by Brenda Novak
In the bathroom, he noticed that her makeup was spread out on the counter. Her toothbrush sat on the edge of the sink, but it wasn’t wet, so she hadn’t used it that morning. Most women would pack those toiletries, even if they were going somewhere for only one night—further evidence that she hadn’t taken a vacation or returned to her home state.
Her purse made it all unequivocal. He discovered that in the bedroom, on her nightstand.
“Shit,” he murmured, and pulled on the pair of latex gloves he’d brought with him so he wouldn’t mess up any forensic evidence. She had less than twenty bucks in her wallet and a debit card. Other than that, he found some cheap jewelry in the bottom of the bag, lip gloss, a brush, some coupons, a whole handful of condoms and an appointment book filled with male names. Mike, John, Bill, Big Jim, Tim—there had to be thirty such entries and they all had an annotation: “A laughable 3.” … “A solid 5.” … “A pathetic 4.” … “Maybe 3.5.” … “A decent 6.”
What was this?
He would’ve caught on sooner if there weren’t so many. But the past three months were filled with the same thing. There was one almost every day—on some days there were as many as five or six. A few of the names repeated, but not a lot and none with any consistent regularity. Amarok was still wondering what the heck she’d been keeping track of when he saw that under one man’s name she’d written: “A full 8 inches!!!”
The exclamation points—and the condoms—gave it away.
* * *
Hugo wasn’t nearly as talkative as normal. He sat in his seat on the other side of the glass, drumming on the desktop as if he was listening to music in his head.
“Hugo?” Evelyn prompted. “Are you going to answer me?”
The rhythmic thumping stopped. “I tried to tell you.”
“Tried to tell me what?”
He glanced at the camera and remained mute.
“You no longer want to help me?”
Standing so fast he knocked over his chair, he glared at her before approaching the glass. “How can I help you if you won’t trust me?”
She couldn’t trust him. This guy had murdered fifteen women. It was ridiculous of Hugo to be irritated by her inability to forget that, but psychopaths often acted as if their past deeds weren’t a big deal, as if others who found them horrendous were overreacting. Psychopaths dismissed murder as easily as most people dismissed neglecting to send a thank-you card.
Or they played the martyr.
Evelyn would never forget seeing a taped interview of Diane Downs, a psychopath infamous for killing her three young children because they stood in the way of her latest love interest. When asked about her children’s deaths, she said that they were the “lucky” ones compared to her with the pain she had suffered from the self-inflicted gunshot wound in her arm.
“You know trust isn’t possible for me,” Evelyn said. “And you know why.”
“Then you might as well let me go back to my cell.” He headed for the door in anticipation of being met by his escorts, but she stopped him.
“Did you know Lorraine, Hugo?”
When he turned back, his eyebrows knitted into a solid line. “Of course. She worked in the kitchen; I saw her almost every day. Why else would I be upset? Do you think I have no feelings? That I don’t care if she’s dead? She was nice. Nicer than just about anyone.”
Since he really didn’t have empathy for others, Evelyn was impressed. His grief seemed real. Although psychopaths had a cognitive sense of emotion—they quickly learned to mimic others, which helped this missing element go undetected—they often struggled to come up with a normal response to certain stimuli. They occasionally laughed, for instance, when recounting their crimes and only sobered when the person they were telling tipped them off that they were acting inappropriately. Or they’d claim to feel regret or remorse in one sentence, but in the next they’d chuckle while recounting details of the “stupid” expression on their victim’s face as he or she died. Hard though it was for regular people to fathom, there’d been a number of studies to back up psychopaths’ complete lack of empathy. Evelyn had performed several herself. True psychopaths were so extremely egocentric that any grief they felt was grief for their own personal loss.
Maybe that was what was going on here. Maybe Hugo realized that Lorraine had made Hanover House a more pleasant place to be. Or it could be that he hated whoever killed her and feared he was losing at some sort of power struggle. Without love or duty or compassion to motivate behavior, psychopaths often felt the desire to prove their superiority to others, to come out on top or win.
“Lorraine was my friend,” he said.
When Evelyn didn’t respond, he grew cross.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“I’m thinking.” Of whether or not she could continue this session. She had no patience today, no reserves. Hugo, who’d become one of her favorites despite the violence of their first meeting, suddenly seemed no better than her other, less endearing patients.
“Well, could you think a little faster?” he snapped. “I’m pouring my heart out here.”
What heart? Those two words nearly came to her lips—another sign she was in no shape to deal with the inmates. With effort she bit them back.
“You know why he picked her, don’t you?” Hugo went on.
She clasped her hands in her lap. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Because you loved her,” he said as if it were obvious. “This is all about you.”
More likely Hugo was attempting to play on her past again. “Who’s he?”
“Forget it.” He waved her question away. “I won’t tell you now. You’ll just have to figure it out for yourself.”
“And you’re acting this way because…”
“I’m sad! You’re sad, aren’t you? You loved Lorraine. You must feel like shit, must be this close”—he showed her his fingers less than an inch apart—“to breaking down.”
