The Perfect Husband

by Lisa Gardner

  We were dealing with a psychopath.

  BECKETT: Please continue, you’re finally getting interesting.

  QUINCY: The unsub was most likely a white male in his late twenties to early forties. Age can be difficult to determine, but given the elaborate nature of the crime and mutilation, we estimated that the homicidal rage had been developing for quite some time. The unsub was already refining and perfecting his technique. His use of a ruse indicated the foresight and planning of a more experienced man, leading us toward an age of early- to mid-thirties. We predicted he would be outwardly charming and charismatic. A man of above-average IQ, socially adept, a capable employee, and either married or involved in a significant relationship. He was physically fit, good with his hands, and probably working in a “macho” job. His car would be a middle-class dark sedan, possibly an old police cruiser. He had spent time in the military, but his egocentric personality and arrogance made him a poor fit—he was discharged under less than honorable circumstances. He probably has a past record of assault and/or minor sex offenses. Perhaps DWI arrests. Also, the style of ligature was similar to what you see in prison rapes, indicating that this man had probably served time.

  He obviously considered himself a sophisticated killer. All three women were young, beautiful, and blond. Also, all three were risky victims for him to choose—these were not prostitutes or strippers, but mothers, daughters, and college students who had families to miss them and pressure the police for further investigation. The killer probably spent a great deal of time patiently driving around, waiting to find the right woman in the right place—

  BECKETT: He’s disciplined?

  QUINCY: Well, as disciplined as a homicidal maniac can be.

  BECKETT: It’s discipline, Quincy, trust me. When the urge to kill is that strong, it takes strength and willpower to wait for the right one. You wouldn’t know that. I doubt you’ve ever had a strong, passionate impulse in your life. What about trophies?

  QUINCY: Generally serial killers take trophies. From looking at a crime scene, it’s impossible to know what’s missing. Maybe the unsub took a ring to give to his wife so he can experience a cheap thrill every time he looks at her. Maybe it was just a lock of hair. He’ll take something though, to help him relive the crime later.

  BECKETT: See, you’re wrong. I didn’t take anything. Why put something in my possession that would link me to a homicide? Bundy, Kemper, they thought they were smart, but they were really just animals, furious, savage animals who were slaves to their own hunger. I’m not a slave, Quincy. I controlled my impulses. I limited myself to my pattern.

  QUINCY: Pattern?

  BECKETT: You’ve never figured it out, have you?

  QUINCY: Patterns are a favorite with Hollywood. Lunar cycles, numerology, astrology—they rarely have anything to do with it.

  BECKETT: I agree entirely.

  QUINCY: Then what do you mean by pattern?

  BECKETT: You’re supposedly the expert, Agent. You figure it out.

  Pause.

  QUINCY: What about visiting the graves of your victims?

  BECKETT: Never.

  QUINCY: You never visited a grave site? Not even a memorial service, a vigil, anything?

  BECKETT: Discipline is the key.

  QUINCY: What about returning to the crime scene? You could pretend to be there as a police officer.

  BECKETT: I am a Berkshire County cop. What would I be doing at a Clinton, Massachusetts, crime scene? I insist, discipline is the key. I’m not toying with you, Agent.

  DIFFORD: Bullshit. The omnipotent guise is how you get your rocks off, Beckett. If you were so fucking smart, so fucking disciplined, so controlled, you wouldn’t be sitting in jail right now.

  BECKETT: Have you ever thought of going on a diet, Difford? Look at you. You’re hitting the doughnuts much too hard these days.

  DIFFORD: You came back for Theresa, Beckett, just like she said you would. A smart man would’ve skipped town, but not you. You couldn’t let it go, not after what she did. You weren’t so disciplined then, were you, asshole?

  BECKETT: And where were you, Difford? When I wrapped my hands around my lovely wife’s neck and began to squeeze the life out of her flailing body, where was her police protection? Where was your fat, lazy ass?

  QUINCY: Gentlemen . . .

  BECKETT: The agent’s right. This exchange of pleasantries isn’t advancing science. But I have to say I’m not impressed, Agent Quincy. At this point you might as well have been reciting a textbook. Come on, Special Agent. Dazzle me.

  Pause.

  QUINCY: Your first murder wasn’t planned.

