John Cleaver has called a demon-literally called it on the phone-and challenged it to a fight. He has faced two of the monsters already, barely escaping with his life, and now he's done running; he's taking the fight to them. But as he wades through his town's darkest secrets, searching for any sign of who the demon might be, one thing becomes all too clear: in a game of cat and mouse with a supernatural killer, the human is always the mouse.
In I Am Not a Serial Killer, we watched a budding sociopath break every rule he had to save his town from evil. In Mr. Monster, we held our breath as he fought madly with himself, struggling to stay in control. Now John Cleaver has mastered his twisted talents and embraced his role as a killer of killers. I Don't Want to Kill You brings his story to a thundering climax of suspicion, mayhem, and death.
It's time to punish the guilty.
And in a town full of secrets, everyone is guilty of something.
Release date:
March 29, 2011
Publisher:
Tom Doherty Associates
Print pages:
320
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The phone rang four times before someone picked up. "Hello?" A woman. Perfect.
"Hello," I said, speaking clearly. I'd muffled the receiver with a sweater to mask my voice, and I wanted to make sure she could understand me. "Is this Mrs. Julie Andelin?"
"I'm sorry, who is this?"
I smiled. Right to the point. Some of them babbled on forever, and I could barely get a word in edgewise. So many mothers were like that, I'd learned: home alone all day, eager to talk, desperate for a conversation with anyone over the age of three. The last one I'd called had thought I was from the PTA and talked to me for nearly a minute until I had to shout something shocking just to get her attention. This one was playing along.
Of course, what I had to say was pretty shocking regardless.
"I saw your son today." I paused. "He's always such a happy kid."
Silence.
How will she react?
"What do you want?"
Once again, right to the point. Almost too practical, perhaps. Is she scared? Is she taking this too calmly? I need to say more.
"You'll be pleased to know little Jordan walked straight home from day care—past the drugstore, down the street to the old red house, then around the corner and past the apartments and straight home to you. He looked both ways at every street, and he never talked to strangers."
"Who are you?" Her breathing was heavier now; more scared, more angry. I couldn't read people very well over the phone, but Mrs. Andelin had been kind enough to answer the phone in the living room, and I could see her through the window. She looked out now, wide eyes peering into the darkness, then quickly wrenched the curtains closed. I smiled. I listened to the air go in and out of her nose, in and out, in and out. "Who are you?" she demanded.
Her fear was real. She wasn't faking—she was legitimately terrified for her son. Does that mean she's innocent? Or just a really good liar?
Julie Andelin had worked in the bank for nearly fifteen years, her entire adult life, and last week she had quit. That wasn't suspicious in itself—people quit jobs all the time, and it didn't mean anything except that they wanted a new job—but I couldn't afford to ignore even the smallest lead. I didn't know what the demons could do, but I'd seen at least one who could kill a person and take its place. Who was to say that this one couldn't do the same? Maybe Julie Andelin was bored with the bank, but maybe—maybe—she was dead and gone and replaced by something that couldn't keep up the same routines. A sudden change of lifestyle might be, from a certain point of view, the most suspicious thing in the world.
"What do you want with my son?"
She seemed genuine, just like every other mother I'd talked to over the last two months. Sixty-three days, and nothing. I knew a demon was coming because I'd called her myself—I'd literally called her, on a cell phone. Her name was Nobody. I'd told her I'd killed her friends, that they'd terrorized my town long enough, and now I was taking the fight to the rest of them. My plan was to take all the demons like that, one by one, until finally we would all be safe. No one would have to live in fear.
"Leave us alone!" Julie screamed.
I lowered my voice a bit. "I have a key to your house." It wasn't true, but it sounded great on the phone. "I love what you've done with Jordan's room."
She hung up, and I clicked off the phone. I wasn't sure whose it was; it's amazing the kind of stuff people drop in a movie theater. I'd used this one for five calls now, so it was probably time to get rid of it. I walked away, cutting through an apartment parking lot, popping open the phone and taking out the batteries and the SIM card. I dropped each piece into a separate metal garbage can, wiped my gloves clean, and slipped through a gap in the back fence. My bike was half a block away, stashed behind a Dumpster. I scrolled though my mental list while I walked, checking off Julie Andelin's name. She was definitely the real mother, and not a demonic impostor; it had been a long shot anyway. At least I hadn't spent much time on this one; I'd "stalked" her son for barely five minutes, but that's all it took if you knew the right things to say. Tell a mother something creepy like "your daughter looks good in blue" and the maternal instinct will kick in instantly—she'll believe the worst without any extra work on your part. It doesn't matter if her daughter has ever worn blue in her life. As soon as you get that intense, honest, fear reaction, you've got your answer and you move on to the next woman with a secret.
