“Well,” he said. “People do not
repetitively and freely do
things that they don’t like to do.”
“Why would they like this?”
“We may never know. They may not know.”
“Speculate,” Jesse said.
“Well, certainly it could give one a feeling of power, and the
more one did it, and the more one got away with it, the more power one would feel.”
“Hell,” Jesse said. “I know it
doesn’t prove they were powerful.
But he was a doctor, and a successful inventor. She was a lawyer.
They appear rich.”
“Power is in the perception,” Dix said.
“You’re saying maybe they didn’t
feel powerful.”
“Maybe not,” Dix said. “Or maybe
they didn’t have a shared
power.”
“His power, her power, not their power?”
Dix shrugged.
“Or,” he said, “perhaps it is a
bonding ritual.”
“Explain,” Jesse said.
“They’re a couple, and this makes their coupleness
special.”
“The family that kills together, stays together?”
“They have a shared secret. They have a shared specialness.
Ordinary couples are leading ordinary lives: food shopping, changing diapers, having sex maybe once or twice a month, because they’re supposed to. These people have found a thing to share that
no one else has.”
“Serial killing?”
“Each has the other’s guilty
secret,” Dix said. “It binds them
together.”
“For crissake, they do this for love?”
“They do this for emotional reasons,” Dix said.
“And love is an emotion.”
“Love, or what they may think is love,”
Dix said.
“What might they think is love?”
“Mutual need, mutual mistrust, that needs to be overcome by
mutual participation in something that ties them together.”
Jesse thought about this. Dix waited.
“Will they keep doing this?” Jesse said.
“No reason for them to stop.”
“Why was he flirting with me about this?”
Jesse
said.
“Maybe the same reason people like to have sex in nearly public
places,” Dix said.
“Phone booths and movie theaters,” Jesse said. “Stuff like
that?”
