Page 17

K ylie stared at the man who had killed her family.

Keefe Hogan gave them a hard cold smile, as he stared at Kylie’s aunt. “I’ve been looking for you again,” Hogan shared. “You have this amazing ability to survive everything I try to do to you. Just like Kylie here. Even this guy survived.”

Agatha stiffened and took a step back from Hogan but a step toward Kylie.

Kylie immediately knew something more was going on here than she had thought. She glanced over at Porter, who gave an ever-so-slight shake of his head. She frowned at that, not sure what she was supposed to do in the midst of all this. Hogan didn’t appear to have his weapon on him this time, but Kylie didn’t trust him.

Hogan smiled at her. “Isn’t that nice.… You and your aunt are so cozy. Have you told them the truth yet?” he asked Agatha.

Agatha just stared at him, half afraid and half furious, almost sputtering in place. “What are you doing here?” she snapped. “Haven’t you tormented me enough?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he stated. “Not nearly enough, not until the whole world knows.” He chuckled. “Then, and maybe only then, I’ll be happy.”

“You’ll just go back to prison,” she stated. “How come that doesn’t matter to you?”

“I didn’t do anything.” He laughed. “If I did, I probably should go to jail. However, I don’t have any intention of doing so. It’s not really the place for me.” He smirked at Agatha. “You, on the other hand, would do very, very well there.”

She glared at him. “That won’t happen.”

“You might be surprised.” Hogan sent a hard look in her direction, before turning to Porter. “And you’re still alive too. That’s fascinating. But it’s really this lovely lady who I’m most interested in at the moment.” And he turned his gaze to Kylie.

Kylie stared at him. “You seem to know an awful lot more about me than I know about myself,” she stated. “Maybe you can fill me in.”

His gaze widened in delight, and then he nodded. “Not a bad idea because I know for a fact that Agatha will deny everything.”

“Of course I’ll deny everything,” Agatha confirmed. “She would be a fool to listen to you and your lies.”

“A fool?” Hogan repeated. “How many times have you called Kylie that and so much more in her life? So maybe she would understand that’s how you are and would listen to me anyway.”

Agatha moistened her lips, while Kylie stared from one to the other. “I understand this has something to do with my family,” Kylie began. “And regardless of what the outcome of all this is, could I please have the truth?”

Hogan nodded. “I think she deserves to know. Don’t you, Agatha?”

Agatha shook her head. “No, I don’t. She doesn’t and won’t understand.” Agatha returned her ever-watchful gaze to Hogan.

He smiled. “And you, Agatha, don’t you look well for your age? Of course not quite as well as you used to look.”

“I’m getting older,” she snapped. “That’s to be expected.”

“Yes, yes, it is. It’s sad though, isn’t it? That whole fountain of youth thing can only go on for so long. It was working wonderfully, but then somehow, somewhere along the line, you lost it.”

“I did one decent thing in my life,” she muttered, “and I let it go.”

“Yeah, but not quite, did you? You waited just long enough until you had the skill to do what you needed to do but from a distance.” When Agatha stared at Hogan in shock, he nodded. “I admit it took me quite a while to figure it out, but I had some time on my hands in prison. But poor Kylie?… She has no clue.”

Kylie spoke up. “No, I really don’t, and I would appreciate it if one of you would explain.”

Agatha snapped, “I won’t explain, and you can’t listen to anything that comes out of his mouth.”

“Maybe,” Kylie conceded, “but somebody needs to tell me what’s going on.”

“Why?” her aunt asked in a mocking tone. “You won’t believe us anyway.”

“Maybe I will,” Kylie stated. “Maybe it isn’t all that bad.”

“No, it’s way worse,” Porter declared. “That’s why Agatha’s hemming and hawing, still trying to protect herself.”

“You!” Agatha said, with a sneer. “You don’t know anything.”

“Maybe not,” Porter replied. “Maybe I’m completely wrong, but somehow I don’t think so.” He looked back at Hogan and asked, “Right?”

Hogan laughed. “I think it’s hilarious, but—”

“I just want a damn answer,” Kylie stated forcefully. “Surely after all this, somebody owes me that much.”

“Nobody owes you shit,” Agatha spat, with a sneer. “I sure as hell don’t owe you anything.”

Kylie stared at her and nodded stiffly. “Fine, you don’t owe me anything, but I still want to know.”

