“You’re thinking that I live off the money he left me. You’re thinking that his money, which I pretend to hate, is actually supporting me. You’re thinking, ‘What a creepy little hypocrite!’ You’re thinking I’m exactly like him, that all I ever wanted was the fucking money.”

“I wasn’t thinking any of those things. It was just an innocent question.”

He let out another harsh laugh. “A TV reporter with an innocent question? That’s like a fucking devil with a heart of gold. Or a surgeon with a soul. Yeah. Right. An innocent question.”

“You can believe what you want about it, Jimi. Does it have an answer?”

“Ah. Now I see what this is about. You want to know how we all made out. Our inheritances. How much we got. Is that what you want to know?”

“I want to know whatever you want to tell me.”

“You mean, whatever I want to tell you about the money. Because that’s what your fucking TV audience would want to know about. Financial pornography. Okay. Fine. The fucking money. The majorly screwed one was the pathetic accountant, whose sister got everything because of her fucked-up kids. Then there was the flaming baker, who mainly inherited his big blond mama’s debts. The sweet little lawyer’s wife did okay, ended up with two or three mil, mainly because her husband had a shitload of term insurance. This is the kind of crap they shared in their fucking support group. This is the kind of crap you want to know about?”

“Whatever you want to tell me.”

“Right. Sure. Fine. Larry Sterne ended up with his father’s medical-dental beauty factory, which I’m sure is worth millions. Roberta, the scary lady with the scary dogs, got her whore-fucking father’s multimillion-dollar toilet business. And of course there’s me. My greedy shit of a father had a brokerage account at Fidelity that was worth a little over twelve million dollars when he bit the bullet. And in case your truth-seeking TV audience wants the latest update, that brokerage account, now in my name, is worth around seventeen million. Which obviously raises a question in your mind: ‘If little Jimi Brewster has such a fucking pile of money, why’s he living in this fucking dump?’ The answer is simple. Can you guess what it is?”

“No, Jimi, I can’t.”

“Oh, I think you could if you tried, but I’ll tell you. I’m saving every cent of it to give to the Good Shepherd, if they ever catch him.”

“You want to give your father’s money to the man who killed him?”

“Every bloody cent. It should make a nice legal defense fund, don’t you think?”

Chapter 38

The White Mountain Strangler