“What Nicki said inspired only the way Tasker did it: the knife, essential to the murder, but not used in the way a knife is normally used. The words on the wall, ‘He is no less dead.’ When I told Hannah Blundy that Damon’s killer might be one of her regular patients, it clicked for her suddenly: she remembered a story she’d heard from the patient calling herself Melissa Redgate, a story she’d made a note of in a file and then forgotten all about. It wasn’t exactly the same—it wasn’t licking poison off a knife, and it was in the mental compartment she’d labeled ‘Work’ rather than ‘Personal,’ so she didn’t make the connection at first.”

“Waterhouse, enough.” Proust lifted his head from the desk. “What did Nicki Clements, calling herself Melissa Redgate, say to Reuben Tasker–slash–King Edward and then repeat in the presence of her therapist, Hannah? Take pity on us. What was this all-important utterance that inspired a murder?”

“It was a flippant remark. She drew a kind of . . . well, an analogy, I suppose. Between sex and killing.”

CHAPTER 15

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

I RECOGNIZE HIM FROM the Internet: Reuben Tasker, the author. Writes supernatural novels. I’ve read half of one. It won a prize.

“Look at me,” he says.

I can’t tell him I’d rather look anywhere but straight at him. He’s put tape over my mouth. I’m scared to move. He’s kneeling astride me, holding a pair of scissors in one hand. If I make him angry, he could stab me.

Behind him, in the corner of the room, there’s a woman sitting in a chair, crying. She also has tape over her mouth. She could run to the door while Tasker’s busy with me, but she doesn’t move.

Why not?

“Look at me, Nicki. Don’t keep turning away. I want to see your face. I haven’t seen it for a long time.”

I should have made a run for it while I could. Now he’s sitting astride me. In order to escape, I’d have to push him off. Can’t. He’s too heavy. He might have a handsome face if he had different eyes, but not with these: two round, dark insects determined to burrow into me. I try to blur my focus so that I won’t see him clearly, try not to dissolve in fear and lose my grip.

Why Tasker? Why did you have to be this man, King Edward—a man whose imagination dreams up tortures and punishments so intricately gruesome that no ordinary person would think of them if they tried for a year?

If he can invent horrors like the ones I read in his book, he can hurt me. He’s likely to hurt me. How would it feel to be stabbed with scissors?

In the eye. In the neck . . .

“Open your eyes.”