Portrait of the Psychopath as a Young Woman - Edward Lee.wps

by phuc

Platt the altruist finally shows some bitterness. Yes, it was obvious to her: these poems were about women from Platt's past; he was a love poet. This seemed totally real to her, totally honest, not corny. Too much of today's poetry dismissed love as a trifle. They deemed it more

  "important" to write about politics or nuclear weapons. But such a bitter poem, she thought.

  Bitterness didn't seem to suit Platt. As for herself, when men had stopped seeing her, or stopped calling, Kathleen never felt bitter. She felt fat and disillusioned but never bitter. Or maybe she'd never loved anyone enough to feel bitter over a relationship's demise.

  But this is just sexual, she pointed out to herself. Platt, though not a physical specimen, looked trim and enticing. There's no way he could ever love a Fattie like me. This impression of herself did not depress her at all; it made her feel proudly objective, not weighing, of course, the hypocrisy. When readers wrote in, fearing rejection due to being overweight, Kathleen reassured them that looks meant nothing in a real relationship. Dump them, she'd advise.

  Still draped in the sheet, like a disheveled statute of liberty, she padded to the bed to look down at Platt. Every few minutes he shifted positions in sleep. Now he lay arms out and spread legged on the mattress, his face covered by blond hair. Her headache was dissolving. Should I just leave? she wondered. She really did want to call her editor and ask if any letters had come in for her. On the floor lay three condoms tied in knots, their reservoir ends laden with proof that Platt could rise to an occasion. Her memory unreeled like clippings of film: he'd made love to her voraciously, constantly concerned for her pleasure. It got to aggravate her to a point. He'd ask her

  "which way feels the best for you?" or "does it feel better this way or that way?" She felt like saying, Look, Platt, I haven't been laid in a year. Any way feels good, so be quiet and just do it.

  She'd had several bouts of orgasms, but the best came when he finished her off. He'd slid her buttocks to the edge of the bed and knelt on the floor, laving her clitoris with his tongue while two fingers stroked in and out of her vagina. She'd shrieked as her climax spasmed, then purred grinning in the dark as the lovely pulses drew on.

  Platt kept his condoms a brand called Sheik in an odd little cup with a hinged lid atop the nightstand. She took one and very carefully crouched at his hips. The deflated penis lay across his pubic patch like something exhausted. She touched its underside very gently she didn't want to wake him then leaned forward and began to lick it. She could smell her own musk laced with the scent of the condom lubricant and sperm.

  It came erect fast as a spring popping. She rolled the condom over it, then shook him.

  "Maxwell?" she said. Or did he prefer to be called Max? How do I know? "Maxwell? Wake up."

  She leaned up and kissed him on the mouth as his eyes slowly opened. Her fingers gently kneaded the sheathed penis. "Maxwell? I have to go soon."

  "Hmm?" he said.

  "I have to go home soon. But can we do it one more time first?"

  He leaned up and groggily glanced down at his groin. "It looks like the decision has already been made," he remarked.

  (II)

  Earlier that morning at the CES morgue, Kohls told Spence, "What we've got here, Lieutenant, is a little of the old Human Jigsaw."

  Spence was familiar with the jargon; he'd seen stuff like this before. This was what crack dealers did to stools, or other dealers moving on the wrong turf. Bodies taken apart with chainsaws or axes. Parts often stacked up like cordwood.

  Kohls, the MCS evidence tech, had lain the body parts found in the Audi's trunk onto three stainless steel dissection tables. The tables came complete with run off gutters and filter traps.

  "Three bodies," he said. "We'll call them One, Two, and Three. One" he pointed "has been dead about a week according to the potass levels in the humor. Two and Three several weeks, maybe a month. T.O.D. is always tough to pinpoint this time of year, the heat and all. Depends on where the parts were kept."

  "Where are the heads?" Spence asked.

  "In the fridge. You want to see them?"

  "Uh, no. All I want from you now is the quickest read you can give me. I want any significant similarities and differences."

  "You mean between these three and Calabrice?"

  "That's right."

  Kohls always seemed full of some weird downplayed vigor, which was not what Spence would expect from a man who made his living histologizing human brains, weighing organs, and forensically analyzing carnage. He drank a can of Coke. "Similarities? Lips sewn shut with hospital spec suture, eyes Crazy Glued, eardrums pricked."

  She's shutting down their senses, Spence realized. Why? "That's all?"

  "Pretty much. Extreme genital violence, of course, but you can see that for yourself."

  Yes, Spence could. Weird, rawish ovals. "What about the genitalia?"

  "She kept them, sir. Not a pecker in the pile."

  Spence, a strong man, felt his knees wobble for a second.

  "The differences are much more significant," Kohls went on. "Calabrice's hands and feet were intact. These three she severed all of them, burned them, and put them in the pile. I'm not even sure if I've got the right hands and feet with the right bodies. Spectrometer reads reduced carbon and commercial Naphtha. Know what I think? I think she burned the hands and feet up in a barbecue. Point is she did a good job don't expect an easy ID on any of these guys."

