Ricky again remained silent, his mind churning.
“One thing you should know, doctor: If you want to be a successful killer, you need to not worry about your own sorry life.”
Ricky listened to the words that flitted through the darkness. A great unsettled sensation crept into his heart.
“I know you,” he said. “I know your voice.”
“Yes, you do,” Rumplestiltskin replied, with a slight mocking tone. “You’ve heard it often enough.”
Ricky felt suddenly as if he were standing on a sheet of slippery ice. Unsteadiness crept into his own voice. “Turn around,” he said.
Rumplestiltskin hesitated, shaking his head negatively. “You don’t want to ask me to do that. Because once I turn around almost every advantage you have will be erased. I will see your precise position, and, trust me on this one, doctor, once I have you located, it will only be a short time before I kill you.”
“I know you,” Ricky repeated, whispering.
“Is it that hard? The voice is the same. The posture. All the inflections and tones, nuances and mannerisms. You should recognize them all,” Rumplestiltskin said. “After all, we were in more or less the same physical relationship five times each week for nearly a year. And I wouldn’t have turned around then. And the psychoanalytic process, isn’t it more or less the same as this? The doctor with the knowledge, the power, dare I say it, the weapons, right behind the back of the poor patient, who can’t see what is going on, but only has his paltry and pathetic memories to work with. Have things changed all that much for us, doctor?”
Ricky’s throat was completely dry, but he still choked out the name.
“Zimmerman?”
Rumplestiltskin laughed again. “Zimmerman is very dead.”
“But you’re…”
“I’m the man you knew as Roger Zimmerman. With the invalided mother and the couldn’t-care-less brother, and the job that went nowhere, and all that anger that never seemed to get resolved in the slightest despite all the yakkety-yak that filled up your office to no great advantage. That’s the Zimmerman you knew, Doctor Starks. And that’s the Zimmerman that died.”
Ricky felt dizzy. He was grasping inwardly at lies.
“But the subway…”
“That is indeed where Zimmerman-the real Zimmerman, who was indeed quite suicidal-died. Nudged to his demise. A timely death.”
“But I don’t…”
Rumplestiltskin shrugged. “Doctor, a man comes to your office and says he is Roger Zimmerman and he is suffering from this and that and presents as a proper patient for analysis and has the financial wherewithal to pay your bills. Did you ever check to be certain that the man who arrived at your door was in truth the man he said he was?”
Ricky was silent.
“I didn’t think so. Because, had you done so, you would have found that the real Zimmerman was more or less as I presented him to you. The only difference was that he wasn’t the person coming to see you. I was. And when it came time for him to die, he’d already provided what I needed. I simply borrowed his life and death. Because, doctor, I had to know you. I had to see you and study you. And I had to do that in the best way possible. It took some time. But I learned what I needed. Slowly, to be sure, but, as you’ve learned, I can be a patient man.”
“Who are you?” Ricky asked.
“You will never know,” the man replied. “And, then again, you already know. You know of my past. You know of my upbringing. You know of my brother and sister. You know much about me, doctor. But you will never know who I truly am.”
“Why did you do this to me?” Ricky asked.
Rumplestiltskin shook his head, as if astonished at the simple audacity of the question. “You already know the answers. Is it so unreasonable to think that a child would see so much evil delivered to someone he loved, see them beaten down and thrown into despair so profound that they eventually had to murder themselves to find salvation, and when this child reached a position where he could exact a measure of revenge from all the people who failed to help out-yourself included, doctor-that he wouldn’t seize that chance?”
“Revenge solves nothing,” Ricky said.
“Spoken like a man who never indulged,” Rumplestiltskin snorted. “You are, of course, mistaken, doctor. Like you have been so often. Revenge serves to cleanse the heart and soul. It has been around since the first caveman climbed down out of a tree and bashed his brother over the head for some slight of honor. But, knowing all that you know, about what happened to my mother and her three children, why is it that you think we are not owed something in return from all the people who neglected us? Children who were innocent of any wrongdoings, but summarily dismissed and abandoned and left to die by so many folks who should have known better, had they the slightest bit of compassion or empathy or even just a drop or two of the milk of human kindness within their hearts. Are we not, having come through those fires, owed something in return? Really, that is by far the more provocative question.”
He paused, listening to Ricky’s silence in reply, then spoke coldly: “You see, doctor, the true question before us this night isn’t why would I pursue you to your death, it’s why wouldn’t I?”
Again, Ricky had no answer.
“Does it surprise you that I have become a killer?”
It did not, but Ricky didn’t speak this out loud.
The silence slipped around the two men for a moment, and then, just as it would in the sanctity of his office, with a couch and quiet, one man broke the eerie stillness with another question.
“Let me ask you this? Why is it that you don’t think you deserve to die?”
Ricky could sense the man’s smile on his face. It would be a soul-dead, cold smile.
“Everyone deserves to die for something. No one is actually innocent, doctor. Not you. Not me. No one.”
Rumplestiltskin seemed to shake slightly, at that moment. Ricky imagined he could see the man’s fingers curl around the grip of his weapon.
“I think, Doctor Starks,” the killer said, with a cold resolve that spoke of what was going through his imagination, “as interesting as this last session has been, and even if you think there is still much more to be said, the time for talk has passed by. It is now time for someone to die. The odds are it is about to be you.”