Chapter 17

The first person he'd killed was his grandfather. The last person he'd killed was Martha Ratliff. In between them he'd killed twenty-four others.

The names of all those people, and the place and date where each died, were on a list that Ethan hid in a hollowed-out hardcover copy ofJohn Cheever's stories. That list was his life's work, the thing of which he was the proudest. Sometimes he fantasized about turning himself in when he was seventy-five years old. The list would be much longer then. He'd bring it with him when he stepped inside the police station, or FBI headquarters, or whatever place he chose. He'd deliver the list, his curriculum vitae, his autobiography. Then the interviews would begin. Endless conversations with detectives and investigators from different jurisdictions. Not to mention the psychiatrists who'd be lining up to hear what he had to say. He'd explain to them just how easy it had been to kill so many people. He'd tell them his rules. For example, never do it the same way twice and always disguise it as something other than what it was. That was the important one. And because he'd followed that rule, at this point in his life—twenty-six murders in—Ethan was not on any investigative body's radar. He was a nobody. He'd never been arrested. He had no internet presence. No, that wasn't entirely true. Ethan Saltz had some internet presence. He was listed in a few obituaries, and he was the author of a number of well-received articles, including one that had been published sixteen years earlier in New York magazine. Ethan Saltz, as a name, as a citizen, still existed. He paid taxes on the relatively small annuity he received from his inheritance, and he held a post office box in Boston. But Ethan Saltz the flesh-and-blood man currently lived his life as Robert Charnock, an art dealer with a residence in Philadelphia. The real Robert Charnock had been a germophobic recluse who was currently at the bottom of a kettle pond in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Robert, the person who Ethan now was, had much shorter, darker hair than Ethan, and a flat California accent. And he had actually become relatively successful in the art world, having sold several genuine pieces of art along with several very good forgeries. It went against Ethan's philosophy to engage in other criminal pursuits besides the art of murder, but forgery was surprisingly easy, especially, or only, when it was done on a small scale. He'd made a fair amount of money simply inventing mid-century artists and selling their forged art directly out of the gallery. Why anyone attempted to produce forgeries of well-known artists was beyond him.

The most surprising thing—surprising to Ethan, at least—about his life as Robert Charnock, was that he was married. His wife was older than him, with two children from a previous marriage, both of whom boarded at private high schools. He'd married Rebecca Grubb because she was rich, and because she owned a brownstone in Rittenhouse Square, and because she accepted him as a rather eccentric art dealer who never talked about his past. (He'd insinuated childhood trauma and she bought it hook, line, and sinker.) And she also accepted that his passion in life was meandering around the country, seeking hidden gems from flea markets and junk stores. She had never complained about his trips away. He suspected she liked the time alone. Rebecca's only expectations for her husband was that he attend the annual Christmas gala for the charity she ran, and that he spend two weeks with her every February at whatever tropical resort hotel she'd decided she absolutely had to visit.

The best part of having a wife was that men without wives were always a little suspicious. Wives were gatekeepers, really, telling the world that the man they had married had been thoroughly vetted and passed some sort of test. This only worked if the wife in question was a person of character. And Rebecca had character. In her case, that meant she had money and clout. And since she'd chosen Robert to share her life with, she'd conferred on him an extra layer of authenticity. She was his disguise.

Ethan's gallery was managed and staffed by his longtime assistant, Chris Salah, another person in his life, like Rebecca, who seemed perfectly content with being left alone for long stretches of time. God knows, and who cares, what Chris got up to when Ethan was away.

Ethan had now been Robert Charnock for six years, although he had credit cards still in the name of Ethan Saltz, and a bank card and a very convincing Illinois driver's license in the name of Bradley Anderson, another one of Ethan's previous victims. In Philadelphia, as Robert Charnock, he drove a two-door Jaguar XJ, but Brad owned a white Kia Forte that he parked at a run-down house north of the city with a single-car garage, a house in Brad Anderson's name. Ethan used the place as a place to swap identities and to swap cars.

In the first five years that Ethan had lived in Philadelphia as a married art dealer, he'd killed nineteen people in various locations, mostly along the East Coast. The easiest people to murder were those on the outskirts of society, drug addicts, teenage prostitutes, all those clichés from the serial killer handbook. And occasionally Ethan did indulge in some of those down-market victims. How hard was it, after all, to find some passed-out vagrant in a department store doorway and pummel him with a brick? The problem, Ethan had found, was that these victims often had no identifiable names. He'd lucked out once, after pushing a teenage drug addict off a bridge in Minneapolis, to discover her name in that week's newspaper, but there had been occasions when the murders he'd committed had never even been reported to the local press.

For that reason, Ethan looked for victims a little higher up the food chain. People with Social Security numbers and friends and family. People the police would care about. He had his rules. There could be no connection between him and the victim, no possibility that his name or even his description could ever come up in an investigation. He took this rule very seriously.

What was equally important to him was that his homicides appear to be something that they weren't. They didn't need to all look like accidents or suicides, although he'd engineered plenty of killings that did just that, but they needed to point in some direction other than random killing. For that reason, Ethan often chose his victims from newspaper stories. Somewhat prominent people going through ugly divorces. Wealthy businessmen being investigated for fraud. They were easy to spot if you knew what you were looking for. Down in Ocean City he'd picked up a newspaper left on a bar and read about a man, Dominic Salamone, recently released on bail after violating a restraining order issued because of domestic abuse. Ethan located Salamone's address in a White Pages phonebook, and cased the shabby little stucco house that, if Ethan didn't know better, he'd have deemed unlivable, and at one in the morning a cab dropped off Dominic Salamone, who entered through the front door. An hour later Ethan entered the house through a back door, let his eyes adjust to the darkness inside the house, then went upstairs to Dominic's bedroom, and strangled him with one of Dominic's own cheap ties.