“That’s nice.” She glanced down at the box in front of her and added, “I might tell you if you give me my papers back.”

Kylie reached for them, but Porter slammed his hand atop them. “Oh no,” he told Agatha. “You’re not getting those papers.”

At that, Hogan laughed and laughed. “Look at that, Agatha. You suddenly don’t seem to have that same pull you used to have.”

She glared at him. “This is all your fault.”

“Really? And why is that?”

“If you hadn’t gone after my sister, none of this would have happened.”

“Oh, kinda like, if you hadn’t helped the police, then I wouldn’t have been incarcerated. Is that it?”

“Yes,” she snapped.

Hogan turned and looked at Kylie. “And do you believe that?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to believe at this point,” she shared. “I still don’t understand why you would have killed my mother.”

“Oh, that’s an easy one to answer, you clueless little bird.” Hogan beamed as he pointed at her aunt and added, “Because Agatha hired me to do so.”

*

Now that made the most sense yet. Porter slid his hand to his gun, sliding it ever-so-slightly free of its holster. It was still in a position where he couldn’t quite grab it, if he needed to. Still, he did manage to get his phone out and place it on the table, hoping he could transmit something to someone. The captain did say he had two officers coming here, but Porter had yet to see them.

He’d already sent a telepathic message to Stefan, who had checked in and then disappeared. Porter wasn’t sure what that meant, but, hey, he could only hope that something good would come out of this. In the meantime, he watched Kylie’s world come tumbling down, as she stared in horror at her aunt.

Her aunt waved her hand. “You can’t listen to a word he says. What absolute and complete BS. She was my sister, and I helped the police find Hogan and put him away.”

“Yeah, you did,” Hogan agreed, “but why do you think I’m back? Because you broke our agreement. We had a letter of agreed terms. Yet you cheated and lied to me and then lied to everybody else. I did prison time because of you, you bitch, and you got off scot-free. How fair is that?”

She snorted. “I don’t understand what you possibly think you deserved after killing my sister,” Agatha replied in a strangled tone. “You’re nothing but a mercenary, and I highly doubt anybody paid you. I think you did that one for free.”

“And why would I?” he asked, staring at her, a smile playing at the corner of his lips. “You were the one using me for your own ends.”

“ Of course I was ,” Agatha quipped, with an eye roll and heavy sarcasm in her tone. “As if anybody will believe that.”

Porter checked to confirm his phone was recording, and, with that, he sat back, wary, his foot rubbing against Kylie’s. She glanced at him, shrinking in her seat, the growing fear inside her, as the truth slowly worked its way through her psyche. Agatha hiring Hogan to kill Ann Marie felt more likely to Porter than anything else he’d heard so far, and it also explained why Hogan had come back after Agatha.

“But of course you were using me, sweetheart,” he said, with a gentle smile. “Do you think I don’t remember what it was like to have an older lover, only to realize afterward how manipulative you were? I owe you for completely changing my life. I wanted to be a doctor, remember?”

“A doctor,” she snorted. “A doctor who kills people, right?”

He shook his head. “My life was going great until I met you, and then… wow.”

Agatha gave him a mocking smile. “You think anyone would believe I slept with you?”

“I don’t know what others will believe, but you remember the truth. I didn’t have a chance to find all the proof, but I certainly know that our relationship was true because I was there,” Hogan replied. “I realize that most of these people look at me now and say, Oh, that’s so gross .”

At that, Agatha’s face pinched.

Hogan nodded, then continued. “Of course you were looking way the hell better than you do now. You were what? Twenty years older than I am? Still, that didn’t seem to bother you one bit at the time. You had a young buck in your bed, and that was just fine, wasn’t it? We had some good times, didn’t we, sweetheart? But then you couldn’t stand the fact that your sister had this lovely little lady here,” he shared, as he pointed at Kylie.

“I don’t understand.” Kylie frowned, looking at her aunt. “Why would you care?”

“Because Agatha can’t have children,” Hogan stated succinctly. “Even with someone as virile as myself,” he added, with a tone of mockery, “Agatha couldn’t have any. More than that, your mother knew about your abilities. She wouldn’t let up about it, and apparently it was just a little too much because Agatha had planned on having her own little witches running around, and yet that never happened.”

“That’s ridiculous. If she wanted children, I’m sure she could have gotten some help and had some,” Kylie noted, “particularly with the energy you’re talking about.”

“Maybe, but her sister didn’t think so, and it remained a bone of contention between the two of them. You know how sisters are,” he said, with a hard smile at Kylie, “and Agatha just couldn’t stand it.”

“So, you hired Hogan to kill my mother?” Kylie asked Agatha in shock. “And my brothers, my father? What did any of them do to you?” she asked, staring at her aunt in horror. “There was no reason to hurt anybody. How do you justify that?”

Agatha sneered. “What do you know?” she asked. “You’ve been causing all kinds of chaos and trouble since the day you were born. I didn’t want to look after you. Hogan was supposed to deal with all of you.”

At that, Kylie stared at her aunt in shock. “Oh my God. You did it. You really did arrange for my mother and my father and my two baby brothers to be killed?”

“Yes, I did,” Agatha snapped. “So there, now you know. Not that it’ll do either of you any good. I have no intention of going to prison, and I’m also not the one who did the deed. Hogan was. Even,… even after I called and told him to forget it.”

“That’s a lie. You never called to tell me to forget it,” Hogan declared, with that dangerous smile lighting up his face. “And it’s been a twisted scenario ever since. I don’t even know how the hell I got conned into doing your bidding, but my life went into a hellish loop. I’m still not sure you didn’t somehow use your abilities against me to compel me to do it because I can’t see that I would have done it any other way. I was doing well and on track for a great career, until I got involved with you. I just know I owe you for the complete destruction of my life.”

Hogan sighed. “My family couldn’t handle the horror of it all. My dad went to his grave, knowing what I had become but never understanding why or how. I tried to explain it to him one time, and he just sat there, shaking his head, as if nothing made sense. And, to him, it didn’t make sense. He was a good God-fearing man, who’d raised his family right,” he shared. For the first time, palpable pain filled Hogan’s words.

“But somehow, after I met you, dear Agatha , I made all kinds of decisions that nobody could understand, and afterward neither could I,” he explained. “Once I went down that path, there didn’t seem to be anything else for me. I lost everything, so there wasn’t much to be done but to keep going ahead with my newfound profession. Did I have to? No, but I was angry at the world and really angry at you. I found you a couple times,” he stated, with a smile, “but I wasn’t quite ready to knock you off. I wanted you to suffer. I wanted you to feel what I felt every day. But you kept finding ways to get away from me,” he said, with a mock smile. “I wasn’t even sure how that worked, but regardless, before I die, I will make you pay for everything you did to me.”

Agatha sneered at him. “You’re deluded,” she muttered. “I would never have had anything to do with you, no way.”

Immediately Porter opened the file on Hogan in front of him and flipped to a picture. The picture was one he now recognized quite easily. He lifted it, so that Hogan could see it as well.

Hogan’s face turned to fury and then satisfaction, as he nodded. “And yet you kept a picture of us.” And, indeed, the photograph was of a man and a woman, still curled up in bed and in each other’s arms. “I remember taking that,” he murmured.

“I got angry with you for it too.” Agatha stared at it. “God, that seems so long ago.”

“It was a long time ago,” Hogan confirmed. “If I had the chance to go back there again, I would completely change those decisions and choices,” he said to her. “But not you, I bet. You would probably repeat the same life.”

“I would have made one change,” she noted, with a negligent toss of her hair. “I would have made sure you couldn’t come back, and I probably would have ditched this one earlier.” Agatha pointed at Kylie. “She’s been such a pain. Raising her—God, what a trial. It’s a good thing I never did get pregnant. Having raised this brat, I don’t think I could have had kids and not killed them,” she stated. “What a waste of space and energy.”

“I think if it had been your own child, you might have been fine,” Porter suggested. “But Kylie represented everything that was wrong in your world. She represented everything that you coveted. It was your guilt staring back at you, and you just couldn’t see past it.”

“Oh, that’s bullshit,” Agatha declared in a no-nonsense manner.

“Is it?” Porter asked, a note of humor in his tone. “You didn’t kill Kylie all those years ago, and you certainly could have.”

“She had her uses, not that they’re of any value now,” Agatha spat, as she glared at the earring on the table.

“Was it even my mother’s earring?” Kylie asked.

“It was, and I used it on her all the time too. Whenever she pissed me off, I got my revenge one way or another. Remember all the sick days she had? That was usually me dropping her energy down, so she felt as if she needed to go to bed. She spent most of that second pregnancy in bed and couldn’t even look after you. I thought that was great.”