  BECKETT: Elementary. What killer has ever planned his first murder? You have desire, then in a fraction of a moment of time you realize that you have opportunity. You either act or you don’t. That’s what separates the men from the boys. Me from you.

  QUINCY: You pulled her over for speeding. You had every intention of writing her a legitimate ticket. You were on duty at the time. Stop me if I’m wrong, Jim. Then you see her. She’s blond, beautiful, and sitting so trustingly in her car, ready to hand you her driver’s license and vehicle registration. You’ve been under pressure for some time. You’ve been drinking—

  BECKETT: I don’t drink.

  QUINCY: But you’ve been under stress, even more stress than you’re used to. You realize no one’s around, the road is deserted, and this beautiful woman is looking up at you and smiling apologetically.

  BECKETT: She wanted me.

  QUINCY: You were sloppy, weren’t you, Jim? You thought it was about control, but you had none. You followed instinct and the next thing you knew, you’d raped and killed a woman with your oh-so-identifiable police cruiser parked behind her car.

  BECKETT: I didn’t panic.

  QUINCY: Your uniform was ripped, wasn’t it? You’d left semen in her body and were vulnerable to DNA matching. People had probably seen you pull her over. What to do next?

  BECKETT: I wrote her ticket, of course.

  QUINCY: Yes, that was good. You got into your car. Gave a status report and said you were continuing on. But you didn’t continue on. You hid your police cruiser, then you returned to the scene. You dressed the victim, you placed her in her car, covering her with the blanket from your trunk so it looked like she was sleeping. You needed to hide her body, but you can’t drive too far away because how will you get back? So you drive her car into the nearby lake, knowing the water will do your dirty work for you. If she’ll just stay in the water four, five days . . . It’s hard to gather evidence from a floater.

  BECKETT: Particularly after a year.

  QUINCY: You got a good break, didn’t you? The woman is listed as missing, your superiors call you in to ask since you gave her a ticket. You handle it cool as a cucumber, all paperwork appropriately filed—

  BECKETT: I already said that half the fun was reporting to shit-for-brain lieutenants who never suspected a thing.

  DIFFORD: Son of a bitch, we caught you in the end!

  BECKETT: Ten bodies later . . . that you know about. But, Quincy, I’m still not impressed. So the first murder was unplanned. So the body was dumped in a lake to cover the crime. That’s all logic. Tell me something cool. Tell me something that will send goose bumps up my spine.

  QUINCY: The night you killed the first victim, Lucy Edwards, your wife was in the hospital, giving birth to your daughter. That was the stress you couldn’t handle, Jim. The birth of your daughter.

  Pause.

  BECKETT: Too easy. You have the date on the ticket, so you know she disappeared that day.

  QUINCY: That doesn’t mean she was killed the day she was last seen. You know it’s impossible to accurately pinpoint the time of death of a body that’s spent a year underwater.

  BECKETT: It’s still just logic.

  QUINCY: No, it’s statistical odds, Jim. All killers have a triggering event. For disorganized killers, it’s generally the loss of their job or a major confrontation with their
mother. For organized killers like you, birth of their first child rates right up there. The new addition to the family, the financial strain—particularly for a police officer who was already living beyond his means. Your arrogance is your Achilles’ heel, Jim. You want to think you’re unique. You want to think you’re the best, but really, you’re just like all the others. And we can profile you the same way we profile them, by looking at what the others did.

  Pause.

  BECKETT: Then you don’t need to talk to me, do you?

  QUINCY: It’s not the what we’re trying to figure out, Jim. It’s the why. You killed ten blond women, beautiful, loving, caring women. What drives a man to do such a thing?

  BECKETT: You mean watch a woman beg for her life, snap her neck, then go to the hospital to see his newborn daughter? That was a good night, you know. Have you ever met my daughter, Samantha? She’s a beautiful little girl, bright too. Tell him, Difford. You know Sam. Sam is the best thing that ever happened to me.

  DIFFORD: And if the world has any justice, she’ll never know who you are, Beckett. Theresa told her you were dead. She even bought a grave marker. You have a pink marker, Beckett. What do you think of that?

  BECKETT: You’re bitter, Lieutenant.

  QUINCY: Jim, why did you kill those women?

