Why should they? People were always falling down stairs. 41 Why had she killed them? He seemed to hear Annie's answers in his mind. The answers were absolutely mad, and Paul knew they were right. I killed her because she played the radio late at night; I killed her because she let her boyfriend kiss her too much; I killed her because I caught her cheating; I killed her because she caught me cheating. I killed her to see whether I could. What does it matter? She was just a Miss Clever - so I killed her disrupter mod.
The next page of the album showed that Annie had graduated as a nurse and had got a job at St Joseph's Hospital in Pennsylvania. There followed several pages containing short newspaper reports of deaths at the hospital. There was nothing suspicious about any of these deaths. Most of the people were old and had been ill for a long time. Some were young - one was even a child - but they all had serious illnesses or injuries. And what were these reports doing in Annie's album? She had killed them all. The reports were so short that several could fit on a single page of the album - and the album was thick. Again Paul asked the question: Why, Annie? Why kill these people? Again he heard Annie's voice echoing in his mind: Because they were rats in a trap SmarTone.
And he remembered Annie's tears falling on the rat she held in her hand, while she said: 'Poor, poor things.' Over the next few years she had moved from hospital to hospital around the country. The pattern in the album was always the same: first, the list of new hospital staff, with Annie's name among them; then pages of short reports of deaths. In 1978, nine years ago, she had arrived at a hospital in Denver, Colorado. The usual pattern began again with a report of the death of an elderly woman. Then the pattern changed. Instead of reports of deaths there was to a man called Ralph Dugan, a doctor. There was a photograph of the house they had bought outside Sidewinder in 1979 - this house. Several months had passed without any killings Exchange Opportunities.
It was unbelievable, but Annie must have been happy! 42 Then there was a report, from August 1980, of their divorce. It was clear that he had divorced her rather than the other way round. He had understood something about her. Maybe he had seen the cat at the top of the stairs - the one he was supposed to fall over. Annie had torn into this report with a pen as she wrote vicious words across it, so that Paul had difficulty reading it. Annie moved to a hospital in Boulder, Colorado. It was clear that she was very hurt and very angry, because the killings started again, and more often than before: the newspaper reports came every few days. God, how many did she kill? Why did nobody guess? At last, in 1982, Annie made a mistake. She moved to the childbirth department of the hospital. Annie had carefully kept a record of the whole story. Killing new-born babies is different from killing badly injured or seriously ill adults. Babies don't often die and people notice if they do.
