The interviewer saw a way to make his discussion appear coherent, and appear to be in control. “All right, then. Take the Louisville restaurant murders we just saw in our opening clip. What were they for?”
“Let’s ignore the superficial reason: some small offense that might have gone unnoticed, jealousy, money. What I’m talking about is the underlying reason. The killer doesn’t think he’s unilaterally attacking. He thinks what he’s doing is retaliating for things that were done to him, or making a pre-emptive strike to avoid something he fears in the future.”
“Specifically in the Louisville case, how would you know that?”
“The way I came to know it is thirty years spent interviewing dozens of killers and hundreds of eyewitnesses. But I did examine the crime scene in Louisville the night of the murders, and I’ve been following the case since then. I believe the case will be solved in a few weeks. We’ll be able to interview the perpetrator and find out exactly what—”
The moderator had been itching to interrupt, but one of the panelists was quicker. It was Cameron, and Millikan wasn’t surprised. “What we’ll find out is that it was a disgruntled employee, or a customer who got thrown out of the place that night. It would have been nothing, except he was able to get his hands on a gun.”
“As my friend Mr. Cameron knows, I’m not a fan of guns,” said Millikan. “But that’s changing the subject. We were talking about why, not how. What we’ll find is that this was a child who was abused or neglected at home. When he went to school, he was picked on or taunted, and nobody protected him. He’s been spending the rest of his life protecting himself from threats that have already come and gone—making himself less emotionally vulnerable to his parents, less physically vulnerable to the people who picked on him in school. Obtaining a gun is only one of the things he did to make himself more formidable. He’s not a good argument for gun control, because he’s not somebody who would have been harmless without a gun and simply killed because it was convenient. He’s a great argument for doing something about the way our society raises many of its children.”
“It’s easy to say that,” snapped Cameron. “But it comes down to ‘What can we do?’ We can’t disqualify a few million people from having sex and producing children. We can disqualify civilians from owning firearms.”
The moderator was getting panicky now. He could see the clock telling him he had six minutes to bump this squabble out of the endless circular argument about gun control and turn it into a news story. He said, “Professor Millikan, I want to get back to something you said earlier: that the case would be solved in a few weeks. What makes you believe that? Have the police made a break in the case?”
“No,” said Millikan. “It’s not the police. What’s happened is that the case struck a chord in unexpected quarters. A donor has put up the money to hire Roy Prescott.”
The interviewer was intrigued. “Roy Prescott?”
“He’s a private homicide specialist. Mr. Cameron and I are both acquainted with his work, and I understand he has good leads already. I would say it’s a matter of time. A few weeks, at most a few months.”
The interviewer unexpectedly turned to Cameron. “Mr. Cameron, I noticed that when Professor Millikan said earlier that it was nearly over, you didn’t disagree. Did you know this too?”
“No.” Cameron’s eyes were on Millikan. He seemed to be getting over a shock. “I didn’t.”
The interviewer sensed that he was on the edge of something.
“Can you tell me more about Roy Prescott?”
“I have no comment.” It was a statement that the moderator had never before heard on his show. Panelists didn’t say that. They interrupted and shouted to get more time to make comments. He could see that Cameron’s expression was peculiar. He was staring at Millikan, intrigued, barely blinking.
“Then, Professor Millikan, can you do better?” It was a mild barb for Cameron, to get him going again, but he was like a member of the audience now. “What makes you confident that this specialist will catch the killer?”
“The best analogy I can think of offhand is a bear hunt,” said Millikan. “A bear isn’t merely big and fast and strong, with long teeth and claws. He also knows what he’s going to do in a crisis, and when the time comes, he does it very efficiently. But the reason bears are an endangered species and we’re not, is that the hunter also knows what the bear is going to do. His larger brain is the only advantage that matters.”
The moderator tried to ignore the frantic waving of the producer, who was spinning her finger in the “wrap-up” sign. He glanced at Cameron, hoping to get a reaction in the last seconds, but Cameron seemed stunned. Reluctantly, the moderator conceded that it was too late to go on. “My thanks to Michael Cameron, former district attorney of Los Angeles and now congressman, and to Professor Daniel Millikan, author of Manifestations of Guilt, the standard text on homicide. Tomorrow night my guests will be Lilian Horvath, animal-rights advocate, and Dr. Garth Fillmore of the Boston University medical school, on the use of animals in research.”
The camera zoomed in for his close-up, and he said, “Be there.” The producer sighed and shook her head at him to show that he had cut it too close, but he shrugged happily. He had made it again, even gotten the promo in.
Varney felt the intense heat of anger on his shoulders and the sides of his neck all the way up to his scalp, so strong that he began to have the peculiar tunnel vision he sometimes noticed during a fight. But this time, there was a shortness of breath, a sensation that his lungs were partially filled with sand so there was little room for air. It was not the clean, good anger that he felt when he was fighting back. It was outrage, a bitter sense of unfairness. They were saying things about him that he couldn’t answer. They said he was stupid, that they knew everything he was going to do before he did it.
He tried to reassure himself. That pompous, stupid son of a bitch on television couldn’t do anything to him. His theories were designed just to make all the fat-ass spongeheads excited enough to sit through the next commercial.
He tried for a moment to get past his anger. It wasn’t really that Millikan guy he was thinking about. He was just the big mouth that went on television. He was so stupid, he had told Varney something he couldn’t have known any other way. He went to his computer and turned it on. He called up the phone directories and began to search.
A few minutes later, Millikan came out of the elevator into the underground parking garage. He looked at the big purple number 3 painted on the wall, then looked at the letter painted on the nearest pillar: D. His rental car was in G, somewhere on the other side. He came around the back of the elevator and saw that his car was the only one left in the visitors’ row. Cameron was standing beside it.
He took a deep breath and blew it out as he walked toward the car. When he was close enough so it wouldn’t be wasted, he put on a false smile. “Pretty good, Mike. Maybe they’ll give us our own show.”
Cameron didn’t accept the proffered pleasantry. “I waited because I want to know about Prescott.”
Millikan stopped walking and stood still. “I said it because he asked me to.”
“Asked you to?” Cameron frowned and stared at Millikan as though he were trying to climb a hill he had never suspected was there.
Millikan nodded. “That’s why I’m here. They’ve been asking me to come on for a year. I called them and said if they were going to do a show on the topic, I’d be willing to go on. I’m going to be on four other shows in the next week, just so I can mention Prescott.”
“Why are you doing anything Prescott asks? You arrested the bastard.”