Grimoire Diabolique

Desmond,” I admitted. “If you could dumb this down a little?”

“Clinically, we would call Profile #1 a graduated bipolar symbolist. The effect of his illness has a tendency to switch off and on at times relative to his delusion, and to put it in general terms, when he’s off, he’s able to function normally in society, but when he’s on, he is indeed ‘crazy.’ He becomes overwhelmed by some facet of his delusional fixation to the extent that he hallucinates. The women he murders are symbols. He sees his victims as his mother, as the self same person who so heinously abused him as a child.”

“Jeeze, that sounds pretty serious.”

“Well, it is given the gravity of the crimes. It’s unusual, though, that someone could maintain this level of bipolarity for three years. If there’s anything ‘promising’ about the diagnosis, it is the graduated aspect. He’s gradually becoming more and more insane; eventually—soon, I would say—he’ll lose his ability to maintain social functionality. And he’ll get caught rather quickly.”

Promising? I thought. Odd choice of words, but then he’s the shrink. “What about Profile #2?”

“More complicated, and less predictable,” Desmond began. “Profile #2 is functionally similar in that the killer is suffering from a symbolic bipolar personality disorder. But he’s not experiencing any manner of hallucinosis and his delusions are conscious and quite controllable. The fantasy element takes over. It’s probably quite like a dream. When he’s murdering these women—and severing their hands—he’s immersed so deeply in the delusion that he’s probably not even consciously aware of what he’s doing. It’s a fixation disorder that’s run amok. Am I losing you?”

“Well, a little, yes.” A little, my ass.

“He’s dreaming of something he never had. Only, regrettably, he’s acting out the dream in real life. Is that synopsis cool with you, young man?”

But I still didn’t get it. “A dream…of cutting off hands?”

“No, no. Be intuitive. The perpetrator doesn’t see it that way. He sees it as claiming what he never had as a child. Remember—the facilitation of the mother’s nurturing touch. All infants need to be touched; the perpetrator was not. That should answer your question about what exactly he’s doing with the hands.”

I stared at him, gulped. And the implication was disgusting. “You mean he’s… taking the hands—”

“He’s taking the hands home,” Desmond finished, “and putting them on his body. His mother is at last touching him. Nurturing him. But now, in adulthood, the delusion is so thoroughly contorted and transfigured—he’s probably masturbating with the hands too.”

What a screwed up world, with screwed up people. “Christ,” I said. “That’s…sick.”

“But so is our perpetrator,” Desmond added. “There’s quite a bit in our world that’s sick, twisted, wrong. And quite a few people in it who don’t see it that way.”

“But the third,” I said, “the third profile.” I put my glasses on and looked back at the marked pages of the case file. “You called it a ‘fixated erotomanic impulse’. What’s that mean?”

Desmond’s pate glimmered in a sun-break through the window. He shrugged his shoulders. “It means that in the case of this third potential profile, the killer is simply a sociopath with a hand fetish.”

Simply a sociopath with a hand fetish, I thought. The terms just rolled off this guy’s lips like me talking about baseball.

“It’s the most remote possibility but also the worst as far as apprehension is concerned.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“It’s remote because sociopaths rarely engage in mutilation crimes. But they’re infinitely harder to apprehend because sociopaths, as a rule, aren’t insane; therefore they’re less likely to make a mistake that could lead to arrest. Sociopaths are skilled liars. They’ve had their whole lives to practice. Their amorality isn’t a result of mental defectivity. They know what’s right and what’s wrong, but they choose wrong because it suits them.”

They choose wrong, I thought. But Desmond had said this profile was the least likely. “If you had to make a choice yourself,” I asked him, “which of the three would you put your money on?”

Desmond tsk’d, smiled a thin smile. “Abnormal psychiatry isn’t an objective checklist. Profile indexes exist only through the documentation of known information. So it stands to reason that there’s quite a bit out there that we don’t know yet. It would be of little value for me to make a guess. All I can say is it’s probably one of the three. But you should also consider a sexual detail that should also be obvious.”

Dumb again. Dumb me. “And that would be?”

“The absence of evidence of rape. No semen in any orifice, no evidence of sexual penetration. Considering any of my three profiles, the possibility should properly be addressed that the killer is at the very least unable to achieve erection in the presence of a woman, or he may be sexually incompetent altogether.”

“This is a lot of data you’ve given me, sir, and I’m grateful,” I said, pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose. The insights he’d given me would make for a great, comprehensive series of articles on the killer. “I really appreciate your time.”

“My pleasure, young man.”

I grabbed my stuff to leave, but then he held up a finger to stop me.

“One last point, though,” he said. “In the cases of Profiles #1 and #2, there’s a considerable formative likelihood that the killer’s mother was either a prostitute, a drug addict, or both.”

“That’ll help my article too. Maybe if the killer reads it, it’ll scare him into making a mistake, or stopping.”

Desmond creaked back in his padded chair. I’m not sure if he was smiling or not, just nodding with his eyes thinned and his lips pressed together. “Perhaps it will,” he said so softly it sounded like a flutter.

“Thank you,” I said. But then something caught me—two things, actually, both at the same time. Behind Desmond’s head, the late-afternoon sun burned, an inferno. And then my eyes flicked down to the doctor’s desk blotter.

It was one of those calendar blotters, each top sheet a different month. The Tuesday and Thursday boxes for all four weeks had this written in them:

J.J. - 1:30 P.M.

J.J., I thought.

Captain Jay Jameson.

««—»»

That’s when I knew Jameson was it. It hit me in the head like someone dropping a flowerpot from a high window. There were still a few holes, sure. But it was one of those things where you just knew. It was a presage. It was something psychic.

I just knew.

I knew I had to go see him. I knew I had to get him out. But before I could even make a plan, Jameson walks right into my cubicle the next day.

“There he is. The lib journalist.”

I glanced up from my copy, stared at him.

“Hey, I’m just joking,” he said. “Lighten up, you’ll live longer.”

“You come here to bust me for my descrambler.”

“What’s a descrambler?” he said. “And tax evasion? Never heard of it.”

“Why are you here, Captain? You want to square up with me? Those four Old English tallboys cost me $3.50 a pop. Us lib journalists don’t make much.”

“Good,” he said. He rubbed his hands together. He grinned through that weird lined, tanned face, the shock of blond-gray hair hanging over one eye. “Let me make it up to ya. Dinner at my place. You ever had broiled langoustes with scallop mousse? My wife makes it better than any restaurant in the city. Come on.”

This was a great opportunity but… “I’ve got a deadline. I’m a crime writer, remember? I’ll be here at least two more hours writing up the robbery at the Ballard Safeway. My boss won’t let me out of here till it’s done.”

Jameson jerked a gaze into the outer office. “That’s your boss there, right? The fat guy in suspenders with the mole on his neck bigger than a bottlecap? I already talked to him. Safeway can wait. You’re off early today, boy.”

“What are you talk—”