I reached out slightly further, and felt a very different mind, fuzzy and confused, and clinging to distant memories. She was terrified of her daughter, and did not want her here, but she was too scared to confront her.
I reached even further and felt what must have been the mind of the man's mother and the elderly woman's daughter. Vile revolting cesspit of a mind. There was smugness there, a sense of controlling and harshness, and a memory of satisfaction at the horror in the eyes of her son as she stood on his kitten, and pleasure as she felt the breaking of tiny bones.
I looked for a way into the house, and found it. Someone had left a window upstairs open just enough for me to unlatch it and climb silently onto the upstairs landing. I made my way into the small upstairs bedroom, and using the trail of my target's mind, I placed a muffling hand over her mouth and snapped her neck just as she began to wake up. I paused. There was no break in the rhythm of the elderly woman's snores. I lifted the woman's body and carried her carefully to the head of the stairs, where I held her upright, her head hanging oddly from her shoulders. I launched her lifeless body down the stairs, and was out through the window, and in my car before the son woke up. His grandmother slept through everything.
As I drove home I marvelled at how well it had all gone. The son would find his mother at the bottom of the stairs and assume that she had broken her neck in the fall. The police would hopefully make the same assumption. Neat and easy.
I arrived back at the hotel at about three in the morning. I don't sleep every day; sometimes I can go for weeks without sleeping at all, but tonight I felt worn-out. I fell asleep within seconds of my head hitting the pillow.