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What the hell was she thinking? If she had pulled that trigger, it would have ruined everything. Steve and Cory would have heard the gunshot. She would have had time to get away, but they would have easily pegged her for the murder. Not to mention the horrible, gruesome mess she would have left behind. Even if no one had heard the gunshot, she would have had no hope of cleaning it up. She had never shot anyone, but she knew enough to know that if she had shot Jake in the back of the head, there would have been brain matter in places that no one could ever clean.
It had occurred to her when she was confident and pulling him by the hand, that she could have slept with him. Led him into the bedroom, shimmied off her clothes, and pressed her lips against his. He wouldn’t have refused her. Then, after she had worked him into a euphoric coma, she could have put a pillow over his head and held it firmly against his face until he stopped breathing.
She didn’t do that, though, because she couldn’t entertain the idea without feeling nauseous. It wasn’t Jake. He was an attractive man. Deirdre just couldn’t imagine herself naked with anyone. The very thought of it turned her stomach. She didn’t fear nudity. She saw all manner of naked bodies, both living and dead, as part of her job, but the intimacy of sharing herself with someone else felt like a violation of her very being. Even for a cause as important as this, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
And so, she found herself at an impasse. Her conviction to kill Jake was as strong as it had ever been and still imminently necessary. She knew that things in Rose Valley were going to get worse if she didn’t carry through. No one knew that yet except her, of course, but that didn’t matter. Every death that The Beast wrought on the town would be a death that she had to feel guilty for. The Beast hadn’t murdered anyone yet, but he would. It was inevitable.
She had endless drugs at her disposal, many of which would kill Jake peacefully. A less-educated person may have gone that route. An average person may have felt confident that they could choose a cocktail that would be both deadly and untraceable, easily slipped into a shared meal. She could probably get away with it. The coroner might not think to check some of the more exotic possibilities, but there were no guarantees, and Rose Valley’s very own roving reporter had a habit of not letting things go. If Deirdre lost control of Jake’s dead body, then she’d also lose control of the trail of evidence leading back to her. She couldn’t take that risk.
She had been acting too impulsively, but now it was time to approach this problem like the scientist she was. She would see Jake again at the clinic. It would just be the two of them in a remote outbuilding, half a mile away from the main campus. Dozens of research cadavers were cremated at Arrowhead every month. With control of her environment, she could kill him and cremate the body before anyone suspected a thing.
Deirdre pushed down feelings of shame and embarrassment. She’d handled this so poorly. The voice of her dad echoed in her head: Every mistake is an opportunity to learn. Now she knew to look for the signs of emotional compromise and force herself to approach her next attempt more logically. Of course, she would never need to murder anyone else. She wasn’t a serial killer. She just had to fix this one mistake.
