Read If I Should Die Before I Die for Free Online

hand anyway.”
    â€œGood,” she’d said.
    End of tape.
    Yes, I thought, and there’d been no more murders during the summer.
    The Counselor’s Wife looked up at me, shaking her hair back behind her shoulders.
    â€œWhat did it feel like?” I asked for no particular reason.
    â€œWhat did what feel like?”
    â€œHis handshake.”
    She laughed, and her hair tossed.
    â€œFunny you should ask that,” she said. “Sweaty, to tell the truth.”
    I watched the smile drift from her face. She was gazing intently at me, waiting for my reaction.
    â€œI don’t get it,” I said. “I mean, I guess he sounds sick enough. And all that ‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep’ stuff and sleeping with the lights on, I guess he was talking about himself there and not a friend. Is that right?”
    â€œI’m not so sure, but I assumed so too.”
    â€œSo maybe he’s afraid of pillows. But that doesn’t make him a killer, does it?”
    â€œWhat makes a killer, Phil? Do you know?”
    â€œNo,” I said.
    â€œNeither do I.”
    I think I’ve called her face angular before, but not thin, and when she’s looking right at you and talking animatedly, which is about the only way she talks, it seems full, broad even. Only now it did look thin, small. Chiseled. She looked distracted, or maybe just tired.
    â€œI spent a lot of time going over it today,” she said. “I’d canceled all my appointments, not because of him but because something else came up. A good thing, though, as it turned out. Or maybe a bad thing, who knows? By the way, I don’t tape all my sessions, only with certain patients and they have to agree to it. Anyway, I went over the material today, the tapes and my notes, and I called up a friend at the Times for the dates, and there’s a correlation. I’m sure of it, Phil.”
    â€œWhat dates?” I said.
    â€œLook,” she said. “There’s no way you could have spotted it, just listening. I hadn’t either. But what I call the crazy sessions? The really angry ones? There was a rhythm to them. What you just heard was nothing like having been here. You could feel the electricity in him, Phil. Palpable almost. And building up. It was like … like … well, like when you feel a lightning storm building. I’ve seen them in the Hamptons. I’ve seen the ground actually smoke when the lightning bolts hit. It was like that. Once he almost put his fist through the wall. Sheer rage, and always directed at women. At me mostly, the surrogate Mommy according to theory. But then, by the next session, it would be as though exhaustion had set in. Utter exhaustion. I always thought it was because he’d worked it out himself the time before, or worked it out of himself, and that if we did that enough times, working it through …”
    I’d heard the rage all right, particularly on the next-to-last tape. And then that kind of relapse on the last one.
    â€œThey coincide, Phil,” the Counselor’s Wife said quietly. “I’ve verified the dates. Each one of those murders took place in between.”
    But there she lost me, at least for the minute. It was like my Full-Moon Theory. Besides, the last session she’d played for me had taken place in July. We were now in September.
    â€œDid he go to Alaska?” I asked.
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œBut when’s the last time you saw him?”
    â€œI haven’t,” she said. “Not since then. He was supposed to call the first week of September to make an appointment. He did call. I scheduled him for last Friday.”
    â€œAnd …?”
    â€œHe never showed up. Didn’t call, anything.”
    â€œAnd the Killer killed again last night.”
    â€œThat’s right.”
    â€œWell,” I said, “if he’s the killer, then at least you can’t blame this last one on