door.
“Sorry to bother you again,” she says. She wears a cool smile. This is our second time talking about her case. “Agent Brower. My partner, Agent Shultz.” Maybe she thinks I have a poor memory. I don’t.
“Anytime,” I say, stepping back to let them both come in.
I lead them past the foyer into the room where I see my patients. Agent Brower sits but Agent Shultz stands as he did in my home last time. Again, he goes right to the bookshelf.
“I don’t mind admitting that we’re floundering a bit,” she says, leaning forward on her knees. “In the absence of physical evidence, we’re trying to create a profile.”
“You still think the two crimes are connected?”
Last time she was here, she wanted my consult on whether I thought the vigilante murders of Steve Markham and Wayne Garret Smith were connected.
“In reviewing other cases, we think there may be more.”
“Oh?”
“Two years ago, a man charged with the beating death of his wife and stepson was acquitted on a technicality. Six months later, someone beat him to death. And then there’s a case you’ll be familiar with, doctor.”
“Let me guess,” I say. “Kreskey.”
“That’s right,” she answers. “I don’t mean to bring back bad memories.”
Her eyes are almond shaped, trained on me. She laces her fingers, long and thin. Her nails are cut short, and filed square, unpolished. She is slim, but her legs and hips are muscular. A runner.
I almost smile. Instead I bow my head. “Trauma like that,” I say. “It doesn’t leave us. We adapt, learn to live with it.”
“Is that why you do the work you do?”
She doesn’t know what she’s asking.
“It helps me to help others, yes,” I say. But there are other reasons.
She nods solemnly, unlaces her fingers and leans forward.
“I think we might have a revenge killer,” she says. “Someone murdering people who are guilty of crimes for which they’ve not been punished.”
I sink into the chair behind my desk.
“There’s no real precedent for that, is there?” I say. I said as much during our last visit.
“That’s what I wanted to discuss further,” she says.
She’s young, I realize in that moment, really young. It’s a thing you don’t really encounter until you reach a certain age. Where people in authority positions are younger than you are. And though she carries herself with confidence, I see clearly in that moment that she’s struggling. Self-doubt, a bit of angst.
“I see.”
I am a bit of a celebrity, if I do say so myself. The surviving victim of a child killer, I then went on to earn multiple degrees in psychiatric medicine and abnormal psychology, specializing in victims of trauma. I am a bestselling author, an expert witness, a media consultant and an occasional source for law enforcement agencies—though not usually the FBI, who are quite proud of their elite behavioral sciences unit. (They even have their own podcast now.)
I put on my glasses, and rock back in my chair a bit. Agent Shultz has taken a book off my shelf. I can’t see which one it is.
“Most serial offenders, as we discussed last time, are motivated by deep-seated needs and compulsions. It seems unlikely to me that someone might be motivated again and again to kill for revenge. It takes an intense amount of planning, a dehumanization of the victim, a tremendous and burning desire to kill. And serial offenders are exceedingly rare, by the way. Usually when a crime of revenge is committed, it’s passionate, full of rage and hatred. You’ll be looking to the families of the victims for these crimes.”
“No,” she says with a neat shake of her head. “These were not crimes of passion. They were meticulously planned, seamlessly executed, with not a shred of physical evidence left behind.”
“Hmm.”
“If not for the proliferation of home security cameras, we’d have nothing to go on at all.”
She slips a file from her leather case and rises to slide it across the desk. There’s a photo inside, grainy and green, indistinct—except for a hooded form wearing a bird mask—feathers, a curved yellow beak.
“That image was captured the night of the Markham murder.”
She hands me another file. “This is from the Boston Boogeyman murder.”
Another grainy image, another hooded form in a bird mask.
I put them side by side, make a show of looking closely at each.
“I see,” I say, pressing my glasses up a bit.
“I just wondered if you’d take some time with these. Give the connection some thought.”
“Of course,” I say. “Anything else connecting the cases? Any other