“Yeah, her husband or boyfriend. They killed a bunch of kids and buried them out in these grasslands or something.”

“And Cheri was interested in this case.”

“Interested? She was fucking obsessed. Wouldn’t stop talking about it. She’d always been into that kind of stuff, serial killers and shit. We both were. But then, all of a sudden, she starts going on and on about this Scottish chick, telling me all about her. It was spooky. Almost made me think maybe she was some kind of reincarnation of this Suzanne Simmons, but I looked it up, and Simmons was still alive.”

“So Cheri talked about those murders.”

“And talked and talked and talked. She kept going on about how this Simmons had found the key. That’s what she called it. The key. We had to stop pissing around—talking about it, fantasizing about it—and do it.”

“Kill someone.”

“Only we couldn’t just kill them. If we wanted this key, we had to do it a certain way.”

“The way Suzanne Simmons had.”

“See, that’s what didn’t make any sense. The stuff she said, it had nothing to do with Simmons. What we had to do was different. She had these instructions—”

“Is that what she called them?”

“Yeah. Instructions. Like she was reading out of some how-to book. At first, it was okay. The stuff she said, it was all things we’d talked about before. But then she started getting careless, and I said, if we keep doing this, we’re going to get caught, but she insisted it was all part of the plan, and we were protected.”

“Just like Suzanne Simmons, who was caught and sentenced to life in prison.”

“Hey, don’t look at me. I’m not stupid. But when I brought it up, Cheri said things went wrong with Simmons, but they were all fixed now.”

“Uh-huh.” I looked him up and down. “Fixed very well, I see.”

“Look, that little cunt—”

“This key. What was it?”

“Oh, mystical bullshit. Magic powers and eternal life. Oh, and really great sex.” He paused. “Can’t say she was wrong on that last part. The sex was pretty damned good.”

I remembered the scene from my vision, the girl crying for her mother. My hands balled into fists. Jaime shot me a warning look, but I didn’t need it. MacKenzie was being forthcoming so I had no excuse to beat the answers out of him. Not yet.

I prodded his memory some more, but he just kept going in circles, babbling about the key and Suzanne Simmons and the instructions.

“After Cheri started in on this, how long did it take before you started killing?”

“She wanted to right away, but I held her back. I tried to reason with her.”

“Uh-huh.”