After killing Arthur Kruse, I traveled to Albany, where I planned on attaching an explosive device to Jessica Winslow’s car. But as soon as I got there it was clear to me that her townhouse and her vehicle as well were being very carefully watched. She was an FBI agent, after all. I’d made a mistake, I realized, and should have killed her earlier.
Jessica was the adopted daughter of Gary Winslow, who was the oldest member of the Pirate Society, and I had often thought that he should have been the one to stop us from doing what we did. Either him or me, of course. But we all listened to Gary, and I remember him saying once—and maybe this is a false memory—that although we were pirates, we were the good kind of pirates.
A lifetime as a successful businessman and consultant has taught me many lessons, one of them being that you can’t do everything yourself, and that sometimes you need to hire experts. That is what I did in order to dispatch Jessica. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I subcontracted that particular death, but I knew that she had left town, and that my chances of finding her and killing her without getting stopped or caught were slim. I paid a lot of money to have it done right.
Killing Jay Coates was comparatively easy, and I did that one myself. I’d learned enough about him to know that he hadn’t fallen far from the tree that was his psychopath of a father. I remember just how much glee Wayne Coates had taken in the initiation rite of making my sister survive the tide. And I also remember that he stayed joyful even later on that terrible day when it became apparent to all of us that something had gone very wrong.
The FBI never located the real Jay Coates. I wonder if he even got the list in the mail, because I did hear that a Jay Coates in Georgia had stepped forward to say that he had received one. It doesn’t matter either way, but it did make Jay’s death one of my easier tasks. I followed him around Los Angeles on a Saturday night, just waiting for an opportunity, and unless I imagined it, he was stalking someone as well. A young inebriated woman that he’d followed from a bar. I wonder if my killing Jay prevented something terrible from happening to that girl. Maybe the karma I was returning to the world was already paying off in dividends?
Caroline Geddes was the daughter of Meg Gauthier （my first kiss, also that summer）， and Ethan Dart was the son of Paula Shepherd, the quietest of our bunch. How odd that the list brought Caroline and Ethan together just before the end.
Arranging their deaths was not easy. But I knew in advance that they would be together in Makanda, Illinois, and then it was just a matter of two very large bribes, one to a local police officer and one to an employee at the Rolling Brook Cabins who provided me with a master key. The hardest part was lying underneath their bed and listening to their final moments together. But as in the killing of Arthur Kruse, I made sure that neither Ethan nor Caroline suffered any pain. And I do know for a fact just how happy they were in their final moments. Maybe I’d done them a favor, ending their lives then. I wonder what I saved them from: A crushing breakup? A bitter divorce? A loss of a child? I certainly saved them from something. Happiness is always a temporary state.
And Alison Horne, of course, was the daughter of Danny Horne. Not only had Danny helped orchestrate Faye’s death when he was twelve years old, he would eventually abandon his own family for a tawdry love affair. I wonder what Danny’ll think of all this if it comes out that his old childhood friend had an affair with his daughter before murdering her in Bermuda.
I felt bad about Alison, of course. It was a pleasure to spend time with her in Bermuda. I’d been wanting to go back there for years, and it was nice to see the old haunted place through her eyes. And it was nice to be able to tell her about my sister, about what happened to her. I suppose the psychologists out there will say that was what I was doing all along, that my entire plan was an elaborate way to tell the world about my sister. They’ll say I wanted to get caught, and maybe that is true as well.
I know that I’ve left some questions behind that have not been answered in this letter. Like why did I even bother to mail the letter to myself and then give the FBI information about the Windward Resort? I don’t really have the answer to that question except that it felt like the right thing to do. I am guilty, as well, in the death of my sister, and I deserved to be on the list, just as I deserve what is about to happen to me.
Maybe you will wonder why I even wrote the list in the first place, sending it to the victims. It made my job harder, and it made their final moments more filled with dread, but, again, all I can tell you is that it felt like the right thing to do. Their deaths were an attempt to add order back to a chaotic world, and the list itself was just part of that order. And being on that list only told them something that they should already have known. That death is coming for us all.