Kylie shook her head. “So that was you pulling my energy from me and why I was so tired lately. You did it to my mother, and now you are doing it to me.”

Agatha gave a half-mocking laugh. “I couldn’t quite bring myself to kill her though. She was my sister, after all. However, then,… then she had the twins. Two healthy boys. That was just way too much. Such a slap in the face.”

“Jesus,” Porter muttered, staring at Agatha. “So, somebody in your family is blessed, and you can’t be happy for her? Instead you turn around and destroy it all?”

Agatha sneered at him. “You’re one to talk.”

He frowned at her. “Can’t say I’ve ever done anything like you have.”

“Everybody does what they need to do to make their own lives happen,” Agatha declared in a hard tone. “Don’t make it sound as if I’m some abnormality because I’m not. You are all just like me, every one of you. It’s just that not everybody gets caught.”

“And what are you here and now, if not caught?” Porter asked, staring at her. “Right now, Hogan’s looking for retribution. Your niece now knows exactly what you’ve done, and you are the same pathetic woman you’ve always been.”

“So what? Kylie doesn’t know everything. She only knows about her pathetic little family.”

“Isn’t that enough horror?” Kylie asked, staring at her aunt.

“Not likely,” Agatha replied. “Thanks for the hospital visit though.”

At that, Kylie stared at her, nodding now. “It really was me bringing you back to life, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, it absolutely was you,” Agatha agreed. “Very kind of you. I wasn’t quite able to pull that one back. It’s a little harder when you’re older, and energy gets that much harder to work with.”

“It’s not supposed to get harder,” Kylie stated, staring at her aunt. “It’s supposed to get easier.”

Porter nodded. “Only if you’re coming from the heart. When you’re manipulating and hurting others, certain things do inhibit your abilities as you grow older. Not enough, not nearly enough to stop people from being assholes,” he explained. “But, in some cases, particularly when Agatha surrounded herself with so much negativity, I can see it being harder for her to do what she was trying to do. For decades though, Agatha utilized your energy instead,” he told Kylie.

She frowned at Porter, and he nodded. “That’s what makes sense, and it’s why you were so weak as a child. It’s why you struggled with your schooling sometimes, and why sometimes you thought something was wrong with you. But, as it turns out, all that was your aunt, this monster who kept you around, as if some personal generator.”

Kylie stared at him in shock.

Agatha gave a hoarse bark of laughter. “That’s not a bad description.” She glanced at Porter. “So now what?”

Porter shook his head. “You really are a complete bitch, aren’t you?”

Agatha shrugged. “I don’t think so. I don’t think anything is wrong with me at all. I simply did what I needed to do, and that’s all anybody ever does,” she snapped. “So, stop with your BS holier-than-thou attitude. Having loyalties, morals, and ethics come with problems. The world would be a whole lot easier place if we could avoid all of it.”

Kylie stared at her. “And my mother, did she know about you?”

At that, Agatha stiffened. “I don’t know whether she knew or not.… I’ll worry about that when I cross over.” She shrugged. “I’ll face that when I get there.”

“You absolutely will,” Porter declared, staring at Agatha. “As somebody who talks to dead people, I put out the call to talk to your sister a couple times. I always got a muddled response and never really had a clear signal.”

“Good, maybe she’s just as stupid over there as she was here,” Agatha replied, staring at him. “If you can talk to dead people, you should be talking to all of Hogan’s victims.”

At that, Hogan turned to Porter. “Can you really talk to dead people?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean that dead people can always talk to me. It depends on how they died, where they’re at, and their life over there. Speaking of which, did you have a son many years ago?”

“Not that I know of.” Hogan swallowed nervously. “Will they be waiting for me over there?”

“Yes,” Kylie replied. “Don’t worry. All your victims will be waiting for you. And your son too.”

“Ah, shit.” Hogan looked around the emptiest part of the restaurant.

Kylie followed his gaze to the cops standing at the entrance, just far enough back that they couldn’t hear, but all of them with their weapons drawn. She nodded. “Now, this is an interesting place to be,” she murmured. She figured that Porter had already seen them. He was just trying to figure out how to get everybody here out alive, or at least some of them. She wanted to be included in that, but she wasn’t at all sure that was what anybody else had planned. She looked at her aunt. “You’re obviously ready to go, but you don’t have to take anybody else with you.”

She laughed. “Oh no, Hogan and I need to go together,” she said comfortably. “Nothing for him is here.” She turned and looked at him. “Right?”

