mind. just overwhelming evil. I don't know how to explain this-but the
Butcher isn't a lunatic. At least not in the classical sense. He
doesn't kill in a maniacal frenzy.
'He's chopped up nine innocent women,' Connie said. 'Ten if you count
the one they haven't found yet. He cuts off their ears and fingers
sometimes. Sometimes he disembowels them. And you say he isn't crazy?'
'He's not a lunatic, not by any definition we have of the word.
I'd stake my life on it.'
'Maybe you don't sense mental illness because he doesn't know he's sick.
Amnesia-'
'No. No amnesia. No schizophrenia. He's very aware of his murders.
He's no Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I'll bet he'd pass any psychiatric
examination you'd care to give him, and with flying colors.
This isn't easy to explain. But I have the feeling that if he is a
lunatic, he's a whole new breed. No one's ever encountered anything
like him before. I think-dammit, I know he's not even angry or
particularly excited when he kills these women. He's just-methodical.'
'You're giving me the shivers.'
'You? I feel as if I've been inside his head. I've got a chronic case
of shivers.'
A coal popped in the fireplace.
She took hold of his free hand. 'Let's not talk about Prine or the
killings.'
'After tonight, how can I not talk about them?'
'You looked wonderful on television,' she said, working him away from
the subject.
'Oh, yeah. Wonderful. Sweating, pale, shaking' Not during the visions.
Before them. You're a natural for television. Even for movies.
Leading-man type.'
Graham Harris was handsome. Thick reddish-blond hair. Blue eyes,
heavily crinkled at the corners. Leathery skin with sharply carved
lines from all the years he had spent in an outdoor life. Five-ten; not
tall, but lean and hard. He was thirty-eight, yet he still had a trace
of boyish vulnerability about him.
'Leading-man type?' he said. He smiled at her. 'Maybe you're right.
I'll give up the publishing business and all this messy psychic stuff.
I'll go into the movies.'
'The next Robert Redford.'
'Robert Redford? I was thinking maybe the next Boris Karloff.'
'Redford,' Connie insisted.
'Come to think of it, Karloff was a rather elegant looking man out of
makeup. Perhaps I'll try for being the next Wallace Beery.'
'if you're Wallace Beery, then I'm Marie Dressier.'
'Hi, Marie.'
'Do you really have an inferiority complex, or do you cultivate it as
part of your charm?'
He grinned, then sipped the brandy. 'Remember that Tughoat Annie movie
with Beery and Dressler? Do you think Annie ever went to bed with her
husband?'
'Sure! '
