The Darker Side

'Really?'

'You saw those trees? They have four real seasons here. White Christmas, things coming to life in the spring.' He shrugs. 'I was into it. Then the marriage went south and I forgot about it.'

He goes quiet again. This is the story of our relationship. He doles out personal information at unexpected times in little dollops. They're often bittersweet, as now. He'd loved a woman and they'd talked about moving someplace where they could rake fallen leaves and build snowmen. Now he is here because of a corpse. Dreams evolve, not always for the better.

'Dr. Johnston is a strange one,' I mutter, changing the subject.

'Yeah.'

Dr. Johnston, the ME, is in his mid-forties and he is huge. Not fat--muscular. He's got biceps it would take both of my hands to fit around. His legs are so big he probably has to get his pants tailored. His hair is bleach blond and shaved close to his head. His face is square jawed and brutal looking, with a big nose that's bent from past breaks and a vein that throbs away in his forehead like a living metronome, mesmerizing. He could be a professional bodybuilder or a mob knee-breaker.

He's all business with Lisa, putting those muscular arms to good use as he cuts through her rib cage. Even through the window, the sound is unsettling, like someone stepping on a series of Styrofoam cups. I can't hear what he's saying, but his lips are moving as he dictates his findings into the microphone that hangs above the table.

'How did it go with Mrs. Reid?' AD Jones asks me.

'Fine. Terrible.'

I fill him in.

'You were right. About why she asked for you.'

'Yep.'

Johnston is leaning forward to peer into Lisa. Looking inside her. I've seen much worse, but for some reason this makes me queasy.

'What's your take on this so far, Smoky?'

I know what he's asking me, what he wants. He wants me to do what I'm best at. To exercise my gift.

I do what I do because I have an ability to understand the men I hunt. It's not immediate, and it's not clairvoyant, but give me enough data and a picture will form. It will have three dimensions. It will have emotions and thought processes. Above all, it will have hungers. Hungers I can almost taste inside my own mouth, dark flavors so tangible I can almost swallow them. I have worked with talented men, AD Jones among them, who helped me to hone this gift. I came to understand that the crux of it is my ability to do the most unnatural thing; I look closer when normal people would turn away.

It's like diving into oil; you can't see through the murk while immersed, but you can feel its slickness covering you. Sometimes, I dive too deep. Sometimes, this scars me on the inside, and gives me secrets all my own.

Five years ago I was hunting a man who murdered only young, beautiful brunette women. None of them were over twenty-five, and all of them were striking. Even in death, and even to me, as a woman, they were lush and beautiful. Made to cloud men's minds. The man killing them felt the same way. He raped them and then he killed them with his fists. He beat them to death slowly, methodically with focused dedication. It's an intimate, personal way to kill another human being. I stood over one of those victims and I looked. I looked and I saw him. The killer. I kept looking until I felt him. He was a man in a frenzy, an overwhelming mix of sexual desire and anger. In the end, I realized, he wanted his sex with them to shake the moon loose from the sky.

I'd stood up, dazed, and had found to my horror that I was a little bit wet between the legs. I had dived too deeply, felt what he felt too strongly.

I found the nearest bathroom and puked my guts out. Bad as that was, it helped. I knew we were looking for a man who was organized and smart, but who couldn't control himself if the right trigger occurred.

We caught our man, we had DNA, but because of my deep dive, we got a confession as well. Stacy Hobbs was a new agent in the LA office, and she was exactly what I needed. Twenty-four, brunette, a distraction to all the men in a thousand-foot radius. I had her dress as the women he killed had dressed, had her make herself up. I told her how to stand in the corner, how to stare at him, how to cock her hip and smile seductively. I told her she wasn't to say a word.

His name was Jasper St. James, and he couldn't take his eyes off her. I watched his fists clench. Watched as his mouth fell open, just a little. His lips actually plumped up before my eyes, like the lips of a vampire. He began to sweat and he muttered under his breath.

'Bitch. Bitch.' Over and over.

In prior interviews, he'd been cool as a cucumber. I crossed my legs, a signal to Stacy. She did what I'd told her to do: she looked right into Jasper's eyes and licked her lips, long and slow, smacking and obscene and wet- sounding. Then she turned, abrupt, and left without a word.

Jasper actually screamed with frustration when that happened. It was just a single screech, a high-pitched keen, as if someone had squeezed his balls with a pair of pliers. I leaned forward over the interrogation table.

'It must have felt so so so so so so good,' I said, pitching my voice low and breathy, 'to watch them realize they were going to die.'

I remember his look. Horror and fascination and hope. Could almost hear his thoughts. Could she actually understand? Was it possible?

It was, God help me, though not in the way he thought. I felt it, I understood it, but in the end, my understanding was synthetic. I was unfaithful; only Jasper's love was pure.

He blabbered and blathered and sweated and shook and he talked. He told me his secrets. He was happy to share, grateful to finally have an audience. I listened and nodded and pretended empathy. It occurred to me that Jasper had probably used false empathy to lure those women. Did this make him my victim? Our aims weren't that much different. He wanted to destroy those women; I wanted to destroy him. The difference between us is that he deserved it. None of these thoughts had shown on my face. I'd given him my full attention. At one point, I even held his hand when he cried. Poor Jasper, I had whispered. Poor, poor Jasper.

I went home that night and soaked in the tub till the water turned cold.

AD Jones is asking me to dive into that oil, to begin the process, to start feeling the man who did this.

'I don't have enough data yet,' I say. 'No emotional component. The act itself is incredible. Audacious. That has meaning to him. It's either a message or it heightens the excitement, or both.'

'What kind of message?'

It pops into my head from nowhere, a shallow dive. 'I'm perfect. Or the reason for what I'm doing is perfect.'

AD Jones frowns. 'How's that?'

'It's like . . . murder in a locked room. He killed her midair. He was trapped and surrounded by witnesses. I think he killed her early in the flight too, so he could sit there next to the body and feel that excitement. It would have been tantalizing. Would someone notice? If they did, there was no way out. Only someone who was perfect could do this, could have the courage, could master that fear. He felt protected, either by his own ability, or because what he was doing was right.'

'What else?'

'He's very smart, very organized, capable of long-range, meticulous planning. He'll be older, but not too old. Late forties.'

'Why?'

'He's too confident to be young, too practiced.' I sigh. 'We'll interview the other passengers, but I can almost guarantee any description we get will be inaccurate.'

'You think he used a disguise?'

'Yes, but it will have been subtle. Hair color, tinted contacts, things like that. The greatest difference will be personality. He'll have adopted a characteristic that will stand out in the witnesses' memories, something that caught their eye and drowned out other observations.'

'What makes you sure about this?'

'Anything less wouldn't be perfect. Only perfection would do.'

JOHNSTON BEGAN TO PEEL LISA'S face down from her skull so he could open her head and get to her brain. I decide this is a good time to do something else. I place a call to Bonnie. It's almost eight-