cross on the red, don’t cheat on the wife, don’t do anything that might make you lose the job. Well, he’s got rules, too, and he followed them for a long time. They’re not our rules, but they’re rules. And insofar as the legal definition of sanity is concerned-whether he can distinguish between right and wrong-well, of course he can. And he’s proceeding anyway, in accordance with a program he’s created. He’s completely in control of himself.”
“He’s very much in control,” Stang said. He’d interrupted a sentence fragment from Velez Caputo, but she looked at him as gratefully as though he’d just offered her the names and addresses of seventy Nielson families. “Your mass murderer, the guy who shows up at McDonald’s with an AK-47 and shoots thirty people, he’s maybe crazy. He kisses the wife and kiddies good-bye and slips a clip into the magazine and blows people away until the cops put a couple through his skull. He knows he’s going to die, and he doesn’t care. That’s crazy. But your serial murderer, he’s careful. He chooses one kind of victim exclusively, and one way to kill them, and he makes sure that no one will catch him. He looks both ways, so to speak, and when the field is clear, he slits the throat…”
“Or throws the match,” Schultz said.
“Or throws the match,” Stang said crankily. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Velez Caputo said, smelling a fight.
“Well, it matters to the victim, I suppose,” Stang said. “But, you know, when you’re about to die, there isn’t time to decide that you’d prefer a different form of murder.”
“Mr. Grist?” Velez Caputo said. Hermione cawed something, but Caputo ignored her.
“He’s sane,” I said, “whatever sane means.”
“He’s bloody crackers,” Hermione said. “You should have heard him laugh.”
“Hermione,” I said, “can it.”
“Time for a break,” Velez Caputo said to the camera, and the lights went down.
“You,” she hissed to me, “don’t interrupt. We have to get a flow going here.”
“Would you prefer that I leave?” I asked. “Want to fill some time?”
“Norman,” she said, but she didn’t have to. Stillman was already there, standing over me and looking down with fatherly concern.
“Simeon,” he said, “you haven’t said it yet.”
“If I leave,” I said, “you’ve got an awful long time in front of you.” The computer behind Velez Caputo’s eyes began to click.
“Fifty minutes,” she said to Stillman. “I told you live was a mistake.”
“Thirty seconds,” said the man with the headset.
“This is national?” Velez Caputo said.
“You wanted it to be,” Stillman replied, demonstrating an Olympian mastery of the sidestep.
“Can I interrupt?” I said as the man with the headset told us that twenty seconds remained. Velez Caputo looked from Norman to me. “Leave us alone,” I said.
Velez Caputo gave me a stare packed with the kind of loathing I usually reserve for the poetry written by characters in novels. “That’s not how it works, sonny,” she said.
“Five,” said the man with the headset, over the strident tones of a commercial for laundry detergent. “Four, three,” and he held up the fingers for two, one. He pointed vaguely in Velez Caputo’s direction.
“We’re back,” she said, sounding very glad to be back. Stillman had retreated behind the cameras. “We were talking to Dr. Stang,” she said, making her first mistake.
“Mr. Stang,” Stang said.
“Of course,” Velez Caputo said, coloring beneath her makeup. “Mr. Stang of the FBI. We were talking about why you’re so sure that the killer is in control of himself.”
“These people,” Stang said sourly, “serial killers, I mean, decide consciously to give up their own lives to take the lives of others. They exert enormous control to do so.”
“Surely that’s insane,” Velez Caputo said. Stang shook his head.
“Painters,” Schultz interrupted, following the script we’d developed, “give up their lives-normal, secure, middle-class lives, I mean-to paint. Writers decide to write, no matter what. This man is following a kind of creative urge. It’s a twisted kind of creativity-
“I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” Velez Caputo said.
“-but it’s a kind of creativity,” Schultz said doggedly. “As in any art form, he’s decided to accept the limitations imposed by his materials-in this case, gasoline and matches-and he’s trying-”
“You’re a doctor” Velez Caputo accused him.
“-he’s trying to take it to the ultimate, trying to do something that no one else has ever done with those materials, all the while facing the challenge of capture.” He sat back, having done that bit. Velez Caputo’s face filled the screen, and Schultz gave me the high sign.
“You sound as though you admire him,” Velez Caputo said. “What about the deaths? What about the agony of the victims?”
“No one’s forgetting about the victims,” I said. “All Dr. Schultz is saying is that it’s a mistake to imagine him as a drooling maniac, hovering in doorways waiting for someone to fall asleep. He’s got a highly developed set of criteria, and he’s almost certainly a very intelligent man. Probably a brilliant man.” Point two.
“So what’s phlogiston?” Velez Caputo said, retreating to consult the TelePrompter at last. “What’s calx?”
“Phlogiston,” I said, glad to get to an easy part, “is a bad idea from the early nineteenth century. It was a principle, sort of like an element, and it was proposed by a German chemist named G. E. Stahl as the thing that actually burned when anything caught fire. Calx was whatever was left over.”
“So he’s saying,” Velez Caputo said, cutting through the history of science with a straight razor, “that he intends to burn you to a crisp.”
“That’s what he’s saying,” I said.
“Because he thinks you betrayed him. I should explain,” she said, turning to the cameras, “some of the background here.” The TelePrompter was whirring again, and she explained it in about forty compact seconds. Finishing, she turned to me. “So how do you feel about that, Mr. Grist?”
It wasn’t time for that yet.
“Miss Caputo,” I said.
“Velez,” she said. “Call me Velez.” Off camera, nobody called her Velez.
“How would you feel if he were after you? And who knows? He may decide to go after you next,” I said. “Surely, he’s watching us now.”
Caputo said, “Well, I don’t-”
“He might like to burn a celebrity,” I said maliciously. Schultz was making frantic hand signals. “Think of the media coverage.”
“And yet,” Velez Caputo said, a trifle grimly as the man with the tic made frantic adjustments in the TelePrompter, “up until a few days ago, this Incinerator specialized, as you say, in men. Then he apparently decided to kill women as well.” She paused and licked her lips again, and this time the gesture looked functional rather than cosmetic. “Why?” she asked. “Why do you suppose he changed course?” The man with the tic pointed at Schultz, and Caputo turned toward him. “Dr. Schultz?”
Schultz was sitting taller than a man who suspected the presence of a whoopee cushion. He hadn’t wanted to do this part. He’d asked me repeatedly to do it myself, but I’d refused. If he did it, it meant that he hadn’t talked to Finch.
“He feels that the rules were broken in the, um”-he looked at me, and I returned his gaze, feeling my heart pound against the walls of my jugular vein-“in the, in the…”
“Police action,” Velez Caputo said.
“Yes,” Schultz said, and his Adam’s apple did a little swan dive. “In the police action last Sunday evening.” Hammond, in the back of the room, glared first at me and then at Schultz. “He feels that Mr. Grist betrayed his trust by talking to the police, and he broke his own rules in return. So he burned his first woman.”
“We have a picture of her,” Velez Caputo said, and Schultz sagged back into his chair as a photograph flashed onto the monitors. It might have been the woman I talked to, but the photo had been taken in a different life, a life when she shopped and went home and went to the beauty parlor, and there she was with a matronly smile on her face, a woman living safely within the walls of a world that shut out rain and cold and Thunderbird and bottles of gasoline and Incinerators.
