“You can… you can blow my brains out, but I won’t talk about it. I can’t.”
“When you mutilate the mannequins, are you excited, Stevie? Are you huge with excitement?”
Zillis shook his head, hung his head.
“Doing it to them and talking about it are so different?” Billy asked.
“Billy. Billy, please. I don’t want to hear myself, hear myself talking about it.”
“Because when you’re doing it, then it’s just something you do. But if you talk about it, then it’s something you are.”
Zillis’s expression confirmed that Billy had gotten to the quick of it. Not much could be gained by harping on the mannequins. They were what they were. Rubbing Steve Zillis’s face in his perversion could be counterproductive.
Billy had not yet gotten what he needed, what he had come here to prove. He was simultaneously tired and wired, in need of sleep but strung out on caffeine. At times, his pierced hand ached; the Vicodin had begun to wear off. Because of exhaustion staved off with chemicals, he might not be conducting the interrogation cleverly enough.
If Zillis was the freak, he was a genius of emotional fakery. But then that’s what sociopaths were: voracious spiders with an uncanny talent for projecting a convincing image of a complex human being that obscured the insectile reality of icy calculation and ravenous intent. Billy said, “When you do what you do to the mannequins, when you watch those sick videos, do you ever think of Judith Kesselman?”
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In the course of this encounter, Zillis had been surprised more than once, but this question shocked him. Bloodshot from the residual effect of the Mace, his eyes widened. His face paled and went loose, as if he had taken a blow.
Zillis shackled to the bed. Billy free on the chair but with a growing sense of being trammeled by his prisoner’s evasiveness.
“Stevie? I asked you a question.”
“What is this?” Zillis said with apparent earnestness and even the merest trace of righteous affront.
“What is what?”
“Why did you come here? Billy, I don’t understand what you’re doing here.”
“Do you think of Judith Kesselman?” Billy persisted.
“How do you know about her?”
“How do you think I know?”
“You answer questions with questions, but I’m supposed to have real answers to everything.”
“Poor Stevie. What about Judi Kesselman?”
“Something happened to her.”
“What happened to her, Stevie?”
“It was in college. Five, five and a half years ago.”
“Do you know what happened to her, Stevie?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Somebody does,” Billy said.
“She disappeared.”
“Like in a magic show?”
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“She was just gone.”
“She was such a lovely girl, wasn’t she?”
“Everybody liked her,” Zillis said.
“Such a lovely girl, so innocent. The innocent are the most delicious, aren’t they, Stevie?”
Frowning, Zillis said, “Delicious?”
“The innocent—they’re the most succulent, the most satisfying. I know what happened to her,” Billy said, meaning to imply that he knew Zillis had kidnapped and killed her.
Such a full-body shudder passed through Steve Zillis that the handcuffs rattled protractedly against the metal bed frame.
Pleased with that reaction, Billy said, “I know, Stevie.”
“What? What do you know?”
“Everything.”
“What happened to her?”
“Yes. Everything.”
Zillis had been sitting with his back against the bed, his legs splayed on the floor in front of him. Now he
