face. I had told him what he wanted to hear: I had told him that he wasn’t responsible for the murder of Ted Severson, and that Miranda was. I had absolved him. When he stopped crying, I asked him to get me a beer. I wasn’t planning on drinking it, but I wanted to give him something to do, and I wanted him to feel like I was now on his side. He came back with two bottles, sat down, and uncapped the bottles with an opener that was attached to his key ring.
“What should I do?” he asked. “Should I just go to the police and confess. Tell them everything that happened?”
“That’s not going to help. You’re still the one who killed Ted. She was nowhere near when it happened, and she’s going to say she had nothing to do with it.”
“So what should I do?” He drank his beer, dribbled a little down his chin.
The way he was looking at me I could have told him to break his own fingers and he would have done it. So I took a chance, and said to him: “I need you to help me get rid of Miranda. It’s what she deserves, and it’s the only thing that’s going to get you off the hook. Can you help me do that?”
“What do you mean, get rid of her?”
“I’m going to kill her, Brad.”
“Okay.”
So I presented the plan. I told him to tell Miranda that I wanted to meet with her, that I knew all about the murder, and that I wanted money. We would meet in the house the Seversons had been building, sometime the next night, after dark. “She’ll be suspicious,” Brad said.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. So instead of telling her that I’m going to blackmail her, tell her that it’s a setup, that I told you to tell her it was blackmail, but that I’m planning on killing her, that I’ve been waiting for my moment since college. She’ll come. I know she will. Then I’ll get rid of her, and you can help me bury her body. If she gets discovered I’ll make sure that you have a solid alibi. I’ll say that you and I met up here in Kennewick, and we hooked up, and you came back down to my house in Massachusetts. You’ll be fine, I promise.”
“What about the money?”
“You’re never going to see that money, Brad. Never. You’re going to go to prison, and I’m offering you a way out. If Miranda’s gone, then you are safe.”
He nodded rapidly, like he’d just been scolded. “How are you going to kill her?”
“I’ll take care of that,” I said.
“I could do it,” Brad said, and there was something new in his eyes. Not fear, anymore, but hatred, plus maybe a little bit of craziness. I wondered if he’d slept at all since killing Ted.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I could send her into the house, and then I could come in through the back patio entrance and sneak up on her. I have this big wrench. I could hit her over the head with it. That way you wouldn’t have to do it. You don’t want to know what it’s like.”
It was perfect. It solved my biggest problem, that if I was the one to kill Miranda, there would inevitably be some sort of forensic test that would prove a five-foot-eight-inch female had dealt the deadly blow and not a six-foot-two-inch man.
“You won’t need to sneak up on her,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Tell her that you’re planning on killing me because I know everything. Tell Miranda that you’re going to sneak up on me and hit me with the wrench. Then, even if she hears you coming into the house, she’ll think you’re after me. She won’t even know it’s coming.”
“Okay.” He nodded.
“Are you sure about this?”
He told me he was, and I believed him. We talked more, going over every detail of the plan. I reassured him several times that everything was going to be okay. When I left his house, I was convinced that he would do everything he had told me he would do.
And he had.
I had wondered, as I was standing in the dark with Miranda, whether I had been stupid, and Brad was going to kill me instead of Miranda. But at the last moment, when Brad lifted that massive wrench, I knew. I knew that I had won, and Miranda, like others before her, was going to