London and was in LA to see about opening a branch in the US.” Amy pauses, sips her water and then continues. “We met round about sunset, at the kidney.”
“The skateboard park at Venice Beach?” Sam checks.
“Yep. My family have always called it the kidney, after the skate bowl there that’s almost the exact same shape.” Amy draws a bean in the air with her finger. “Anyway, I knew immediately the guy was not it. The first thing he did was hand me a business card,as if to demonstrate his level of importance. He’d said he was six feet tall, but he was closer to five nine. He was sicklypale—looked like he lived in a windowless basement. His British accent kept slipping into something strong…”
“Could it have been Romanian?” Sam offers, but Amy shakes her head slowly.
“No. I’m sure he was a native English speaker. It felt to me like he was actively trying to sound like a British royal, but he couldn’t stop switching to something else—like a Liverpool accent, Scottish maybe? Or perhaps whatever Ant and Dec speak.”
“Geordie,” Sam says, smiling to herself. It would fit perfectly with Betty’s nephew.
Amy shrugs.
“Please describe for us, in detail, what happened next,” Chloe says.
“We walked along the promenade toward Santa Monica Pier and rode the Ferris wheel. We stopped on the way and watched a woman doing pull-ups. Trying to beat a man from the crowd. Denver was determined she was hustling—faking it. He said she must have some kind of hidden hook on her wrist. But to me, she was just a strong woman who was great at pull-ups.”
“Please try to remember everything he said to you,” Sam says.
“It’s difficult, but I remember having the distinct impression that he was a bullshitter. For example, he said he had various degrees and ran a business and volunteered at a hospital and had a secretary. All kinds of lies, or what I took to be lies.”
