So Simple, page 12
Something odd was going on, and Faith wasn’t sure if it was her mind playing tricks on her or trying to tell her something.
“You think too much, Faith,” Doctor West said from behind her.
He stepped around, and Faith saw that he alone was close to her as he walked in front of her and looked down at her with his hands folded behind his back. He wore the gray slacks, brown oxfords and wool sweater that he always wore to their sessions. For some reason, all three of these killers appeared as Faith had first seen them. Did that mean something?
“You think too much,” Doctor West repeated. “The problem with thinking is that it relies on context. It adds structure to that context to create a reality, but if the context on which it bases its structure is flawed, then the structure is flawed, and we live in a reality that doesn’t exist.”
Faith recognized those words from one of their sessions.
“Look at her,” Trammell said gleefully. “Look at her squirm.”
Faith looked down at herself and realized it was true. She was shifting and writhing and pulling against her bonds, unaware of her own movements as she tried to escape her imprisonment.
West sighed and rubbed his temples. “Such a waste.”
“Speak for yourself,” Kenneth said. “I like when they can’t move.”
“It’s like a little mouse in a trap,” Trammell agreed. “They kick and kick and kick, but they can’t get out of the trap.”
Faith opened her mouth to speak but found it taped shut. That was different too. Trammell had left her mouth open on purpose. He wanted to hear her scream.
“You keep focusing on the past,” West said, beginning his circuitous route around her again. “You’re so wrapped up in what was that you reject what is. How do you ever hope to learn what will be?”
He was speaking in circles. Faith thought it ironic that he was also walking in circles. Her subconscious had a cruel sense of humor.
“You think she’ll remember any of this?” Kenneth asked. “When she wakes up?”
“She’ll remember,” Trammell assured him. “She always remembers.” He laughed. “It’ll bother her for the rest of her life that she had to ask you for help.”
“Of course it will,” West agreed. He stopped in front of her again and looked contemptuously at her. “She’s Faith Bold, after all. She’s supposed to be invincible. She doesn’t need help.”
That wasn’t true anymore. She hadn’t felt that way in a long time. She had reached out to help for the Copycat Killer case, had turned lead of that case over to Desrouleaux. Even with David dying in a hospital at West’s hands, she hadn’t thrown reason and caution to the wind. She was here, over a thousand miles away, working on a case that had nothing to do with West while back in Philadelphia, his latest victim slowly turned into a vegetable.
“She thinks this has nothing to do with us,” Trammell said, “She thinks it’s all different.”
“It’s never different,” Kenneth said. “Just like the song goes, only the names have changed.”
“That’s a rather simplistic way to view it,” West said, “but on the whole, not inaccurate. Faith, you must stop thinking like yourself. Or rather, start thinking about you as you could be if you were denied the context around which the structure of your reality was built. You’re a violent person, Faith. You know this. Twice, you’ve chosen careers that involve violence. Imagine how dangerous you would be if that violence wasn’t controlled.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Faith woke, softly this time. She sat and checked the time on her phone. Nine-thirty.
She looked around the room. Michael and Turk slept soundly. She stood from the bed, amazed at how refreshed and awake she felt. She decided to make coffee anyway, just in case this was a fake high and she was going to crash a few minutes later.
Turk’s ear turned her direction as she filled the coffeemaker with water and poured grounds into the filter. While the coffee brewed, she sat and tried to make sense of her dream. The details of the dream—she couldn’t really call it a nightmare like the other dream—remained vivid in her mind. For a moment, she thought she might still be dreaming. She pinched herself, and the sting that followed proved to her she was awake.
She realized suddenly that all of her dreams of Trammell, all the times he had cut her, all the times she had screamed, she couldn’t actually feel his knife on her skin. That was a detail her brain had told her she’d experienced over and over and over again, but she hadn’t. That sharp sting was minor and barely qualified as pain, but it was more pain than she had ever felt asleep.
The coffee finished brewing. She poured a cup and tried to think what her mind might have been telling her. It was about the case, obviously, despite the allusions to a general blindness the apparitions of her killers seemed to make. But what was the point? What were they trying to tell her?
West was clearly the leader of the three. The others served mostly to taunt Faith and make observations that West could build off of. She decided to focus on his words.
He spoke of reality as a construct, a structure people built around a context. He had talked at length about this when she was his patient. The structure of a person’s reality was their worldview, their beliefs and philosophies. The context was the circumstances and events of their formative years that informed those beliefs and philosophies.
What was Faith’s context? What was her structure?
That, of course, was a complex question, but the basic framework was simple. She believed in justice. She believed that people who did good things should be rewarded and people who did bad things should be punished. She believed that she had been blessed with a sharp mind and a strong will and was thus well-equipped to punish people who did bad things.
She wasn’t violent, not for violence’s sake. But she was willing to be violent if it meant punishing someone who deserved to be punished. She wasn’t a murderer, but she would kill Doctor West if she had to.
But what was the context? She sipped her coffee and allowed the question to brew in her mind a moment.