He stared at her, his jaw working. “That would be a hell of an ending on my part, wouldn’t it?”

“It’s where we started though, love,” she replied, her tone softening. “It’s really the only answer right now. Unless you want to spend the next forty years of your life in prison? They might even give you the death penalty, but I’m not sure.”

He swallowed, staring at her in shock.

Agatha continued. “It would always come down to this, and you knew that. It’s precisely what we put in our pact so long ago.”

He closed his eyes and nodded. “I wondered if you even remembered that.”

“Oh, I remember,” Agatha said, “I just wasn’t quite ready for it.”

“And yet you denied me a relationship all these years.”

“I felt you should have gone off and had your own life, without somebody as old as I am,” Agatha revealed. “I realize now it’s an energy we couldn’t walk away from, a shared energy that entwined us forever. It isn’t something we’ll separate from. It’s just us right now.”

“And your sister,” Porter noted. “Ann Marie’s here right now. She says you haven’t told Kylie something.”

Agatha stiffened and glared at Porter. “You’re just trying to make trouble.”

“You’re already at the end of this anyway,” he pointed out. “So why play games? Why not just tell the whole truth?”

“What truth?”

“The truth about why you really wanted Kylie. It’s not just that you were jealous because your sister had a daughter, or that she could have kids and you didn’t. It was also about something completely different.”

Even Hogan looked at her in surprise. Agatha glared at Porter. “You don’t know anything about it.”

“No, but it is something your sister wants you to explain to Kylie.”

“That’s too damn bad. I don’t give a shit what Ann Marie wants. She’s dead and gone. Her time is done. That’s not anything I have to listen to now.”

“Maybe not,” Porter conceded, “but she’ll be there, waiting for you.”

“So what?” Agatha stated boldly, but it was obvious that the thought bothered her. Agatha shrugged. “What do I care? I won’t be there in the next little bit anyway.” She turned to Kylie. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”

“No. Should I?”

“That just means the blocks worked better than I thought,” she murmured, “and that’s good.” Then she shrugged and sighed. “What the hell. You want the truth, Kylie? Well, here goes.… You were still alive when I came up behind you. Hogan took out the car but ended up having to finish off almost everyone. The babies died immediately, your father not quite. I was there and stopped Hogan from killing you, but you were already trying to help your mother stay alive. I couldn’t let that happen, so I separated the two of you. Even then Ann Marie was already fighting hard to stay alive, so I took her out,” Agatha said simply. “Hogan killed the rest of your family, but I killed Ann Marie.”

“How…” Kylie was too shocked to get the words out. “Why?”

“That’s what happens. Siblings are like that.” Agatha gave a laugh and a careless wave of her hand.

At that, Hogan sighed. “I’m really glad you finally confessed. I’ve been waiting a lifetime to hear it.”

“You were responsible for killing the family,” Agatha pointed out.

“Yes, because you hired me to do so.”

“I barely paid you anything for it,” she clarified, “so it was hardly being hired . Don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” he insisted, “but you urged me to do it.”

“That’s all old hat now,” Agatha replied. “Besides, what we had was special. Yet, after that, it all went to pot.”

“I know, and you turned on me like a rattler.”

“Self-preservation,” Agatha muttered. “That’s all it was, once I realized the cops were looking at me oddly. At least I thought they were. Maybe they weren’t. Who even knows,” she said brokenly. “I was just so terrified, and I blamed you. Then you were gone, so I could spin whatever tale I needed to spin to get them to believe me,” Agatha added. “I’ve always been good at that.”

Glaring at her, Hogan said, “You fed me to the lions, disappeared with Kylie, then used her the whole time to prop up your failing abilities.”

Agatha seethed with anger as Hogan continued on.

“You just couldn’t resist keeping Kylie close and making her do what you needed her to do, even though Kylie had no idea. All those blocks you put in her mind to make her amiable and to keep her toeing your line. Just so you could have your living generator beside you.”

“A living generator, to regenerate me. Antiaging and healing energy all at once.” Agatha laughed. “I love that.”

“It’s a seriously ugly way to describe it,” Porter said. “You took Kylie’s whole childhood to figure out how to use it from a distance, only to finally cut her free.”

“And not a moment too soon,” Agatha declared. “I was so damn sick of having her around. I couldn’t stand it. I hated her.”

