Dr Snyder, who had spent the meeting doodling on a legal pad, looked up.
“Actually, Colonel, if you have a moment, you and I should chat.”
“Your office,” said Weaver. “Rest of you get moving.”
The higher-ups at InterGov were left to their own devices when it came to decorating their offices. Most emulated Weaver’s spartan army-surplus look. But Dr Snyder’s office was damn near opulent.
Two walls were covered by bookcases. The cases were full, and Weaver had no doubt Synder’d read all that shit. An exquisite hand-tied rug from northern Afghanistan covered most of the floor. The pattern was dense and intricate, with red the predominant color. It had been darker red the first time Weaver had seen it because Ferguson had picked up a body the lab needed to look at and had used the rug for packaging on the flight from Islamabad to DC. Thing was, Fergie’d had to put a couple 9mm slugs through the body in order to convince it to lie still, so the body had a couple of leaks. They were going to toss the rug, but Snyder had asked if she could have it. She got some restoration friend of hers at the Smithsonian to clean it up. Still had some stains, but you had to know where to look.
Weaver sat down in one of the wine-colored leather wingback chairs that flanked a butler’s table with brass accents. Snyder was futzing around in the back.
“Would you care for a cup of tea, Colonel?” she asked.
“Doc, every time I come down here, you ask if I want a cup of tea. Every time you ask, I tell you no.”
“I’m going to have some tea, Colonel. Propriety demands the inquiry, even given your predictable response.” Dr Snyder settled into the other chair, setting a small white china cup and saucer on the table.
“So you unscramble Fisher’s eggs for me, doc?”
Snyder smiled. “Alas, like the lamented Humpty Dumpty, Mr Fisher’s eggs cannot be put back together again. I do believe, however, I can offer some insight into what might be on his menu.”
“Gimme,” said Weaver.
“First, Mr Fisher, like most of the gentlemen in your operations department, evidences numerous psycho- or sociopathic tendencies — lack of empathy, lack of guilt, considerable cunning.”
“For Christ’s sake, we have you test for those qualities when we recruit. Look, Doc, I understand if you’re running the local Walmart those qualities might put you off a candidate. But they’re all big pluses for me.”
“True. Mr Fisher is an interesting case, however. He did consent to examination after his family was murdered. I had expected him to be enraged and focused on revenge. Psychopaths generally hold grudges and do not bear insults of any kind lightly. Fisher was curiously unaroused. In response to questions in this area, he indicated that his family was in paradise. They had all been to the Catholic sacrament of confession that morning, so Fisher was convinced they had died in a state of grace and were thus ensured immediate entrance into heaven. I understand that his father was devout as well?”
“Zeke? Yeah. I did a job in Kenya with Zeke, back during the Mau-Mau shit. Son of a bitch got me out of the rack at dawn one Sunday so we could drive through the bush for better than an hour so he could make mass at some cholera-trap mission.”
“So a paternal bond, our Mr Fisher sharing his father’s spiritual and vocational faiths. As to the issue of this geographic line that so interests you and Mr Ferguson, that smacks of ritual. Now, mental illness is a maddeningly esoteric affair, so such rituals are often very difficult to decipher. However, if Mr Fisher has become a serial killer, although I suppose one could argue that he has been one for years after a fashion, but if he has become a serial killer operating on an agenda other than the one which you control, then there is almost certainly a ritual involved. In his case, I would guess that this ritual will have religious, specifically Catholic, underpinnings.”
“You gonna give me any more guidance on that, or am I just supposed to operate on the assumption that he’s become some kind of religious whack job?”
“We are well into the area of supposition, Colonel. But not, I don’t think, wholly unfounded supposition. Let me ask you, how many people has Fisher killed?”
Weaver gave a shrug. “Couldn’t say for sure. Specific targets on missions I assigned? Better than a hundred. Collateral deaths in those missions? Maybe another hundred. There was Vietnam before that.”
“And how would you characterize the men Fisher killed?”
“Scumbags, mostly. Terrorists, drug dealers, third-world thugs. Why?”
“Colonel, Fisher is not, I don’t believe, what you would characterize as a primary psychopath — not utterly remorseless, certainly not incapable of forming real attachments. His attachments to his family were authentic and quite strong. I believe he is a secondary psychopath. Ordinarily, the only hope for anything like a cure for a psychopath is an epiphany of some kind. Some event that so undermines their egocentric worldview that they ameliorate or even repolarize their behavior of their own volition. I believe that watching his family die was such an event for Mr Fisher. Unfortunately, the shock of this event was such that it did not redirect Mr Fisher into more normal channels. Instead, it has redirected him into another pathology entirely. As I said, one psychopathic characteristic that Mr Fisher evidenced was a lack of remorse. He was capable of killing in cold blood without allowing his conscience to interfere with his ability to continue to do so. When his family was killed in front of him, when he had his epiphany, the cumulative guilt attendant to all those previous killings must have been extraordinary, compounded by the guilt of not being able to save his own family. He was able to exonerate himself of the latter guilt by taking refuge in his religion — by assuring himself that his family was in paradise. If he had found no mechanism to relieve the guilt of failing to prevent — and, really, since the act was almost certainly targeted at him, of likely causing — the death of his family, the death of the only persons with whom he had an authentic attachment, I don’t believe he would have been able to function. Therefore, he has not only found refuge in his religion, he has become imprisoned by it. However, Catholicism compounds the guilt attached to his prior bad acts. The men he killed, by the standards of Fisher’s religion, were almost universally evil. Thus, he not only killed them, by killing them when they were not in a state of grace, he damned them. God, in his church’s teaching, desires that all souls find their way to him. Fisher had, thusly, subverted God’s will.”
Weaver leaned back in the chair. He’d learned long ago that you couldn’t rush Snyder. She’d get to her point when she got to it. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he threw a glass at her, but he was pretty sure she wouldn’t wet her drawers like Paravola.
“This is all real interesting, doc, but where’s it get us?”
“Colonel, don’t you see? The two people he’s killed so far were both killed immediately after being absolved of their sins by a Catholic priest. Fisher purposely killed them while they were in a state of grace. He sent them to heaven.”
“Christ, doc. You telling me he’s trying to balance the books?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“Then he’s got a couple hundred people to go.”
Dr Snyder tilted her head a little, looking amused. “That, dear Colonel, is your problem. There’s one more thing, Colonel. I happened to take a peek at that map Mr Ferguson accessed. Your assumption is that the killings will be roughly equidistant from one another along this north/south axis?”
“It’s a stretch, but it’s all we’ve got.”
“If you look just south of Effingham, you’ll see a town called Moriah.” Snyder paused expectantly.
“And?”