I was starting to realize that everyone had a secret. But in sixty-three days I still hadn't found the secret I was looking for.
I pulled out my bike, shoved my gloves into my pocket, and pushed off into the street. It was late, but it was August and the night air was warm. School would start again soon, and I was starting to get almost unbearably nervous. Where was Nobody? Why hadn't she done anything yet? Finding a killer is easy—aside from all the physical evidence you leave behind, like fingerprints and footprints and DNA, there's a mountain of psychological evidence as well. Why did you kill this person instead of that one? Why did you do it here instead of there, and why now instead of earlier or later? What weapon did you use, if any, and how did you use it? Piece it all together and you have a psychological profile, like an impressionist portrait, that can lead you straight to the killer. If Nobody would just kill someone, I'd finally be able to track her down.
Yes, finding a killer is easy. Finding someone before they kill is almost impossible. And the worst part about that was the way it made me so much easier to find than the demon. I'd already killed two people—Bill Crowley and Clark Forman, both demons in human form—so if she knew where to look and took her time, she could find me so much more easily than I could find her. Every day I grew more tense, more desperate. She could be around any corner.
I had to find her first.
I pedaled toward home, silently noting the houses I had already "cleared." That one's having an affair. That one's an alcoholic. That one turned out to have a massive gambling debt—Internet poker. As far as I know she still hasn't told her family their savings are gone. I'd starting watching people, going through their trash, seeing who was out late and who was meeting who and who had something to hide. I was shocked to find that it was almost everybody. It was like the whole town was festering in corruption, tearing itself apart before the demons had a chance to do it for them. Do people like that deserve to be saved? Do they even want to be saved? If they were really that self-destructive, then the demon was helping them more than I was, speeding them along in their goal of complete annihilation. An entire town, an entire world, slitting its vast communal wrist and bleeding out while the universe ignored us.
No. I shook my head. I can't think like that. I have to keep going.
I have to find the demon, and I have to stop it.
The trouble is, that's a lot harder than it sounds. Sherlock Holmes summed up the essence of investigation in a simple sound bite: when you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Great advice, Sherlock, but you never had to track down a demon. I've seen two and talked to a third, and everything they did was impossible. I've watched them rip out their own organs, jump up after a dozen gunshot wounds, assimilate other people's limbs, and even feel other people's emotions. I've watched them steal identities and faces and entire lives. For all I knew they could do literally anything; how was I supposed to figure them out? If Nobody would just freaking kill someone already, then I'd have something to go on.
I was almost home, but I stopped halfway down my block to stare up at a tall beige house. Brooke's house. We'd gone on two dates, both cut short by a dead body, and I'd really started to … like her? I didn't know if that was even possible. I'd been diagnosed with sociopathy, a psychological disorder that meant, among other things, that I couldn't feel empathy. I couldn't connect to Brooke, not really. Did I enjoy her company? Yes. Did I dream about her at night? Yes again. But the dreams were not good, and my company was worse. All the better, then, that she'd started to avoid me. It wasn't a breakup, because we'd never been "together," but it was the platonic analogue of a breakup, whatever that's called. There's really no way to misinterpret "you scare me and I don't want to see you anymore."
I suppose I could see her side of it. I came at her with a knife, after all—that's a hard thing to get over, even if I did have a good reason. Save a girl's life by threatening it and she'll have just enough time to say thank you before she says good-bye.
Still, that didn't stop me from slowing down when I passed her house, or from stopping—like tonight—and wondering what she was doing. So she'd left me; big deal. Everyone else had. The only person I really cared about, really, was Nobody, and I was going to kill her.
Yay me.
I pushed off the curb and rode two doors down, to the mortuary at the end of the street. It was a biggish building, with a chapel and some offices and an embalming room in the back. I lived upstairs with my mom in a little apartment; the mortuary was our family business, though we kept the part about me embalming people a secret. Bad for business. Would you let a sixteen-year-old embalm your grandmother? Neither would anyone else.
I tossed my bike against the wall in the parking lot and opened the side door. Inside was a little stairwell with two exits: a door at the bottom that led to the mortuary, and a door at the top that led into our apartment. The light was burned out, and I trudged upstairs in the dark. The TV was on; that meant Mom was still up. I closed my eyes and rubbed them tiredly. I really didn't want to talk to her. I stood in silence a moment, bracing myself, and then a phrase from the TV caught my ear:
"… found dead…"
I smiled and threw open the door. There'd been another death—Nobody had finally killed someone. After sixty-three days, it was finally starting.
Day one.
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