Shattered
Page 26
Around the room scattered arms levitated. Edith Drinkwater eagerly put her hand up.
“The nice lady in black over here.” Grove gave a curt nod at Drinkwater.
“Bed-wetting, fire starting, and animal torture.” Drinkwater spoke the words with the earnest confidence of a spelling bee finalist nailing a five-syllable word, a faint tracing of goose bumps running down the back of her legs as Grove proffered a pleasant smile in response.
“Excellent, thank you.” He turned and wrote the three traits on the board, the sound of his chalk rasping and squeaking:
BED WETTER
FIRE STARTER
ANIMAL TORTURER
“This formula is overused.” Grove scanned the room, spewing his rapid-fire lesson: “It’s probably a little misleading, maybe even a little apocryphal, but it’s still a good starting point. Sixty-two percent of all children between the ages of six and ten wet the bed on a regular basis, and they’re not gonna kill anybody. But when you add a fascination with fire you reduce the percentage to eleven percent.”
Throughout the classroom pens madly skritched and scrawled the numbers.
“You know where I’m going with this.” Grove paused for dramatic effect. “If our little problem child also has a propensity to pull the wings off of flies, he’s part of a much narrower band of the population. We’re talking about maybe point-oh-five percent peeing the bed, playing with matches, and kicking the dog. Why is this percentage important? Anybody? What’s the big deal with point-oh-five percent?”
Fewer hands shot up. A couple in the back. And, of course, Drinkwater.
Grove grinned at Drinkwater. “You’re on a roll, girlfriend, go ahead.”
“It’s basically the same percentage of the human race that will murder somebody.”
“Very good. Now let’s push it further. Let’s say a huge percentage of that point-oh-five percent will kill out of passion or opportunity. Cuckolded husbands, drive-bys, robberies gone bad. That’s not our boy.”
Grove paused again. He played his gaze across the room, and for a brief instant Drinkwater thought he was going to say “Boo!” Ulysses Grove had that effect on people. Something behind his dark, almond-shaped eyes hinted at volatile chemicals being mixed.
Not surprisingly, many of the students had entire MySpace pages devoted to speculations about Ulysses Grove’s mysterious personal history. He had been instrumental in more infamous homicide closures than any other single employee of the Bureau, including Melvin Purvis and J. Edgar Hoover combined, and yet he seemed like a major flake. One rumormonger swore up and down that he was the reincarnated spirit of some African witch doctor.
Right now, this moment, the witch doctor was pulling down a small projection screen on which a gun range silhouette was pasted. “Our boy fits into a much smaller shard of that murderous pie chart,” Grove told the class, jerking a thumb at the silhouette.
Drinkwater stared at the paper effigy. She had seen similar silhouettes many times. The black, featureless cutout was rendered with the simplicity of an international symbol for person. Depicted from the waist up, overlaid against an intricate crosshair bull’s-eye, it looked like an inverted cast-iron skillet.
“We’re talking about one hundredth of one percent of that point-oh-five percent,” Grove was saying, indicating the black oval head and rounded rectangular shoulders.
Drinkwater knew target silhouettes well. She had happily riddled many of them with .44 caliber holes over the years. At the Cicero police academy she had won a trophy in the quick-draw contest, managing to get her Colt Desert Eagle out of her shoulder holster in 1.5 seconds, then squeezing off eight rounds over the course of another 4.2 seconds, five of them head shots. But today, for some reason, the target looked strange to Drinkwater.
At the front of the room, Grove posed another question: “What we’re talking about here is a person who will kill out of…what?”
Only Drinkwater’s hand went up.
Grove gave her a nod. “Go for it.”
“They’ll kill out of need.”
“Define need,” Grove said.
She looked at the target silhouette, that big bulbous black head like a dead lightbulb. “Need…in terms of…like addiction.”
Grove nodded. “That’s not bad. But it’s more than a drug, it’s fuel for the fantasy. The killing is actually secondary. What do I mean by that?”
Drinkwater had no idea what he meant by that. Neither did anybody else.
“The murder serves a purpose not unlike pornography,” Grove explained. “This guy—our mathematical average, our every-killer, if you want to call him that—he kills to feed that furnace.”
Pens scribbled notes across the room. But Drink-water could not tear her gaze from that silhouette. Something about it was profoundly bothersome to her now.
“What is this furnace, anyway?” Grove scanned the room, looking for a participant other than Drinkwater. “Anybody, what is it?”
“Sadism?”
Grove nodded at the Pakistani gentleman in the second row, the one with the bow tie and eager-beaver expression. “Interesting but not exactly correct, not for our archetype. Somebody else take a crack.”
Somebody else said, “Cruelty.”
Grove shook his head. “Actually, cruelty is more of a baroque, external modifier. When I say furnace I’m talking about something fundamental, the source of the fantasy—the source. Somebody else?”
Nobody said anything.
Drinkwater stared at that black bulbous outline, that perfectly generic figure, and murmured a single word. “Ego.”
“Excuse me?” Grove glanced at Drinkwater with a half smile. “Say again?”
“Ego.”
“Give the lady a gold star, that’s exactly right. Hubris, ego. It’s that Nietzschean superhero in his head.” Grove walked over to the target. He reached up and ran the tip of his index finger around the contours of the silhouette. “When you strip away the fantasy, our typical killer here murders out of the need to dominate. To be superior. That’s where the torture component comes in.”
More scribbling.
Grove cocked his head at the silhouette. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, our boy’s a torturer. Most are. Even physical positioning echoes the ego. Somebody tell me what I mean by that. The physical positioning echoing the ego.”
Drinkwater looked up, didn’t even raise her hand. “You’re talking about the missionary position.”
Uneasy laughter.
Grove stopped smiling. “Go on.”
“Man on top,” Drinkwater said.
“That’s right…and what else?”
Drinkwater looked at the silhouette. “He needs to do it to them slowly.”
“Good, what else.”
“He needs to have eye contact.”
The class got quiet then. Grove nodded. He started strolling down the middle aisle toward Drinkwater’s chair. “Interesting. Why, though? Why eye contact?”
Drinkwater took a deep breath. At the age of eleven she was raped by her stepfather. It happened late one night in a tractor shed out behind Chicago’s Robert Taylor projects.
After a long pause she said, “Because he needs to see the desolation in your eyes.”
Now the class was stone silent. Some of them stared at the floor. Most heard Drinkwater say “your” instead of “their.” As Grove approached her desk, he gave her an encouraging smile. “Girlfrend, you go to the head of the class.”
“He needs to see it,” she reiterated softly with a level, unblinking gaze.
Drinkwater was raped during a lightning storm, in the midst of a blackout. For most of her life, right up until the year she went through some heavy therapy, she only remembered the flicker of cold, icy light on her stepfather’s grizzled face while he thrust himself into her.
“Let’s go ahead and take a break,” Grove suggested, his overly cheerful voice finally breaking the spell. “We’ll pick it up after lunch.”
Chairs squeaked, voices
murmured with relief. Drinkwater let out a sigh and gathered her things, feeling Grove’s silent benevolent presence beside her like a phantom.
Even as she made her way out of the room, she felt him watching her.
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Copyright © 2007 by Jay Bonansinga
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