Psychopathy…
It wasn’t a term that anyone in the mental health profession used to diagnose anyone, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t an accurate picture of the kinds of people who’d commit murder.
“Hey,” said a voice from behind her.
She looked up.
The librarian working the computer lab was standing over her monitor. “You using this computer? Because if you’re not, you can’t just take up a perfectly good computer.”
Lorelei furrowed her brow. “There are empty seats everywhere.”
“You using it or not?”
“I’m using it,” she said, pulling up Internet Explorer.
He made a sour face and then walked back to his desk at the front of the room. He picked up a paperback book and started to read. The book was about Ted Bundy.
Inwardly, she snorted. Well, that was ironic. Wasn’t it? She was always confused about what that word even meant. Here she was thinking about psychopathic killers, and he was reading a book about Ted Bundy.
She narrowed her eyes at the librarian. He sure did have a power complex about the lab, didn’t he? Maybe he was a psychopath too.
Psychopaths didn’t have to kill people, after all. The condition was marked by a sincere lack of empathy and an inability to care about the well-being of others. