I was silent for a long moment. Most of what Mike said made sense to me. I’d drawn my own conclusions, made my own speculations, tried to imagine this man from the evidence he had left us, and from the evidence he had not. As usual, the experts at the Bureau had left a flatfoot like me in the dust. I liked the body defect and the description of his house. They gave me something physical to go on.
“Still there, Terry?”
“Thinking.”
“Let me say a few things. You have to understand that this guy is a bundle of powerful contradictions. It’s a classic escalating fantasy cycle he’s in. He has the morality he learned in childhood colliding with hatred of his mother, and of the man or men who abused him when he was small. He has this powerful drive to connect with women, hitting up against his vision of himself as freakish and unlovable. He has heterosexual desire mixed up with his fear of women, and homosexual urges he’s still trying to deny, feeding his self-loathing. That’s why he goes so young on the girls, Terry — they’re a way of punishing his mother for bringing him up in an effeminate way — it’s the most forbidden act he can imagine, the most rebellious. But underneath it he’s trying to make a statement of his heterosexual desires, though he’s terrified of women. So he picks women who aren’t women yet — he’s going to make the sexual connection without any adult, human interaction at all. His conquests are so small he can tape their mouths and carry them right out of their houses — the pure control he needs to feel, his way of making the world behave the way he wants it to. Right now he’s the culmination of probably twenty plus years of inner torment and outer placidity. He won’t have any priors. You won’t find him in the sex offenders’ registry. I made a VICAP run anyway, and it came up dry. But he’s made his change. He’s consolidated himself, finally, into a more singular personality. And because of that decision, that choice to move from imagination to action, he’s thrown himself into even greater stress.”
“But you say he consolidated. He’s become... whole.”
“It’s killing him. He hates himself even more now, and he’s going through radical changes in behavior. I’d guess heavy drinking, or maybe an antidepressant, or both. If he wasn’t nocturnal before, he is now. He’s probably growing or cutting hair, growing or cutting a beard, maybe dyeing one or both. A change in wardrobe. Sharp changes in personality, to anyone who might notice, but there’s a good chance that no one will, because he’s alone, absolutely alone in this now. He’ll have cut everyone off, except his anonymous, accepting peer group on the Web. Lurk the chat rooms — you might overhear something. Now this is a bit of a leap, but both my people came up with it — it’s possible he’ll have thought about selling the house. Clearing out. Change of scenery, change of behavior. Maybe he even listed it. If so, he’ll be anxiously waiting for a taker. And while he waits, he smolders. So look for the incidence between events to shorten. According to our models he’ll start raping, then killing. He won’t confess, and if you arrest him he’ll look for a way to kill himself. And of course, if there’s a way out of it for him, he’ll kill you to take it. Exercise extreme caution with this guy, Terry. He’s dangerous and he’s at the end of whatever tethers you can imagine — even his own. Good luck.”
“Thank you.”
“And call me when you score. We can help with an interrogation strategy, or we can drink a long-distance toast.”
I thanked him again and hung up.
The fax came through ten minutes later, but Ishmael beat me to it. Ishmael is Jordan Ishmael, an administrative lieutenant who oversees all of the Crimes Against Persons units, including mine. He’s two years older than me, forty-two, handsome like a panther and smart. He has black hair and green eyes, and teaches a special class in hand-to-hand combat for the Sheriff Academy. He’s big in the way that professional baseball players are big — hands, head, legs.
Ishmael is a genuine power broker within the Sheriff-Coroner Division. His desire for the office of sheriff-coroner is no secret, and his rivals are few and meek. He helped me get hired on here when he was just a young deputy himself. He expected fealty, which I offered for a while, then got tired of giving. He has been a friend and champion of Melinda for as long as I’ve known her. For eight of those years he was her husband. He told me recently, in all seriousness, that if I ever tried to interfere with the welfare of his daughter, Penelope, he would break my neck with his bare hands. I’m slender and wiry and far from powerful, though I believe I could take him if I had to. Maybe that’s just my Irish showing. More to the point, I can’t stand him anymore, and he can’t stand me.
“Here’s your psychobabble,” he said, dropping the uncut fax transmission onto my desk.
“Nice of you to deliver. What do you think?”
“I just said. Babble.”
“Well, here’s for your time. Thanks.”
I held out a quarter by its edge and waited for Ishmael to react. He left.
If Ishmael wasn’t a lieutenant and I wasn’t good at busting the creeps who prey on children, the department might have transferred one of us off this floor a long time ago. A year ago to be exact, when I took up cohabitation with Ishmael’s ex-wife. The fact that we chose to live together rather than marry probably prevented Personnel from acting — our arrangement is off the record, though well known.
Melinda is relatively free of the continuing vibe, working one floor down, in Fraud and Computer Crime. Ishmael still fawns over her. I doubt his sincerity with her. Inside, I suspect, a part of him must hate her. So far as my proximity goes, Ishmael is actually hamstrung by his own ambition: to lobby for my transfer or removal would make him look even more feudal and conniving than he is. I’m the thorn he can’t pull out.
Something else is at work here, too. Namely, I’ve been talking with Sheriff-Coroner Jim Wade a lot about my future here at the department.
Jim is nearing retirement — another three years and he’ll step down and into his well-earned golden years. He’s arranging things like a dying man, setting his house in order for a smooth transition. Sheriff-Coroner is a nonpartisan office in Orange County, but it’s an elected one, so the deep internal machinery that produces a winning candidate has to engage early to be effective. One of the greatest powers of any sheriff is to actively choose his own successor. Jim hasn’t said anything of substance to me, so far. When we talk, it’s like golf course talk without the golf. But there is something in the air, and I feel it and it is coming from Jim and his office.
Not that I’d be a likely successor, but I’m still completely floored by the attention.
For one, I’m nonpolitical. I’m not ambitious — at least I wasn’t until Jim Wade began to murmur the quiet language of power into my ear.
Second, I’m not only not a family man, but I’m going through the uncommitted motions of family life with one of the department’s best detectives, the ex-wife of the department’s brightest lieutenant, and their daughter. I’m messy.
Third, I’m head of the division’s smallest and newest unit — Crimes Against Youth — that until recently was accorded neither respect nor recognition. Two years ago, we didn’t exist at all. At first there was an attitude toward us, an attitude of snickering jocularity and prurient suspicion. It’s the same one that gets aimed at a vice dick who’s been on the job too long. People start to wonder why he’s spending so much time with prostitutes, pimps, panderers and pornographers. Why doesn’t he transfer out? Up? Hit the desk a while? With good reason, maybe: more than a few of them fall to the temptations. I can understand how they do. And I feel compassion for them, but this may be a character flaw in myself, a blurring of the knowledge of good and evil, caused by the death of my son.