  "What about their teeth?"

  "That's another significant difference. These guys all had their teeth pulled out first, unlike Calabrice, before she sewed their mouths up. The dental extractions are all pretty clean, so she must've done it while they were still unconscious from the sodium am. She didn't want these three ID'd, but she obviously didn't care if we ID'd Calabrice. It's almost like..."

  It's almost like she wanted us to know about Calabrice, Spence considered.

  "You sure you don't want to see the heads?"

  "No thanks," Spence said. "I gotta drive."

  "Histo data's all in the prelims. There's your big difference between these guys and Calabrice."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Calabrice was a well nourished white male. Moderate drinker, sure, low B 6 and mag, but he was healthy. He had good guts."

  Good guts, Spence echoed.

  "These guys?" Kohls flicked his hand. "Low economic histo spectrums. Lot of arterial plaque, first stage liver sclerosis, lot of lipofusial rancidity, low body fat. These guys were malnourished."

  "Bums?"

  "No, not bums. Just nutritionally deficient, players."

  "Players" meant hustlers, street hawks, city people whose incomes were erratic and who didn't eat right. "In other words," Spence asked, "Not the kind of guys who hang out in high class bars."

  "Exactly," Kohls said. "Compared to Calabrice, these three guys were phantoms."

  Phantoms, Spence thought.

  He considered this on his drive back to Headquarters on Indiana. He had an appointment. The autopsy reports were dicey this early but Kohls had given him enough up front to get him thinking.

  Spence had been doing a lot of thinking.

  Now he sat in the office of one Dr. Ian Simmons, who quietly read over the forensic preliminaries. Simmons, sixtyish, goateed, and with a paunch, was the department's forensic psychiatrist. He'd recently had an article published in a British medical journal called Lancet ("Criminal Behavioral Differences of Ipsilateral Males"), and had been nominated for some award.

  "So you're looking for someone with medical knowledge. A doctor, perhaps." Simmons' eyes widened in amusement. "Me, perhaps."

  "You're not a woman with red hair," Spence observed.

  "Ah, but couldn't the hairfall be from a wig?"

  "Not with intact hair root sheaths. Not with shaft cuticles full of unoxidized dihydrotestosterone.

  All the pubic hairs microscopically match the head hairs. Fusiformal lineament and scale count are female positive."

  "Good, good," Simmons
said, still scanning the prelims. He was just testing Spence, as always.

  "Who's doing the radio immune assay?"

  "McCrone Associates. They're expensive but they get the work back a lot faster than the Bureau."

  "You should've saved the taxpayer's money," Simmons said. "The r.i.a. results will indicate a long term drug or alcohol abuser, malnourishment, megalopsis."

  "How do you know?"

  "If I'm wrong, I'll buy you dinner."

  "I hope you're wrong," Spence said. "I haven't been to a good restaurant in ages."

  Simmons chuckled. "No doubt you've instructed Background Programming to cross reference red haired females with recent psych ward releases?"

  "Yes," Spence said. "And hospital employment."

  "Too bad there's a Privacy Act, hmm?"

  "I'm telling them to go back four months."

  "Tell them to go back a year," Simmons corrected. "This is something more evolved than your typical unsystematized reality break. Take my word for it, Jeffrey. That's what they pay me for."

  Simmons' mien always captivated Spence. The doctor regularly spoke with great animation and facial inflection yet rarely looked up from his reading, as though the preliminaries were Spence's face. Simmons was perhaps Spence's only real friend.

  "Sagittal fusion, fusion of the mastoid process...all four of your victims are late '20s to early '30s, yet the first three clearly come from lower economic backgrounds."

  "That's right," Spence said.

  More reading. Then Simmons' brow furrowed. "Your friend is quite tribal " Simmons always amusedly referred to killers as Spence's "friends." " and probably very smart as well as very well read."

  Spence backed up. "What do you mean tribal?"

  "She collects physical symbols of adversarial power. Use the Bantis of lower Africa as an example, or any number of pre colonization Filipino tribes. They collected the heads of their enemies because they believed it would give them power. You've got vou dou cults in the deep south doing the same thing today. Similar tribes collected penises for the same reason." Simmons fell into a bemused pause. "And your friend here is definitely collecting penises."

  Collecting penises, Spence thought. It was perhaps the strangest thought of his life.

  "Calabrice, Stephen, W. Your friend mailed Mr. Calabrice's penis to a magazine writer?"

  "That's right. A self help columnist."

  "Idolatry," Simmons said, still smiling vaguely at the reports. "Objects of abuse serve as objects of power to be envied hence, the missing penises. In Calabrice's case, your friend decided to share that object of power with another woman. More tribalism."

  This was too strange. This entire conversation was too strange. What would the average person think, overhearing this?

  "She probably lives in a house, in a secluded community," Simmons continued. "She was sexually abused, probably quite heinously, and probably by her father or other prominent male family figure, from a very young age. She's obviously bipolar enough to function in public."

  But Spence had considered all of this already. Preliminary deductions that any investigator would make. Simmons added: "And she has no close acquaintances. No friends."