  BECKETT: They were immoral, godless sluts who deserved to die.

  DIFFORD: He’s lying. He doesn’t have a religious bone in his body.

  BECKETT: Laughter. For a change, Difford’s right. But I get so bored with the my-mother-toilet-trained-me-at-gunpoint excuse.

  QUINCY: Did you hate your mother?

  BECKETT: Which mother? Adoptive or biological? Actually, it doesn’t matter. Neither of them was worth hating.

  QUINCY: They told me you’ve been exchanging letters with Edward Kemper III.

  BECKETT: Sure. Ed’s a big guy. Six nine and three hundred pounds. That’s a hell of a lot of psychopath. I work out everyday here, you know. I’m up to bench-pressing three-fifty. [Beckett pulls up sleeve and flexes for camera.] Impressive, huh? But I still got a ways to go to catch Ed.

  QUINCY: Ed’s IQ is also 145, did you know that?

  BECKETT: He’s a real Renaissance man.

  QUINCY: He killed ten people as well. Is that why you decided to write to him? His victims were closer to home though—his grandparents, his mother, and her best friend. . . .

  BECKETT: Yeah, Ed’s read a little too much Freud. All he talks about is how much he hated his mother. For God’s sake, he attacked her with a claw hammer, decapitated her, then raped her corpse. It’s time for him to move on. Have you heard about the larynx?

  QUINCY: I read the interview notes.

  BECKETT: Now, is that irony or what? Poor, bed-wetting, traumatized Ed is jamming his mother’s larynx down the garbage disposal as a last symbolic act, and the disposal jams and throws the bloody voice box back up at him. Ed says, “Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me. I couldn’t get her to shut up!” That’s one of my favorite stories.

  QUINCY: Did your mother bitch at you? Was she demanding?

  BECKETT: My birth mother was a weak, pathetic hypochondriac without an intelligent thought in her head. When she dropped dead, she merely fulfilled her own prophecy.

  QUINCY: Your father?

  BECKETT: My father was a good man, don’t bring him into this.

  QUINCY: Would he be ashamed of you now, Jim?

  BECKETT: For what?

  QUINCY: I think he would be, Jim. I think you know that. I think Jenny Thomson really got to you.

  BECKETT: Who?

  DIFFORD: You know who the hell he’s talking about, Beckett. Little Jenny Thomson. The seventeen-year-old from Enfield. The girl whose head you cut off.

  QUINCY: You didn’t decapitate anyone else, Jim. Only her. You also let her get dressed after you had raped her. I think she shamed you. I think she told you that she was driving home from visiting her dying father in the hospital. That he needed her, she was his last reason to fight for life. That she loved him very much. But she’d seen your face. You had to kill her. So you did, but you didn’t feel good about it, not like the others. The others you looked in the eye, but not Jenny. She was manually strangled from behind, but even then you didn’t feel right about it. You were troubled and you were angry because you didn’t want to be troubled. So you cut off her head, classic depersonalization. You hid it under a pile of leaves, not able to look at her. You left her body covered, not exposed like the others. But you still felt shame, didn’t you, Jim? Every time you think of her, you feel shame.

  BECKETT: No.

  DIFFORD: You’re shifting in your seat, Jim. You don’t look so comfortable anymore.

  BECKETT: My leg’s fallen asleep.

  DIFFORD: Sure, Jim.

  BECKETT: I saw Jenny’s father in the hospital.

  QUINCY: What?

  BECKETT: The nurses never put it together, did they? I went to the hospital. I wanted to see if her father was really there, if he was really dying. You can’t trust what a woman says, particularly once you have her. They’ll say anything if they think it will save their life. So I checked up on it.

  I found him in an oxygen tent in intensive care, Mister Quincy. He wasn’t allowed visitors, but I told the nurses I was working on his daughter’s case and I had good news for him. Of course they let me in. Young nurses. One of them was quite beautiful but she was a brunette.

  I leaned over until I could press my face against the oxygen tent. And I told him how beautiful his daughter was and how wonderfully she’d screamed. I told him she’d begged for her life and she’d prayed to God, but God hadn’t saved her. She belonged to me and I took her. He died the next day.

