I didn’t wait to see what happened.

The woman had my gun and was staring down at the gory mess that was on top of me. I pushed it aside. I was covered with blood and brains. I was watching the admiral. He had the gun on Trisha.

“I’m gonna kill the girl! I’m gonna kill the little monster, do you hear me!!”

I got to my feet and raised my hands. I was the only one alive in the room who didn’t have a gun.

“Trisha,” I said, “Just stay calm and I’ll get us out of here, okay?”

The patchwork woman looked at me and tilted her head. “I’m Jenny. Trisha died in an accident.”

Uh oh.

Bennington, the fucking admiral started to cry. “I can’t kill Jenny! I can’t!”

I leaned in. “How about everybody lower their weapons.”

I held out my hands and waited for one of them to hand me their gun.

Bennington shuddered and bawled like a baby. Snot streamed over his mouth. He aimed the gun on the young dead woman. “I don’t want to kill you.”

And then Trisha, Jenny, and the others spoke.

“We don’t care what you do. We want to die. You already killed us once,” they said.

Bennington’s eyes were as wide as mine and he responded as I would have. “We?” he said. His gun hand was shaking violently and sweat gathered on his forehead.

The girl took a step toward him. “You’re not my father. You’re my killer,” she said.

“I didn’t kill you, baby,” he whined. “It was an accident.”

She pointed to her hip where the flesh appeared tanner than the rest. “You killed Stephanie and Sally and Beth . . . killed all of us.”

They didn’t even know I was there. It was the jigsaw girl’s moment and I let her have it, or more to the point I let them have their moment with their killer. I believed Bennington hadn’t killed his daughter, but he’d lost her and the grief drove him to murder other girls for parts.

Maybe he met Burns by accident, maybe they sought each other out. It didn’t matter. Two fathers had lost their daughters. Both heads had never been found. I looked at the girl and saw the stitching around the back of her head and guessed that the head was one daughter’s and the brain the other.

The patchwork woman raised the gun and clenched her teeth. “We’re going to kill you now.”

Bennington pissed himself and sobbed. He let the gun slip from his hands. It was finally too much. He surrendered.