He was back in Philadelphia the next day. Two days later he bought a copy of a Maryland newspaper at one of the few remaining news merchants in the city, and read a story about the death of Dominic Salamone, thought to be a revenge killing. The story hinted at Salamone's ex-wife being potentially connected to a local criminal enterprise.

It was all so easy.

And, truthfully, it had started to get a little boring. A year ago, Ethan had been in one of his periodic downswings, the world colorless and dull. He'd gone onto Facebook, logging in as Barbara Smith, an entirely made-up person who had somehow still managed to acquire about four hundred idiotic friends. He liked to go on Facebook and browse around. It was stunning to him how much information people gleefully offered up. About where they lived, where they traveled, what their kids were up to, whom they loved. Mostly he used Facebook as a place to fantasize, and sometimes he used it to read remembrance boards on people he had killed—all those clichéd sentiments unspooling because of what he'd done. That was his favorite thing to do on Facebook, honestly, although he did occasionally take a look at people from his past, kids he'd gone to high school with, and sometimes even his brother and sister, both of them entirely out of his life.

On that particular day in springtime—Ethan's least favorite season—a name had come to him: Martha Ratliff. Ethan found her on Facebook. There was a picture of her, still a little brown mouse, still a librarian. She rarely posted. In fact, it had been a year between her last post and her most recent one, but the latest post was a marriage announcement, accompanied by a picture, her and some gaunt, vapid businessman. They'd honeymooned at Niagara Falls, the picture of them swallowed by mist, and Ethan supposed that the choice of Niagara Falls was partly because it was such a funny place to honeymoon, because, ha ha, people in the old days used to do it.

Ethan had eliminated most of the rage in his life, but it reared up in him now. Martha, back when he was Ethan Saltz the writer, back when the only person he'd killed was his grandfather, plus that one Vermont townie his junior year of college, back then Martha had been his special project. This was when his favorite pastime had been seducing mild-mannered girls, then slowly and completely taking them apart, corrupting them, making them do things they'd regret for the rest of their lives. Like everything else in his life, it had been far too easy, really. He'd always been handsome. There were always eyes on him wherever he went. Covetous eyes. He could have his pick of available girls, and for a time, toward the end of high school and the beginning of college, he'd picked the most popular girls, the prettiest, the ones who wanted him because he was a prize as well. But those girls, he found, were uninteresting to him. They were self-absorbed, and scorekeepers, and already prone to cruelty and extremes. Then he discovered the subset of girls who'd been ignored their whole lives, the wallflowers, and he found that they were far more interesting to him. He could talk them into the only kind of sex he enjoyed, sex that hurt, and he found that sometimes he could even talk them into hurting other people with him.

He'd found Martha during that one semester when he'd been an adjunct professor at Birkbeck College, back when he was going by his real name. He'd been a writer then. It was something he was good at, had always been good at, and it allowed him to openly and publicly investigate some of the seedier sides of the world we all lived in. His most famous piece, the one that was published in New York magazine, had been an exposé of a nascent cult that had sprung up among high school students in rural Texas. It had been started by the local minister's kid, who'd convinced more than ten fellow students to commit animal sacrifice, and join in orgies, at an abandoned farmhouse on Friday nights, while the rest of the town watched high school football. That story had gotten him a lot of attention, plus a now-expired film option. Writing it had been easy. Writing was just manipulation, in a way. The key was to seem objective while all the time leading your readers to the conclusion, and the emotions, that you wanted them to have. But Ethan, at that point in his life, knew he was bound for greater things, and being a writer was not quite as anonymous as he'd hoped it would be. He took the teaching gig to get out of New York City and to rethink what he really wanted to do with his life.

Martha Ratliff had been so promising to him, her self-esteem so low that she believed she'd actually been the victim of some kind of love curse. She was an ugly duckling who had given up all hope of a relationship. He'd spotted her at a table in some bar, surrounded by a bunch of prettier students, and he'd seduced her without so much as talking to her. And things had gone well for a while. He'd talked her into rough sex and into some pretty interesting threesomes with drunk locals. He hadn't seen it in her eyes yet, that moment when she gave in to the transgressions and began to enjoy them. But that was why she was a project. He had time. And then, suddenly, out of the blue, she'd told him that she didn't want to see him anymore. It was a laughable performance. She'd been coached by some do-good friend of hers who'd clearly become concerned. That friend had shown up on the night of the breakup, conveniently arriving just in time to usher Martha home and out of his grasp. He didn't remember the friend's name, but he remembered what she looked like, red hair, strange green eyes, skim-milk skin. She'd scared him just a little. What was her name? Some kind of flower, he thought.

What was funny was that he remembered Martha Ratliff's name but not really what she looked like. Of course, when he saw her on Facebook it all came back to him. There she was, the little mouse, survivor of some silly love curse, and survivor of a pretty exciting relationship with Ethan Saltz. Maybe he shouldn't have let her go so easily. He clicked over to her new husband's profile. It was actually a business page. He sold novelty items for teachers at conferences. There was a picture of him standing in front of some booth, and Ethan had an idea, a really interesting idea. It would be dangerous, more dangerous than his current hobbies, but then again, it might be far more satisfying. There was a calendar of upcoming conferences on Alan Peralta's Facebook page—the man traveled constantly—and Ethan began to formulate a plan.