More Twisted

was already there.
    Kitty glanced at her watch, the one Ron had given her. It was simple and elegant and probably worth ten thousand dollars. “Why don’t you get some rest tonight and I’ll come by in the morning.”
    “Of course. You have the address?”
    “It’s somewhere. I . . . I don’t know where. I’m just not thinking straight.”
    He gave it to her again.
    “It’ll be good to see you, Kitty.”
    “Family has to be together at times like this.”

    Kitty went into the bathroom and washed her face in icy water, rinsing away the last dullness of sleep.
    She returned to the room and gazed at herself in the wall mirror, thinking how different she looked from the woman she really was. Not Kitty Larkin at all, but someone named Priscilla Endicott, a name lost behind a lengthy string of aliases.
    When you were a professional killer, you couldn’t afford to be yourself of course.
    A left-wing radical in the United States, an advocate—and occasional practitioner—of political violence, Priscilla had moved overseas after college, where she’d floated among several underground movements and ended up helping out political terrorists in Ireland and Italy. But by the age of thirty she realized that politicsdon’t pay the bill, at least not simpleminded communist and socialist politics, and she decided to offer her talents to those who’d pay: security consultants in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. When even that didn’t pay enough, she changed her line of work again, keeping the title but taking on a whole new job description, which she described as “problem solver.”
    Four months ago, while sunbathing at a pool in the United Arab Emirates, she’d gotten a phone call from a trusted contact. After some negotiation, she’d been hired, for $5 million U.S., to kill Ron Larkin and his brother and wife, the three people instrumental in overseeing the Larkin Foundation.
    Priscilla had changed her appearance: weight gain, dyed hair, colored contact lenses, strategic collagen injections. She became Catherine “Kitty” Biddle Simpson, created a credible biography and managed to get close to Larkin through some charities in Los Angeles. She’d spent plenty of time in Africa and could discuss the region intelligently. She even knew a great deal about the plight of the children, having turned a number of them into orphans.
    Kitty laid on the charm (and a few other skills, of course), they began dating and she looked for a chance to complete her contract. But it wasn’t easy. Oh, she could’ve killed him at any time, but murdering a very public and popular man like Ronald Larkin, not to mention his brother and sister-in-law too, and getting away, of course, was much harder than she’d thought.
    But then Ron Larkin himself provided a solution. Amusing her no end, he proposed to her.
    As his wife she’d have complete access to his life, without the security people around, and his brother and sister-in-law would automatically trust her.
    The first thing she said was, “Yes, dear, but I don’t want a penny of your money.”
    “Well . . .”
    “No, I’ve got my father’s trust fund,” she’d explained. “Besides, honey, what I like about you isn’t the dollar signs. It’s what you do for people. And, okay, you got a decent body for an old guy,” she’d joked.
    Under those circumstances, who could possibly suspect her?
    Then after a bout of marital bliss (occasional sex, many rich dinners, countless boring businesspeople), it was time to act.
    On Tuesday night they’d arrived at LaGuardia (flying on a private jet, she could bring her guns and the other accoutrements of her trade with her), driven to the town house and gone to bed. At 4:30 a.m., she’d dressed and pulled on latex gloves, screwed the suppressor onto the barrel of her favorite .32 automatic and stepped outside onto the balcony, feeling the cool, electric smell of New York City air in the morning. She’d distributed the planted evidence—the trace she scattered around to lead the police off—then rested the grappling hook on the railing, tossed the rope over the side. She’d returned to the window, cracked the pane and fired—hitting Ron three times and sending the fourth and fifth rounds into her own pillow.
    Then she called 9–1–1, hysterical, to report the attack. After hanging up she’d unscrewed the back of the television,put the gun, silencer, ammunition and gloves inside, and with her cuticle