Rage Against the Dying - By Becky Masterman Page 0,51
on her mind and that she always started by talking about something trivial first, like how I came to join the Bureau. Facing straight ahead, I said, “Coleman, you may have heard things about the kind of person I am. One thing I’m not is a therapist. We don’t have limitless sessions to indulge in, so spit out what’s on your mind. I promise not to shriek with laughter or twitter it.”
Coleman took a deep breath. In my peripheral vision I could see her grip the steering wheel a little more tightly. “I read all those books, like the one by David Weiss, to get ready for the interviews. Before I started them, I thought to myself, kind of excited, ‘ooh, here I am, I’m going into the mind of the monster’ like they say.
“The scary thing is, it never happened. Like you said, I was expecting ‘disgusting.’ But after a while, I think it happened shortly after that session you saw, it felt like I was just talking to some guy, all right, some totally fucked up guy, but not the inhuman monster I was expecting.”
“What did you expect, somebody who laughed evilly while twirling his mustaches?”
“Couldn’t he have looked at least a little like Charles Manson?” Coleman finally laughed, and it eased us both. “Well, yeah, yeah, I kind of did expect him to look that way. It was almost like, he was too much like one of us, Brigid. Kind of a pathetic jerk, but I was unnerved because he was a human being and I was expecting something else.”
“Let’s cut to the chase. He got you with the business about the popularity of vampire movies, how there’s something of a turn-on in combining sex and death.”
“No,” she said.
“Yes.”
“All right, yes.”
“We’re a depraved race. To some extent, Lynch is right. We might as well admit it.”
I turned to look at her. She had drawn her lips between her teeth and her eyes narrowed, as if her face was closing in on itself for protection. I wondered what she would say if I told her how I’d killed the guy in the wash. I pretended I was sucking wet air through a hose, joked to lighten the mood, “Luke. Come to the dark side.”
She didn’t laugh that time, so I went for the more serious approach. “Hey, Coleman, don’t worry about it. Liking the Twilight series is a far cry from draining someone’s blood. We all embrace our inner serial killer at some point. Because, because,” I said, rapping my knuckles lightly on my window to make sure I had her attention and accentuate the point, “that’s precisely one of the things that will make you so good at this it will scare you.”
Coleman gave a weak but semi-encouraged smile. “Except, how do you know if you’re empathizing with someone not because of the killer in you, but because they’re not a killer after all?”
“Your intuition, you mean.”
She nodded.
“I’ve been there, Coleman. You said it yourself the other day. Sometimes you can be so certain who the bad guy is you don’t sleep till you prove it, even if it takes decades. But every once in a while it works the other way, like now. After all that time you spent with Lynch, in your core you knew he wasn’t a killer. You couldn’t stop thinking about it. That was what made you ask about the ears, and that was why you noticed his reaction when no one else did.”
She nodded again.
“So I say you go with your intuition. Just don’t tell the men I said so.”
Coleman grew quiet after that, maybe mulling over what we’d talked about for the rest of the drive. Thinking she might want to talk some more, I suggested we stop at Emery’s Cantina for lunch. She agreed, and pulled in to the space next to my car when we got back to the Bureau office. I told her I’d be there as soon as I checked up on Zach at the hotel.
“How is he holding up?” Coleman asked, while scanning the parking lot like she was looking for someone, or hoping someone wouldn’t see us.
I waggled my head. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Are you going to tell him that Lynch’s confession is suspect?”
“Hell no, I don’t want to tell him anything this time until I’m sure we have something solid to prove Lynch’s confession false. We need to find the physical evidence, and we need to present it to Lynch