It wasn't hard to find Casey Todd.

He'd been in the Supervised Population Information Search online. His aliases were there, his hair color, eye color, weight, and his current and verified permanentaddress. It was a lot to go on, and she found him quickly.

It also wasn't hard to follow him. He wasn't a stupid man; he just didn't watch the traffic behind him for the black pickup.

He wasn't a bad driver; not obnoxious, not slow, not swervy. He didn't even drive more than five mile over the speed limit.

He didn't seem like a disruptive housemate, she knew, from watching the house he lived in with a woman who probably knew nothing of his past. He didn't cause any trouble, didn't give his probation officer any reason to notify the state of anything.

In short, he gave her no excuses to act.

After four days of watching him, and after more than a week of barely any sleep, she was getting irritated and impatient to just finish what she'd come here to do. Or start, anyway.

And currently, Beth was hopped up on caffeine pills and itching for a fight. It was not going to be a good day for Casey. But as pissed off, hopped up, and resolved as she was, it was going to be hard to take the fucker down. He was six foot one and a buck eighty, and she wasn't sure how much of that was muscle. Probably a fair amount. He had just been released from the Montgomery Correctional Center not many weeks before, and even if he hadn't kept up with working out, he was still going to have a residue of the muscle buildup he'd undoubtedly done in there. Todd would be proportionally stronger than her.

Which was exactly the reason why she had the Taser, and if that didn't work, the gun.

She was hoping she didn't have to use the gun. If everything went to plan, Casey would pay in fucking spades for what he'd done to Stacey.

She'd listened to Stacey haltingly recount how Casey had taken her into the laundry room of his house, locked the door, and raped her. That was bad enough, but after seeing the movie Boys Don't Cry, sitting in shock through the rape scene, and then watching her girlfriend have a series of memory flashbacks to her own rape was harder. When Stacey had flinched away when Beth had tried to hold her through the memories, it was worse, and when Stacey would cry her way out of nightmares, be she home or in Beth's bed was nearly the breaking point.

But then there was a rash of rapes and murders in the south Florida GLBT community, and finally, it was the first rape victim that Beth saw when she volunteered at the local Women In Distress shelter that made her snap. Hearing the woman recite dully just what her boyfriend had done to her filled Beth's tension-filled body with rage, and after she'd shown the woman out, she took a leave of absence.

Home she went, to pick up the Heckler and Koch. The Taser was already on her belt at the small of her back, where it always was.

And off she'd driven to Jacksonville.

So now she just needed to wait for him to drive home from work. She would follow him home, park next to him in the driveway, and while he was still confused, she would shock him with the Taser, haul him into the backseat of the pickup, tie him up, and drive home. Simple.

Since she'd brought enough full gas cans in the backseat, she didn't even need to stop at any gas stations where people might hear him screaming. She couldn't Tase him too often; otherwise it might screw up his nervous system. And she needed that to be functioning perfectly.

In the end, it went off without a hitch. She followed Casey Todd home, pulled her black F-150 in right next to his tiny car, and Tased him before he had a chance to ask who she was. Before you could say, Little Miss Muffet, she had him tied up in a position that would be excruciatingly painful whenever he stopped jerking from the muscle spasms, and the pain in his overextended limbs became more important.

But by the time that happened, she was more than halfway home, speeding down I-95 so she could start with the payback.

Even if Stacey didn't know about it, Beth knew she would be relieved to hear that her rapist was dead. And had he suffered? Had he gone through at least a semblance or equality of what Stacey went through in her nightmares?

Oh, yes.

#

"My name is Nancy Sommers. This is Sunday, the twenty first of September, 2008, and this interview is with Elizabeth Snowden, convicted of the torture-murder of Casey Todd in 2001." The digital tape recorder counted out the seconds on the screen. Twenty seconds and counting up.

Across the table, Snowden grinned at her. "Call me Beth."

"Beth Snowden. Beth, you know why I'm here, don't you?"

The short, built woman suddenly dropped the smile, plopped her arms onto the table heavily, and looked tired. "Yeah."

The interview room wasn't dark, but it was small; forbidding, almost. "Care to tell me what you think?"

"Why? So you can put it in your paper that I'm recalcitrant and untalkative, or that I'm interested in this project of yours and I think that it's nifty that you wanna interview one of the most famous murderesses in the twenty first century?"

"Exactly," Nancy said, hoping to knock Beth off balance. The prisoner was smarter than Nancy had thought she would be.

"Exactly what? Nice try."

"Um, I'd like to know because it's important to my paper, and so I can get a gauge on whether you're going to be helpful, or only do this partway through and then crap out on me on purpose."

The convict eyed her. "I think it's bullshit that you want to interview me."

"What?"

"I think you have a more personal reason for coming here."

Maybe, Nancy thought. Maybe I do.

"And what would that be?"

"Because you want to know."

"What do I want to know."

"Whether I regret doing it; regret killing him."

"Do you regret it?"

"Yes." She leaned in close. "But not because I didn't make him suffer enough. Because what I did to him will not fix Stacey, and now she hates me because of him."