27
Ben Stepped out of the shower and dabbed his body dry with the clean towel that Eve had hung up for him. He wrapped it around his waist, picked up Eve’s toothbrush and brushed his teeth whilst staring in the mirror, knowing that his reflection no longer belonged to him.
The man in the mirror winked.
Eve and Ben had agreed that in order to move forward, he must come to a decision on what he was going to do about Natalie.
Eve worried a little that Ben would forgive his girlfriend for cheating on him. Would she lose this special guy so soon after they had built this amazing bond? She decided that no, she didn’t think so, and encouraged him to find a solution to the situation sooner rather than later, whilst he was still hurting inside, in fact.
An outsider looking in on Ben’s life could be forgiven for thinking all women were manipulative and worked for their own agendas. Ben agreed that it was better if everybody knew where they stood.
For him, the greatest problem on his mind was the knowledge in his head. He knew that he had killed two people. He was a killer. He knew he could be found out by the police and sent to prison for a very long time, or even not found out and maybe forced to live with the guilt for the rest of his life. Although, when he thought about the two youths, that he so savagely beat to death, he didn’t feel guilt. Staring at his alter ego in the mirror, and the man in the mirror staring unflinchingly back, they both knew that the only feeling Ben felt was the fear of being caught, which one would imagine, would lessen over time.
The more Ben thought about his craziness, because he was certainly quite a bit crazy and he’d accepted that at this point, the more he believed that he really didn’t know his father at all. His father was The Phantom; his mother had no reason to lie. And as upsetting as this idea was, it also had a calming effect, because his father was never caught.
Ben knew murders went unsolved, and he was sure nobody had seen him at the canal, and he had left no weapon to be found and no other clues as far as he could tell. So, had he gotten away with it? He thought he probably had. Which led to the next potential problem, could he control his anger in the future? Could he face Natalie, for example, a woman who had very recently broken his heart, when he had been going through the hardest time of his life?
Eve had organised a one-on-one appointment for Ben to see an anger management counsellor, someone she had known for a while, and who could see him early in the afternoon. The plan was to see this guy before he went home to Natalie and hopefully learn some special techniques for keeping calm in the heat of the moments that would surely arise.
When the time came, Ben sat opposite the softly-spoken counsellor and explained that he had lost his temper with two teenage boys, who had been verbally abusive and even assaulted him by throwing a stone at his head.
He also gave, upon request, any mitigating circumstances. As the words came out of his mouth, of his father, his job and his girlfriend, Ben knew how stupid this sounded. There was a fundamental problem with this process. Ben could only give the counsellor so many details about the incident, and the counsellor could only give advice relative to the information he had been given.
‘There is no problem with defending yourself against people who are doing you harm, not morally, nor legally, to an extent,’ said the advisor, after listening to Ben recount events.
‘Reacting with violence is not a good thing, but in a situation such as this, completely understandable,’ he continued. ‘You were forced to defend yourself, and your natural reaction was to fight. Some would have fled, but either response is justifiable due to the circumstance you found yourself in, by no fault of your own.’
The counsellor also touched on the last two months that Ben had lived through, especially the morning he’d had, these were all factors that could impair one’s judgement. Stress, emotional pain and shock are hard enough to deal with one at a time, all three together is tremendously difficult for anyone.
Ben sat and listened as he was given techniques to help curb his temper if anything like this arose in the future, but Ben knew the breathing techniques and counting to ten were not going to be of any help. He’d been using these tools for coping for a while already.
After shaking the counsellor’s hand and thanking him for his time, Ben walked out onto the street and realised that there was nobody he could rely on to get him through this. There was nobody he could be absolutely honest with about what he had done, and nobody who would stand by him after learning what a monster he had become. Nobody, that is, except his mother.
28
Summers had spent a couple of hours with the police psychologist, going over the old profile she had inherited from the case files, and looking to improve the psychological profile of The Phantom. She’d accept anything that could give her more clues as to narrow down the search and how to track him down.
Ninety per cent of serial killers were white, aged in the mid-twenties to mid-thirties, had an above average IQ, although didn’t necessarily perform well at school, and also preferred to spend time alone as opposed to taking part in social activities.
Serial killers can be categorized; some kill for gain, taking money or objects of value. That wasn’t The Phantom. Some seek the power over their victims, but The Phantom was more a hit and run kind of killer, so that wasn’t him, either. There was no sexual motivation for the killings, nor was there a specified group in the victims; The Phantom had killed different races, ages, sexes and religions. With the previous types of serial killers excluded, meant that the chances were, that The Phantom was what is known as a visionary serial killer. Usually psychotic or schizophrenic, the killer would perhaps hear voices who instructed that the killings should take place.
Something that didn’t fit with any pattern of serial killings is the time frame that The Phantom worked at. Even if Summers only included the cases she believed could reasonably be attributed to The Phantom, the killings spanned over years, not weeks like history would dictate.
Summers and the psychologist also discussed the potential for The Phantom not to be a loner, but a family man. Not someone who lived alone and could come and go as he pleased, but a man with responsibilities who had to be careful not to be discovered by his loved ones to be a mad-man.
Summers had a theory that The Phantom was someone who jogged from home to crime scene, being able to move quickly without using transport or attracting attention from the public, for if you see someone wearing sports gear jogging down the road, you think nothing of it. If you see a man running in ‘normal’ clothes, it is normal to ask why, is he late? Is he being chased? Is he doing the chasing? Either way, you’d be remembered. Someone that jogged would also have the perfect excuse to leave his wife and children at home without at all looking suspicious.
But the psychologist didn’t agree. She said that the statistics showed a much greater chance the killer was a loner of sorts. Although, she did concede that there had been cases, where for example, a wife or girlfriend suffered from a type of paraphilia called hybristophilia. That meant she would be sexually aroused or attracted to a criminal, someone who was capable of cruel or outrageous crimes. This phenomenon is known as ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ syndrome, after Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, part of a gang who robbed and murdered in the early thirties in Texas and Louisiana, USA.
Sat now alone in her office, Summers concluded that she had learnt some interesting facts and stats from the psychologist, but she was no closer to finding The Phantom.
Psychology, learning how the mind works and what makes us human. It was a field that she had of course touched on back at university, but it took a back seat as her attentions were mainly focused on the anatomy, medications and all the other things trainee doctors needed to know.
But she wasn’t a doctor, she was a detective. She had the biggest case in the country to solve and at that moment, she didn’t have a clue as to how on earth she was going to do it.