Porter shook his head. “You didn’t hate her. You hated what she represented. Your own deceit, your own guilt, your own murderous intent.” Porter stood up. Immediately Hogan pointed the gun in his direction. Porter shrugged. “Go ahead and shoot me, but shouldn’t you be shooting Agatha? Wasn’t that the pact you two lovebirds made so long ago? Besides, with all that love between you,” Porter said in a mocking tone, “don’t you want to have your one final shot to share the afterlife together?”

“Final shot, huh ?”

“Think about it. You both go together.… You would both be together.”

His eyes opened wide, and he asked, “Really?” He looked over at Agatha and, without warning, drove a bullet into Agatha’s brain. She collapsed without a sound onto the floor.

A muffled scream came from Kylie, as Porter wrapped his arms around her. She stared at Agatha, her hand over her mouth, the next scream frozen inside her, and he nodded. “And now what?” Porter asked Hogan. “Don’t you think Kylie’s suffered enough?”

“Yes, she has. I’ve felt bad for her all these years, after I figured out what Agatha was doing. No way I could talk to Kylie. Not after Agatha had sicced everybody on me, had turned me into a felon, destined to be a fugitive for the rest of my life. I did prison time and got myself the hell out and disappeared, and I just hated Agatha for all of it.”

“Except you didn’t.”

“No, of course not,” Hogan admitted. “You can’t hate the one person you really, truly love. We were the same in so many ways, and that I could understand. It took a while, but I finally realized what Agatha was doing and why. Though I didn’t like it, I knew why she was doing it,” he explained. “You’ve got to admire Agatha’s resourcefulness on some level. She’s a hell of a bitch, but”—he looked over at her dead body—“she was my bitch.”

And, with that, Hogan smiled and added, “Now, Porter, you have something very precious beside you. Make good use of your gifts and don’t go down the pathway I did.” Without warning he jammed the gun against his head and fired.

As Kylie cried out, Porter wrapped her up close and held her, turning her head aside so all she saw was the nearby wall. The police stormed in from the sidelines, where they’d been waiting. Porter rocked her back and forth, as he whispered, “It’s okay. It’s over now.”

She trembled in his arms and nodded. “Good God, what a murderous family.”

“But not your family,” Porter stated.

She looked over at him. “What do you mean?”

“Agatha was adopted. Your mother was not her sister by blood,” he explained. “So, when I made the comment to Hogan about you being family,… he was confused about what that meant. However, to your mother, Hogan and Agatha were family because Ann Marie accepted your aunt Agatha as a blood relative. However, Agatha herself never felt as if she really belonged. That must have stung, since she coveted what you had, your gifts and your loving parents, with two baby brothers added to the mix.”

“Good God. So many years and so much death between them,” she murmured. She wrapped her arms tighter around Porter and held him close.

The captain was suddenly there in front of them.

Porter looked over at his boss. “It’s been a hell of a ride, but I need to take her out of here.”

“You do that,” the captain said. “And maybe when this is all over, and you’ve had a chance to recover”—he turned to Kylie—“my dear wife would like to meet you.”

Kylie smiled up at him. “I would like to meet her too,” she said warmly. “Other people in this craziness who do what I do would at least have had some idea of what Agatha was doing to me,” Kylie admitted. “But I don’t even know what I can do, much less what Agatha could do. So anyone who has a clue would be very welcome to share that with me.”

The captain laughed. “When you’re feeling better, we’ll make it happen. In the meantime, you need to get out of here.”

“I’m taking her back to my place,” Porter shared, “and we’ll set up a time frame with Stefan to see about dealing with the blocks that need to be taken care of.”

The captain shook his head. “I don’t even want to know what that is, but you go do whatever you need to do.”

Porter sighed. “This is one hell of a mess, but we’ll work our way through it.”

Kylie added, “More is in this paperwork that we got from Agatha’s house. Lists of Hogan’s other victims are here. Agatha apparently kept track of Hogan all these years and had compiled all these cases that she thought Hogan had been involved in,” Kylie shared. “I guess we still need to go through all these papers ourselves.” She looked to Porter.

“Not right now though,” Porter said. “We can deal with that later. Most of it is details about your family life. You know most of it now, so anything else you need to know can wait a little while longer.”

“Sure,” she whispered, “but it’s horrific, isn’t it?”

“It absolutely is, but you’ll be okay,” Porter replied, “because now you’re on the other side of it.”

She smiled and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.”