  You want to know what makes me, Mister Quincy? If you want to understand me, forget the mommy-hating or the bed-wetting, animal-torturing, fire-starting triad you guys developed. It’s so much simpler than that. There’s power in the world, and that is me.

  It’s the power of being alone with a woman and having her plead for her life. It’s the power of having her on her knees and watching her implore God to intervene. He doesn’t. She’s mine. I am the strongest, I am the best. I used to not understand the Nazi officers and what they did during the Holocaust—I respected their discipline, but I didn’t quite get them. Now I do. I’ve held a beating pulse between my fingers and I’ve squeezed. And it’s the best goddamn feeling in the world.

  DIFFORD: You’re sick, Beckett. You are fucking sick.

  BECKETT: Get over it, Difford. It’s guys like me who keep you employed. You were just a backwater no-name county lieutenant until I came along. I was the best thing that ever happened to your career. You should like me.

  QUINCY: Jim—

  DIFFORD: You’re wrong, Beckett. You’re not the most powerful person in the world. Theresa is.

  BECKETT: What?

  DIFFORD: You heard me. Who brought you down, who put you in jail? Face it, you married a sweet eighteen-year-old girl you thought you could control, manipulate, and terrorize to your heart’s content. But instead of simply rolling over and playing dead, she figured you out. She learned you, she fought you. She toppled the omnipotent Jim Beckett.

  BECKETT: Theresa is a weak, stupid woman who couldn’t even stand up to her own father. All you had to do was raise your voice and she cowered in the corner.

  DIFFORD: She kept a log on you. All the times you said you were on duty when you weren’t. All the times you came home with unexplained scratches and bruises.

  BECKETT: She was a jealous wife.

  DIFFORD: She tracked the mileage on your odometer. She kept a whole little book of evidence against you, writing in it secretly every night until she finally had enough to call the police. And you never suspected a thing.

  BECKETT: Theresa is not that smart!

  DIFFORD: She turned you in, Jim. You terrorized her, you traumatized her. You burned everything she owned, told her day in and day out that she was worthless, and still she stood a
gainst you.

  BECKETT: I made her pay. Every time she takes a step now, she thinks of me.

  DIFFORD: And every time you hear the cell doors slam shut, you can think of her.

  Pause.

  QUINCY: One last question, Jim—

  BECKETT: Do you know what I dream of, Difford? Do you know what I think about every night? I dream of the day I see my wife again. I picture sliding my hands around her neck and feeling her hands flail against my chest. I envision choking her to the edge of unconsciousness. And then, while she’s lying there, staring at me helplessly, I pick up a dull Swiss Army knife and hack off her fingers one by one. Then her ears. Then her nose. And then, then I cut out her beating heart. I’ll do it someday, Difford. And when I do, I’ll mail her heart to you.

  LIEUTENANT RICHARD HOULIHAN walked to the front of the debriefing room and shut off the film projector. At his signal the lights came back on and sixty-five police officers and federal agents blinked owlishly. The room held the largest task force Massachusetts had ever seen. The second largest task force had been assembled two and a half years ago for the same purpose—to find former police officer and serial killer Jim Beckett.

  “Now you know what we’re up against,” Lieutenant Houlihan said without preamble. “Jim Beckett has always prided himself on his superior intelligence, and last week he demonstrated again what he can do. At nine A.M. two corrections officers escorted Beckett from 10 Block at Walpole to the Multipurpose Room where he had signed up for time to conduct legal research. The corrections officers had followed proper protocol—Beckett’s hands were cuffed behind his back, his legs were shackled, and they were with him at all times. Yet somehow he managed to slip free of the cuffs—we believe he may have fashioned a homemade lock pick—and the minute they entered the Multipurpose Room he turned on the two officers. In two minutes he beat both men to death with his bare hands. One officer managed to activate the red alarm on his radio. When Walpole’s security officers descended upon the room ninety seconds later, they found Beckett’s handcuffs and leg shackles on the floor and two dead men—one missing his uniform and radio. Immediately all units were locked down, the lieutenant in charge issued a red alert, and a full-fledged search began. Somehow in this time period Beckett entered central command dressed as the guard. In full sight of the main facilities he knocked out the lieutenant and sergeant running central command, seized the master key, and unlocked the system, opening all cell doors and blocks.