“Bad dream, little sister?” he drawled.

“Help!” I whispered.

“All alone,” Geoff singsonged. “All, all alone.”

“Damn you,” I croaked, fighting again. “Let me go—what are you—?”

“I told you there was a way into your apartment,” Geoff said, in that same crazy, nursery-rhyme meter. “I told you.” He smiled vacuously. The lights were on, the dogs were barking and nobody was home. He put a finger to his lips, and I was reminded of Barbara, pretending there was some nice surprise in the offing when what she really planned was to pump bullets into the two people in the world I loved and needed most. “It’s under the bed,” Geoff went on, almost conspiratorially. “A sort of crawl space. All you have to do is stand on the bar downstairs and push the vent grating out of the way, and there it is. The secret passage.”

I tried to squirm away, but he took another grip on my ankles, harder this time, his fingers biting deep into my flesh.

“I happened to be in the bar one night,” he droned on. “Right downstairs from you, Mary Jo—so close—so very close—and I noticed the vent.”

“Wh-why are you doing this?” I gasped. “What have I ever done to you?”

Geoff’s blankly handsome face assumed an expression of perverse indulgence. “You were born,” he crooned. “My mother slept with that baboon—I heard them sometimes, in the night, and I wished they’d both die. Then I pretended it was only a bad dream. It worked—I could pretend she wasn’t letting him touch her. Until you came along, that is. Mary Jo, the living proof.”

I started to tell him he was nuts, but since that was clearly established, it would have been redundant. If I was going to survive—and even though my chances weren’t great, I fully intended to come out of the experience alive—I couldn’t afford to waste my breath stating the obvious.

“Married people sleep together,” I said carefully. “They have babies.”

I tried to sit up and, to my surprise, he let me.

Geoff got out to his feet, covered in dust bunnies. He reached down, caught me by my sore arm, and yanked me upright.

“Not my mother,” he said, spitting the words into my face.

I decided to push him a little. It was an instinctual thing, not even a distant cousin to common sense. “You were there that night, in the trailer. The night of the murders. You didn’t try to stop Barbara—you were in on the whole thing.”

Geoff smiled at the memory. From his expression, he might have been recalling a family picnic, or an especially good Christmas, instead of the savage slaying of his mother and stepfather.

“You didn’t do it just for money—did you?”