door is locked because he just locked it. Nobody can leave if he fires. Why sneak thirty feet across a lighted kitchen, find a knife, and risk a fight with a good-sized guy?”
“To show us he can. He can cross that distance in about three seconds without making a sound, grab the right knife and strike—once, with certainty—and step back before the first drop of blood hits the floor.”
“What are we talking about—martial arts?”
“I think so. I’m not sure what kind, yet. Other people can sneak up on a guy like that and cut his throat. But this one took a quick look and knew he could do it a hundred times out of a hundred, or he wouldn’t have tried. He didn’t need to. It was just the best way to do it. He has to do things that way.”
“The shots?”
“Right. More lessons, more practice. He must spend enormous amounts of time on firing ranges—probably combat ranges, with moving targets and pop-ups. He’s been perfecting himself.”
Millikan sighed and rubbed his eyes.
The silence caught Prescott’s attention. “What?”
“You want me to get somebody in law enforcement to give you some lists, don’t you? Black belts, regulars at shooting ranges, and all that.”
“No,” said Prescott. “You know what this guy is like.”
“I do,” said Millikan. “He’s the loner of all loners. Maybe a charmer, but even if he is, no real friends. Smart enough to avoid the notice of the authorities, or even of people who would put his name on a list for authorities.”
“He’s convinced himself he’s the best,” said Prescott. “That’s his vulnerability.”
“Very likely,” said Millikan. “I’m not sure it’s a vulnerability.”
“Of course it is. He’s not the best,” said Prescott. “I’m the best.”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to tell him.”
4
Varney watched in fascination. A week ago, he had never heard of this Millikan jerk. Here he was on CNN, and they were calling him a leading expert on homicide. Varney gave a mirthless little laugh. A leading expert on homicide wasn’t some professor. It was somebody like Varney.
It was Millikan’s turn to talk. “We’re accustomed to having authorities, from the president on down, say killings like these are ‘senseless,’ or I believe the usual term is ‘random and senseless.’ They’re neither: the killer knows exactly what they were for.”
The interviewer saw a way to make his discussion appear coherent, and appear to be in control. “All right, then. Take the Louisville restaurant murders we just saw in our opening clip. What were they for?”
“Let’s ignore the superficial reason: some small offense that might have gone unnoticed, jealousy, money. What I’m talking about is the underlying reason. The killer doesn’t think he’s unilaterally attacking. He thinks what he’s doing is retaliating for things that were done to him, or making a pre-emptive strike to avoid something he fears in the future.”
“Specifically in the Louisville case, how would you know that?”
“The way I came to know it is thirty years spent interviewing dozens of killers and hundreds of eyewitnesses. But I did examine the crime scene in Louisville the night of the murders, and I’ve been following the case since then. I believe the case will be solved in a few weeks. We’ll be able to interview the perpetrator and find out exactly what—”
The moderator had been itching to interrupt, but one of the panelists was quicker. It was Cameron, and Millikan wasn’t surprised. “What we’ll find out is that it was a disgruntled employee, or a customer who got thrown out of the place that night. It would have been nothing, except he was able to get his hands on a gun.”
“As my friend Mr. Cameron knows, I’m not a fan of guns,” said Millikan. “But that’s changing the subject. We were talking about why, not how. What we’ll find is that this was a child who was abused or neglected at home. When he went to school, he was picked on or taunted, and nobody protected him. He’s been spending the rest of his life protecting himself from threats that have already come and gone—making himself less emotionally vulnerable to his parents, less physically vulnerable to the people who picked on him in school. Obtaining a gun is only one of the things he did to make himself more formidable. He’s not a good argument for gun control, because he’s not somebody who would have been harmless without a gun and simply killed because it was convenient. He’s a great argument for doing something about the way our society raises many of its children.”
“It’s easy to say that,” snapped Cameron. “But it comes down to ‘What can we do?’ We can’t disqualify a few million people from having sex and producing children. We can disqualify civilians from owning firearms.”
The moderator was getting panicky now. He could see the clock telling him he had six minutes to bump this squabble out of the endless circular argument about gun control and turn it into a news story. He said, “Professor Millikan, I want to get back to something you said earlier: that the case would be solved in a few weeks. What makes you believe that? Have the police made a break in the case?”
“No,” said Millikan. “It’s not the police. What’s happened is that the case struck a chord in unexpected quarters. A donor has put up the money to hire Roy Prescott.”
The interviewer was intrigued. “Roy Prescott?”
“He’s a private homicide specialist. Mr. Cameron and I are both acquainted with his work, and I understand he has good leads already. I would say it’s a matter of time. A few weeks, at most a few months.”
The interviewer unexpectedly turned to Cameron. “Mr. Cameron, I noticed that when Professor Millikan said earlier that it was nearly over, you didn’t disagree. Did you know this too?”
“No.” Cameron’s eyes were on Millikan. He seemed to be getting over a shock. “I didn’t.”
The interviewer sensed that he was on the edge of something.
“Can you tell me more about Roy Prescott?”
“I have no comment.” It was a statement that the moderator had never before heard on his show. Panelists didn’t say that. They interrupted and shouted to get more time to make comments. He could see that Cameron’s expression was peculiar. He was staring at Millikan, intrigued, barely blinking.
“Then, Professor Millikan, can you do better?” It was a mild barb for Cameron, to get him going again, but he was like a member of the audience now. “What makes you confident that this specialist will catch the killer?”
“The best analogy I can think of offhand is a bear hunt,” said Millikan. “A bear isn’t merely big and fast and strong, with long teeth and claws. He also knows what he’s going to do in a crisis, and when the time comes, he does it very efficiently. But the reason bears are an endangered species and we’re not, is that the hunter also knows what the bear is going to do. His larger brain is the only advantage that matters.”
The moderator tried to ignore the frantic waving of the producer, who was spinning her finger in the “wrap- up” sign. He glanced at Cameron, hoping to get a reaction in the last seconds, but Cameron seemed stunned. Reluctantly, the moderator conceded that it was too late to go on. “My thanks to Michael Cameron, former district attorney of Los Angeles and now congressman, and to Professor Daniel Millikan, author of
The camera zoomed in for his close-up, and he said, “Be there.” The producer sighed and shook her head at him to show that he had cut it too close, but he shrugged happily. He had made it again, even gotten the promo in.
Varney felt the intense heat of anger on his shoulders and the sides of his neck all the way up to his scalp, so strong that he began to have the peculiar tunnel vision he sometimes noticed during a fight. But this time, there was a shortness of breath, a sensation that his lungs were partially filled with sand so there was little room for air. It was not the clean, good anger that he felt when he was fighting back. It was outrage, a bitter sense of unfairness. They were saying things about him that he couldn’t answer. They said he was stupid, that they knew everything he was going to do before he did it.
He tried to reassure himself. That pompous, stupid son of a bitch on television couldn’t do anything to him. His theories were designed just to make all the fat-ass spongeheads excited enough to sit through the next