  A flash of memory. Spence's mother. How come you don't go out with friends, Jeffrey? How come you never go out with

  Spence frowned the memory away. "I'm thinking maybe she's a prostitute. Calabrice's vehicle was ditched just off the red light corridor."

  "Maybe, maybe not," Simmons said. Finally he set down the CES prelims and looked at Spence.

  "We have some oddities here, most paramount of which is that she's probably also very attractive."

  "Because Calabrice was attractive?"

  "Of course. And wealthy, and successful. You can't catch quality fish without quality bait."

  "Why is it an oddity?"

  Simmons stroked his silverish goatee. "Most acute stage psychopaths are uniformly unattractive.

  The sexual traumas of their childhood enforce a repugnant self image. But of course most psychopaths, contrary to popular belief, don't kill people either."

  "I thought we were looking for a stage sociopath," Spence said.

  "No no no no," Simmons replied. He said "no" a dozen more times. "I thought your degree was in psychology, not onanism. Your friend here is uniquely psychopathic, and it was only very recently that she suffered the first major reality break of her life."

  "On what do you base that?"

  "The four victims. Aren't you curious as to why she went to extremes to obstruct the potential identification of the first three victims, yet not Calabrice?"

  "That's the chief reason I came to see you," Spence said.

  "Oh, and all this time I thought it was my invigorating persona. It's rather typical in serial killer scenarios that are psychopathically rooted, as opposed to sociopathically rooted. The first few victims are frequently discovered after later victims. No difference here. One, Two, and Three had no fingerprints, no teeth. Calabrice did. Why?"

  "You're the clinical psychiatrist."

  Simmons laughed in his throat. "All psychopathies eventually assume an objective purpose in the psychopath's mind. The initial crimes are always unformed. It is only until well after the reality break that the crimes pursue a solid focal point."

  "Well then what's the focal point?" Spence asked.

  "I should think it would be obvious. It's this magazine writer. This " Simmons reglanced at the Calabrice summary. " this Kathleen Shade."

  They walked down to the automat, for Macke coffee. "But why?" Spence inquired. It bothered him. "Why Kathleen Shade?"

  "I have no idea," Simmons answered. "I don't know her, nor have I read her. But I suspect that's the key it has to be. A psychopath's active delusions almost always cling to a physical symbol.

  For some reason, your friend relates to Kathleen Shade. I'd love to know exactly why."

  You're not the only one, Spence thought. "In her first correspondence, she referred to Shade as a ‘Great Woman.'"

  "Not surprising. Shade's an idol, and you can probably count on the keystone of the idolatry as being quite subjective, or even invented. On one hand it may be something as simple as a physical resemblance; or it could be something so complex via the delusion that no sane person could grasp it... How are you handling Shade?"

  "I think I summed her up pretty quick," Spence said. "She kind of strikes me as a fractured personality type. Smart, independent, but diced up from insecurities."

  "And she's trying not to show those insecurities," Simmons guessed rather than asked.

  "Yeah, that's what it looks like. So I'm playing Bad Guy with her, and it's working. You know, the stone face, rigid body language, deliberately rigid speech patterns, and all that. Objective rudeness; she thinks I'm a male chauvinist pig. It really pisses her off."

  "Good, good. She sounds like the type you'll have to keep pissed off in order for her to remain perceptive herself. She has to feel the necessity to compete with you, otherwise she won't be of much help. And there's probably something in Shade's writings that have set off the idol concept.

  I suggest you read everything she's published."

  Spence nodded. "I already got Research pulling it all up."

  "And find out if Shade was sexually abused."

  "I did," Spence said. The coffee was terrible. "I ran a prelim background on her; she was abused by a family member a long time ago. The guy got busted, and she testified against him. I'll be getting more info on that soon." Spence half smiled. "She thinks I guessed. I kept her antsy by using all those great kinetic and kinesthetic gestures you taught me in school. She practically thinks I read her mind."

  "Good, and make her keep thinking that. Is she lesbian?"

  "No. Her advice column is hetero sexual. And last night she spent the night with a man she just met."

  "You're a bad boy, Jeffrey. Discreetly psychoanalyzing citizens, following them, invading their privacy."

  Spence shrugged.
"Hey, I'm a cop. That's what cops do, isn't it?"

  Simmons' nose crinkled over his coffee. "You should've been a psychiatrist. Then you could invade people's privacy even more."

  "The killer seems to want Shade to write a book about her," Spence said, "or a story of some kind. ‘Would you like to do my story?' she asked Shade."

  "Of course. Shade's the key; the killer relates to her. More proof that the purpose of the delusion has solidified. That's why she left the first three bodies in Calabrice's car. She wanted you to find them. She wants you to know what she's doing now. Without that, the purpose has no actualization, and no meaning. And if Shade publicizes her crimes, the purpose will assume even more meaning for whatever the killer's delusion is based upon. She thinks Shade will sympathize, will view her as a colleague. More delusion. Actually, it's wonderful that your friend is a stage psychopath."