It was true. She was teetering on the edge. She couldn’t accept that Lorraine was gone, couldn’t equate the person she’d known with what was left of her body. She felt like crying again, but she couldn’t. Not in front of him. He would only interpret tears as a sign of weakness.
“For the most part you’ve been sounding more angry and indignant than sad,” she pointed out.
Tensing, Hugo stepped back. “Because I could’ve kept Lorraine from being murdered. You could’ve stopped it. If you would’ve listened to me.”
Evelyn couldn’t help but flinch when he put the blame on her. She desperately hoped that he wasn’t right. “Is that a sympathetic thing to say to me, knowing, as you do, that Lorraine was one of my closest friends?”
“It’s true, so I don’t care. You’re letting me down just like my bitch of a mother!”
Evelyn spoke through her teeth. “You mean the mother who sends you a weekly care package? That bitch?”
He could tell he’d been acting inappropriately again, so he tried to pass it off. “Stop twisting my words.”
Evelyn shook her head as she stared at him.
“What?” He didn’t seem to realize that she wasn’t twisting anything, just noting the contradictions so common in his language. One day, he loved his mother, said she was the best woman in the world. The next, she was a bitch, with nothing in between to trigger the change.
“I thought you were different, better,” he went on. He hadn’t liked her little head shake, knew it signaled disapproval. “But you’re as frightened and weak as all the rest.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes! Who are you to act superior? Like you have everything figured out?”
Now that he was attacking her, trying to make her feel unworthy of the love and devotion he’d reserved for her, she was seeing, once again, a glimpse of what Hugo was like when he was disappointed. A glimpse of what she’d seen at San Quentin. A glimpse of what the women he’d strangled might have seen before he killed them. But what upset her was tha
t she did feel a measure of guilt for “causing” this negative turn in their relationship. Apparently, she’d responded to the protective comments and effusive compliments he’d paid her in the past in spite of everything she knew about him and psychopaths in general.
It was amazing how convincing they could be. No wonder so many people—wives, children, girlfriends, friends and unsuspecting strangers—were taken in. And yet, when she looked at this meeting objectively, she could see how he was making it all about him—his disappointment, how she’d let him down—when she’d just lost one of her best friends. In that moment of insight, he grew quite transparent, revealing the egocentricity Evelyn had found to be so common among those who scored high on the Hare.
She needed to quit noticing, quit analyzing. Today she was here to glean whatever information he possessed on the murder, if, indeed, he possessed any. That was all.
“You’re saying it was someone at Hanover House who killed Lorraine?” she asked, trying a different tack.
A knock interrupted. Then Steve Jacobs, a CO, poked his head into Evelyn’s side of the room. “Dr. Talbot, Dr. Fitzpatrick asked me to find you.”
Reluctant to take her eyes off Hugo, she barely glanced over. “What does he want?”
“He says you need to meet with Anthony Garza before you go home. I guess he’s causing trouble again. He’s telling everyone he won’t quit until he sees you.”
They could put him in a straightjacket or give him a sedative. They had ways to force him to calm down. But Fitzpatrick was making a point. He wanted her to know that she’d really blown it by bringing Garza to Hanover House, wanted to make sure she felt it.
“Fine. I’ll meet with him next.” She said that mostly to get rid of the distraction, but sending off Officer Jacobs did her little good. No matter how many times she asked Hugo who he thought had killed Lorraine or how hard she prodded him, he wouldn’t say another word.
Because he was lying, she decided. That was what psychopaths did.
9
You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!
—TED BUNDY, SERIAL KILLER, RAPIST, KIDNAPPER AND NECROPHILIAC
It was Anthony Garza’s turn behind the plexiglass. He stared at Evelyn for maybe fifteen minutes, but she refused to be the first to speak. Garza had demanded this meeting. She was giving it to him, but she wasn’t about to initiate the conversation. Either he had something to say or he didn’t.
Apparently, he just wanted to waste her time.
Tired of his game playing, she stood to go—and that was when he broke the silence.
“Hell of a storm, huh?”
Even in cuffs and chains and an orange jumpsuit, with bandages on his arms and broken front teeth, he sounded like a normal, rational individual, someone she might’ve chatted with on an airplane. But that was calculated behavior, designed to make her lower her defenses.
Wrapping her arms around her clipboard and hugging it to her chest, Evelyn returned to her seat. She liked being able to jot a few things down if she wanted. Doing so gave her an excuse to look away from her patient when she needed to regain her emotional equilibrium or keep various statements in perspective. But it wasn’t necessary to take notes for the sake of being able to remember what was said and done. She always videotaped her sessions with the inmates, and this one was no exception. From the way Garza kept glancing at the camera in the corner of the room, even smiling as if pandering to an audience, she guessed he was well aware of that.
“You bloodied your arm with my name just to be able to say to me, ‘Hell of a storm’?”
He ducked his head, acting abashed. “Figured it was a good icebreaker.”
At five-foot-eleven, he wasn’t particularly tall, but he wasn’t short, either. He had a few physical assets she hadn’t paid much attention to in their first meeting—a nice golden skin tone and, by all appearances, a powerful build. Other than his teeth, which he’d destroyed since being incarcerated, there was nothing overtly frightening about his looks, nothing that would warn others he was dangerous.