Another way to phrase West's statement was to ask why she had chosen to build the structure she had built. She recalled another of West's explanations of the context.
“Ultimately, the structure we build is designed to provide what our context did not that we feel it should have and to protect from what our context contained that we felt it shouldn’t have. Desire and fear, Faith. Those are the two ruling emotions, the two primary motivators of all humanity. Everything else—every thought, every action, every history—is based on those two driving forces.”
Faith thought of her love of justice, her zeal for it. Where had that come from?
She thought back to her childhood. She’d had a younger sister, Grace. Grace was everything Faith wasn’t. Faith was a tomboy who liked trekking through the woods and getting her hands dirty working on projects, first in her room and later in the garage. Grace was the poster child for sugar and spice and everything nice. A varsity cheerleader at fourteen, student body president at fifteen, homecoming queen at sixteen and valedictorian at seventeen.
“And pregnant at eighteen,” Faith said drily.
She chuckled at herself. It still upset her after all these years that her parents had favored her. Grace was the child that they had imagined when they found out they were having Faith. She wore dresses, played with dolls, liked dancing and pop music and had crushes on the clean-cut boys who her parents lauded for their achievements in sports and academics. They never said it to Faith’s face, but they would look at her sometimes, and Faith could see in their eyes that they wished she was more like her sister.
That was it. That was Faith’s context. Not all of it, of course, but enough for the purposes of this brainstorming session. She had felt treated unfairly, so she had sought careers where she would fight for fairness.
So what was their killer’s context?
To know that, she would have to start with the structure. Their killer hated his victims. He was overcome with rage when he killed them, a rage that was enhanced in Hannah Peterson's case by her interaction with children. He had some sort of problem with dogs, too, but not a rage problem since all of the dogs were unharmed.
But children. He hated children almost as much as he hated his victims.
No, he didn’t hate them. If he hated them, then he would have killed them too, not just grown women. He resented them. More specifically, he resented them because of their association with the women he hated.
Maybe he resented dogs too. Maybe he picked the victims he picked because the dogs and children got something from these women that he never had.
Many serial killers were men who targeted younger women. Many of these serial killers simply enjoyed the thrill of power. Like Trammell and West, they enjoyed completely dominating their victims, being so strong and powerful that the people they hurt were literally helpless to stop them.
Many others, though, were shy, unattractive, unassuming men, or else they were weird or awkward or else they simply had no social skills and as a result had few or no romantic encounters with women. So, they resorted to rape and murder to punish women for not giving them the sex and love they felt they deserved.
Their killer was not motivated by sex, but his actions were similar. At his core, he was punishing these women.
But why? What was the context?
The children were the key. The dogs were important, but the children prompted the extra dose of rage he had exhibited with Hanna Peterson.
What did the children and dogs get that he didn’t?
She thought of the photographs in Rebecca Green’s and Amanda Milleson’s house, the joy in their faces as they held their new dogs. She thought of the crayon drawings Hannah Peterson’s students had made for her birthday, and the answer finally came to her.
Love. The dogs and children received love. Those women loved their dogs like their own families. Hannah loved her students.
No one loved the killer.
She leaned forward and sipped more of her coffee. Her heartbeat quickened as she sensed herself drawing close to the answer she needed.
The women loved those dogs, and that was bad. Hannah Peterson loved those children, and that was worse.
What context could lead to that hatred?
He would have had to be an unloved child who watched other children receive love and who felt that even the family dog was loved more than he was.
Faith thought of her parents who sent her cards for her birthday and Christmas and who occasionally would call and talk for twenty minutes about everything Grace was doing with her Harvard Law School husband and their three perfect kids. “They’re just like her!” her mother would always gush.
Faith didn't hate her sister or her parents, but Faith had love in her life. In the Marine Corps, she had found a family. In the Bureau, she had respect and admiration. She had found romantic love, first with Michael and now with David. Her parents' choice to favor her younger sister had left a void in her life, but that void had been filled so quickly it might as well have never been there at all.
The killer had likely never felt that love. He probably had never experienced a loving family or close friends or any romantic success.
She was looking for a killer with an abusive childhood, one of several children, probably one of the middle children. The family would have had a dog as well.
She began hunting for people who could fit the bill, and after an hour of research, she came across a suspect who matched her profile perfectly.
“Jumping” Jon Evans was a former heavyweight boxer known for his powerful punch. He had never risen above the regional circuit, but even a mid-level boxer was more than capable of these murders.
And he had worked for and been fired from both animal shelters but then somehow allowed to volunteer there on weekends up until a few months ago. How that worked, Faith had no idea, but he had worked with all four of the victims’ dogs and been present for at least two of the adoptions.
Michael stirred, and Faith checked her phone. It was now seven-thirty. She sipped more of her coffee, then poured a cup for Michael. She walked to the bed just in time for him to sit up.
“Made you some coffee,” she said, handing him a cup.
He smiled at her, and Faith felt another familiar but long-ago forgotten thrill. “You’re an angel,” he said.
