Violets Are Blue

Was that why he had killed Betsey Cavalierre? What about Maureen Cooke in New Orleans? And Jamilla?
    I made a note to carefully think and plot out one particular angle, a dysfunctional family triangle with both Kyle and me in it.
    One step ahead.
    So far, anyway.
    If he went after his parents or his brother we would have him. They were being closely protected in Charlotte. The FBI was all over them.
    Kyle knew that. He wouldn’t do something stupid — just cruel and nasty.
    One step ahead.
    That seemed to be the key to Kyle’s fantasy life, at least as I understood it so far. He wouldn’t make the obvious move. He would go at least one move, maybe two, beyond that. But how did he stay a step ahead — especially now? A very bad thought had been running through my head lately. Maybe there was someone else in the FBI helping him — maybe Kyle had a partner.
    I had finally drifted off to sleep when the phone in my bedroom woke me. It was three in the morning.
God damn him. Doesn’t he ever sleep
?
    I picked it up, clicked it off, then unplugged the phone from the wall.
    No more phone tag, Kyle. Fuck you.
    I was setting the rules now. This was my game, not his.

Chapter 107

    IN THE morning, I drank too much black coffee and thought about our last case together: Daniel and Charles, Peter Westin, the Alexander brothers. What did it mean in Kyle’s fantasy? The macabre story he was plotting out involved both of us. He had asked me into the investigation, then used it to control me. Was that where it ended for him, and me?
    I kept trying to piece together the puzzle from a psychologist’s point of view. The rest might flow from that.
Might
. With Kyle, there was no knowing for sure. If he saw a clear pattern, he might break it; if he understood his own pathology, and maybe he did, he would use that in his favor too.
    Around noon, I called Kyle’s older brother, Martin, a radiologist living outside Charlotte — where we had once believed that Daniel and Charles had begun their murder spree. Did Kyle have a previous connection with them? Was that a possibility too?
    Martin Craig tried to help, but he finally admitted that he and his brother hadn’t spoken during the past ten years. “We saw each other at my brother Blake’s funeral,” Martin said. “That was the last time. I don’t like my brother, Detective Cross. He doesn’t like me. I don’t know if he likes anybody.”
    “Was your father especially rough on Kyle?” I asked Martin.
    “Kyle always said so, but to tell the truth, I never saw much of it. Neither did my mother. Kyle liked to make up stories. He was always the big hero or the pathetic victim in them. My mother used to say that Kyle had an ego only second to God’s.”
    “What did you think about that? Your mother’s assessment of your brother?”
    “Detective Cross, my brother didn’t believe in God, and he wasn’t second to anyone.”
    The continuing theme throughout the three brothers’ relationship had been competition, and Kyle had always believed that Martin and Blake won in the eyes of his parents. Kyle had been a starter on the high school basketball team, but Martin had been the clever all-county point guard who also played bass guitar in a local band and had an enviable social life. There had once been a feature story in the local paper about the basketball-playing brothers, but most of the article dealt with Blake and Martin. They had all attended Duke undergraduate, but Martin and Blake went on to medical school. Kyle became a lawyer, a career choice his father deplored. Kyle had talked to me about sibling rivalry, and maybe I was beginning to understand a little of the origins of his fantasy world.
    “Martin,” I finally asked, “is it possible that Kyle murdered your younger brother Blake?”
    “Blake died in a hunting accident — supposedly,” Martin Craig said. “Detective Cross, my brother Blake was an incredibly responsible and careful man,
almost as careful as Kyle
. He didn’t accidentally shoot himself. I believe with all my heart that Kyle had something to do with it. That’s why he and I haven’t spoken in ten years. My brother is Cain. I believe he’s a murderer, and I want to see him caught. I want to see my brother go to the electric chair. That’s what Kyle deserves.”

Chapter 108

    NOTHING EVER starts where we think it does.
I kept remembering that Kyle had done nearly all of the TV and print interviews after the capture of Peter Westin in the