"He's got to slip up sooner or later."
Lee wished he shared his friend's confidence. His cell phone beeped, and a shiver shot through him as he fumbled to dig it out of his pocket. Another text message: I'm watching her too.
He stared at it, then handed the phone to Chuck.
"What's this about?" Chuck said after reading it.
Lee told him about the text message of the day before.
"Your sister?" Chuck said, puzzlement on his squarely handsome face.
"What else could it be about? Laura was wearing a red dress when she disappeared."
"But no one knows that except-"
"Exactly. How did he find out?"
"And is this even the same guy?" Chuck said. "How do we know these messages are from the…the killer?" He resisted using the name Butts had chosen for the killer. He thought "the Slasher" sounded lurid and distasteful.
"We don't," Lee answered, but in his mind there wasn't much doubt.
"I'll see what we can do about tracing the messages," Chuck said. "And starting tomorrow, you'll be under surveillance."
What neither of them said was that if the Slasher was talking about watching his sister, it meant that Laura was still alive.
Chapter Twenty-four
"Who among us can say he's never had a violent fantasy?"
John Paul Nelson looked over the assembly of students, who looked back at him uncomfortably, as if he had just accused them personally of being criminals.
Lee sat in the back of the lecture hall, watching as Nelson surveyed the young faces, blank as unformed clay. It was Monday morning, and today the heat was on with a vengeance. Hisses of steam erupted at irregular intervals from the radiators lining the assembly room walls. As soon as the lecture was over, Lee planned to give Nelson Chuck's urgent invitation to join their investigation. He had tried to reach Nelson by phone the day before without success-sometimes, he knew, Nelson would turn off both his phone and answering machine.
"Anybody?" Nelson continued, a smile struggling to break through the corners of his mouth. "So you've all had a violent fantasy at one time or another in your life, then. Good-then you'll be able to follow what I'm about to say next." He picked up the remote and aimed it at the slide projector.
One click and a familiar face appeared on the screen: the hangdog, boyish features of Jeffrey Dahmer, with his sad, basset hound eyes and splotch of blond bangs. A murmur floated up from the crowd and dissipated, smokelike, when Nelson turned to face them.
"I see most of you recognize him. Ask yourselves: what separates him from us?"
The blond girl snaked an arm tentatively into the air.
"Yes?" Nelson said.
"Uh…nothing, sir."
"Nothing? You mean you don't have an answer?
She cleared her throat and pushed a strand of straight pale bangs from her eyes. "No, sir; I mean 'nothing' as in nothing separates us."
"That's an interesting point of view. Would you care to elaborate?"
The girl shifted in her seat and tightened her grip on her notebook.
"What I mean is that they're more like us than us than they are different from us. I mean, they're different in degree but not in kind, you might say."
Nelson raised his left eyebrow. "Nicely done, Ms. Davenport-I couldn't have put it better myself."
Lee smiled. For all his arrogance, Nelson was always ready with praise for students who asserted their own opinions. Lee had never really studied Dahmer's face before, but now, seeing him closely, he looked lost, so lost, like a little boy abandoned by his parents-which, of course, he was.
Nelson cleared his throat. "Mr. Dahmer was not an alien, a scientific oddity, an exotic species of some kind-a mutation, a marsupial, or a manta ray."
He paused and looked at Ms. Davenport, who gazed up at him with rapturous devotion.
"Alike in kind," he mused. "I want you all to consider Ms. Davenport's felicitous phrasing. We are all alike in kind-even the most degraded, despised, or dispossessed."
He walked back to the slide projector and picked up the remote again. A click and Dahmer's face disappeared and was replaced by a colorful illustration. Two interwoven strands-one red, the other blue-climbed like vines around one another, twisting in and out in perfect symmetry.
"This is what we all share: DNA, the double helix, the structure of life as we know it. Or perhaps this is only the starting point, and everything we are cannot be reduced to ink stains on a piece of paper." He clicked again, and a symmetrical, dark-on-white design appeared-a black splash of ink that Lee recognized immediately as a Rorschach blot.
"What is this?" Nelson asked, stroking his chin. "A butterfly? Or maybe an anvil? Or do some of you see a manta ray? Or a uterus? How about a dead body? If you do see a dead body, are you a serial killer in the making? Or maybe the serial killer is so repressed that he's the one who sees the butterfly?"
He seated himself on the edge of the desk and swung his right leg back and forth. "Flaubert famously said, 'Madame Bovary, c'est mois.' In order to write about a character, a writer insinuates himself into the character's mind-slips into his skin, as it were. The criminal profiler must do the same, like the actor who becomes the character he plays."
The theater had certainly lost a gifted actor when Nelson turned to a career in psychology. With his forceful personality, resonant voice, and charisma, Lee thought Nelson would have been a natural for the stage.
"For most of the repeat offenders we have come to know as serial killers, fantasy plays an enormous role. Often, their very identity represents a kind of fantasy: Ted Bundy, the concerned citizen, political activist, and loving friend; or John Wayne Gacy, the community organizer, Rotary member, and friendly clown who performed at children's parties. These were facades created to hide a darker personality the offender wishes to keep hidden from society."
He paused to let this sink in and drank from a bottle of Evian water on his desk. Lee thought Nelson looked tired, the lines under his blue eyes deepened. He leaned against the desk again and crossed his arms.
"R. D. Laing said that the more identity is fantasy, the more intensely it is defended. Doesn't that make sense? If you know who you are, then there's no need to defend against an attack-real or imagined-because you're secure in your knowledge. But even though the subject knows on some level that his false self is unreal, the alternative is unthinkable: not just death, but complete annihilation.
"The subject can't see that maybe his false self could be replaced by a real, authentic one. His tragedy is that he can't see what lies beyond-to him it appears to be an endless void in which he wanders like a zombie, a creature ostracized from human society, doomed to walk the earth, empty eyes staring vacantly out of a face with no mind, a body with no soul.
"And so he defends this false identity with all the ferocity of a lioness fighting to save her cubs-because his instinct for self-preservation tells him to."
Ms. Davenport raised her hand. "So are you saying in effect that with these people, there's 'no there there'?"
Nelson smiled. "Pithy as usual, Ms. Davenport." He turned to the rest of the class. "Ms. Davenport here has summed up my whole complex theory in a few words-but essentially, she has it. The shell the offender constructs for the outside world is no more 'real' than the fantasy life he lives in private."
He leaned forward, and his face was very earnest, almost vulnerable. "Most of us take our identities for granted. You, Ms. Davenport, for example. Let's say you're the first child, the smart one, the organizer, efficient and responsible. Your mother and your siblings could always count on you, and you knew that about yourself before you remember having language. Knowing this about yourself gave you a certain sense of security in the world."
Ms. Davenport blushed, a deep purple that spread from the base of her neck to the thin blue veins on her forehead.