Evelyn imagined some women might even have found him handsome when he was younger. Not that he was old now. The paperwork she’d received listed his fortieth birthday as Valentine’s Day.
Valentine’s Day. For a wife killer. Wasn’t that ironic.
“I’m not here to discuss the weather,” she said flatly.
When he realized that his attempt to charm her had failed, his mood shifted. Eyes shimmering with the hatred he’d momentarily concealed, he stood and stepped up to the glass. “Then what do you want from me, Doc? There must be some reason you brought me here, something in it for you.” He flashed her a lascivious grin, ogling her breasts. “Or were you hoping to have my baby? Because if that’s the case, all you have to do is lift that tight skirt of yours and spread your legs.”
This kind of talk was nothing new, either. Many of the men she dealt with tried to use sex, or what they knew of her past experience with Jasper, against her. Stripped of physical weapons, Garza was poking and prodding, searching for an emotional equivalent with which to destroy her.
Refusing to give him that, she managed a smile of her own. “Actually, I brought you here because we’re doing experiments on the biggest assholes in the world—and I needed the perfect specimen.”
He’d just been ramping up to act crazy. She could tell. But her response took him off guard. She was pretty sure he’d never heard a mental health professional call him an asshole or behave in an adversarial manner, but she wasn’t in the mood to pretend he was anything other than what he’d proven himself to be.
“What do you mean by that?” he asked.
“What we have planned does involve your—er—equipment.” She emphasized the word so he’d know exactly what she was talking about. “You’ve heard of castration, haven’t you? It dramatically lowers testosterone levels, diminishing a man’s tendency toward violence. I’ll admit it’s a controversial treatment, but … in many instances it has proven effective.”
He gave an uncomfortable laugh. “Bullshit! You can’t cut off my balls. Not without my permission. That’s cruel and unusual punishment.”
What he said was true. He had to be coming up for parole and be desperate to stop himself from reoffending. It was a choice only an inmate could make. So far, no one at HH had taken such extreme measures. But she wasn’t about to volunteer that the procedure was optional.
“Who are you going to tell—way the hell up here?” she asked.
This question wiped the irritating smirk from his face. She’d managed to spook him, which gave her a measure of satisfaction. She’d certainly never tried this approach with an inmate before. But after her meeting with Hugo, she was confused and overwrought. For the first time since coming to HH she’d felt the delicate balance of control shifting—and not in a positive direction.
Besides, appealing to Garza’s good side would never work. From every report she’d read about him, he didn’t have one. She figured she’d try something new, get what she could from his anger and his arrogance. Psychopaths had an inflated view of their own talents and abilities. They tended to think they were different, special, entitled. She wanted to challenge Garza’s opinion of himself.
“That’s messed up,” he said.
“It is,” she agreed. “How do you like being powerless?”
His eyes narrowed into slits. “I see what you’re doing. You’re trying to show me what a victim goes through. But I’m not powerless. You won’t do shit to me! You can’t. I got rights. I’m protected by the Constitution.”
She studied her cuticles. “That may be true, but as long as I’m willing to pay the consequences, I have the same choices available to me that you did when you murdered those women. With the right opportunity, I can do anything. And since I run this place, opportunity is never a problem. The only question is whether I will be punished for it later,” she said with a wink. “And, p
ersonally speaking, I would consider castrating you a public service, something for which I might risk just about … anything.”
“You’re trying to get back at the guy who hurt you through me. That’s all.”
“Maybe you’re right. We all have our little eccentricities, things for which we’ll go a bit too far. Mine is protecting the innocent against predators like you.”
“But I’ve never hurt anybody.” It was a throwaway statement, one he’d no doubt made many times.
“Then it’s quite a coincidence you had three wives who died in the same manner.”
He shrugged. “Some people are just unlucky, I guess.”
“One wife didn’t burn in her bed. What happened with”—she glanced at her notepad even though it wasn’t really necessary—“Courtney Lofland?”
“Nothing. I married her. Then I started fucking the neighbor and things fell apart.”
“But she got away. Why? Did she outsmart you?”
“She wasn’t a smoker.” It was a joke, but even he didn’t laugh.
“Have you stayed in contact with her?”
“Leave her out of this,” he growled. “I won’t talk about Courtney.”
His fourth wife was a sore subject; Evelyn made a mental note of that. “Then let’s talk about the others.”
Feigning boredom, he slouched onto the chair and spread out as best he could. “What others?”
“The women you raped and killed, then posed in erotic positions.”
He blinked at her. “So that’s what this is about? You’ve hauled my ass all the way up here hoping to get me to confess to the Porn Poser killings?” Dropping his head, he scratched his scalp so rigorously she thought he might make himself bleed, but she did nothing to stop the behavior. She felt certain his self-injury was calculated to torment, trouble or evoke a response, because it was nothing he’d done before being incarcerated. Given that, she decided to ignore it as long as she could.
“You shouldn’t have wasted your time,” he said when he eventually looked up.