“You bet,” she replied, pushing her emotions away, “and I have something even better for you.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“We’re going to have to be careful with this one,” Michael said, “he’s not just an ordinary thug.”
“We’ll be calm but firm,” she said. “We don’t want to provoke him, but we don’t want to show weakness either.”
“What if he’s not calm?”
“Then we respond as appropriate. We’ve handled dangerous suspects before. Remember Benny from Idaho?”
Benjamin Diller was a highly disturbed man who had lived inside of an abandoned mine for years after his parents had died in a cave-in. Faith, Michael and Turk had conducted a harrowing rescue of two young women from his clutches, nearly dying from Benny’s attacks as they escaped through the sprawling cave system to the surface.
“Yeah, but after Brian Johnson, I’m not so sure we have our mojo like we used to,” Michael replied. “Brian wasn’t a trained fighter. He just worked out, and he was all the three of us could handle.”
“Well,” Faith said with a touch of irritability. “We don’t really have a choice but to handle this.”
“I know,” Michael said, “I just want it on record that I think this is a bad idea, and we’re going to get hurt.”
“Quit moaning,” Faith said, “you know you like fighting.”
“Younger Michael did,” Michael replied, “Forty-year-old Michael would like a nice, relaxing straightforward interaction with a calm suspect who never even considers trying to harm Michael.”
“Well, you stay calm, and he’ll stay calm. If he doesn’t, that just means that we’re on the right track.”
“Or that he’s just jumpy like Brian was.”
Faith sighed. “And on that encouraging note.”
She parked the car across the street from Evans’ house. Evans had enjoyed success as a boxer, but not the kind of success that came with money. He lived in a run-down house in an equally rundown neighborhood in the poorest part of Fargo.
Clearly he had made some sort of income, though, because his car was a late-model muscle car that according to Michael retailed for well over a hundred thousand dollars.
“I won’t lie,” Michael said, “This looks like exactly the kind of place where a guy who enjoys beating women to death would live.”
Faith’s brow furrowed. “What makes you say that?”
“Chainlink fence, shitty house, bad neighborhood, car that costs almost as much as my much nicer house… seems like a guy who has his priorities straight.”
They reached the door, and Turk growled low in his throat. "Calm and easy, boy," Faith said.
“You sure this isn’t a ‘be mean, Turk,’ occasion?” Michael asked, referring to the command Faith gave Turk when he was supposed to act like a fighting dog.
“I’m sure,” she replied, much more confidently than she felt.
The door opened, and Jack Evans stepped onto his porch. His bio listed him as six-foot-four and two hundred thirty pounds. In his two years off, he had put on some weight and was now probably closer to two-seventy, but his arms and chest still bulged with muscle despite his somewhat more pronounced gut.
He’s smaller than Samantha Roberts was, she thought.
But despite not being quite so massive as the weightlifter, Evans was far more intimidating, courtesy of the cold look in his eyes, and the depth in his voice when he said, “Yes? Can I help you?”
“Good morning,” Faith said. “I’m Special Agent Faith Bold of the FBI. This is my partner, Special Agent Michael Prince and my K9 unit, Turk. We need to ask you some questions.”
“Why?”
There was a challenge in his voice, and Faith had to force her shoulders not to tense. “May we come inside?”
"No, you may not. Why do you need to ask me questions?"
“We’re investigating the murders of Rebecca Green, Amanda Milleson, Trisha Sinclair and Hannah Peterson,” Michael replied. “Your name has come up in our investigation, and we need to ask you a few questions just so we can clear you off of our list. This should only take a few minutes.”
“You think I’m stupid?” Evans sneered. “I know better than to trust you two. Clear my name? If my name has come up, you think I’m the murderer. What evidence do you have to support that claim?”
“Mr. Evans,” Faith said, “If we can talk inside—”
“You can talk on my damned porch,” Evans interrupted, “and you can answer my question before I throw you both back over the fence.”
Turk growled and stepped in front of Faith.
Evans looked down at Turk and sneered. “I’ll throw you over the fence too, boy. Don’t get all tough with me.”
Despite the seriousness of the situation and Faith’s own anxiety, anger flared and for a moment overwhelmed her caution. “Don’t threaten my dog, Mr. Evans.”
“Or what? You’ll glare at me?”
Michael opened his jacket, revealing his firearm. Evans’ eyes snapped to him and narrowed shrewdly, and Michael lifted a hand and put it on the butt of the weapon. “You want to see if you’re fast enough to hit me before I draw my handgun and shoot you with it?”
So much for being calm and collected.
Evans glared at Michael a moment longer. Then his anger vanished, replaced by a smile. “Nah, man,” he said cordially. “We’re cool. I’m still not letting you into my house, though.”
“That’s fine with me,” Michael said, taking his hand off of the weapon.
And that was his mistake. Jon’s left hand shot out so fast that it hit Michael before Faith could register what happened. Michael didn’t go out, but his eyes were far from focused as he staggered backwards.
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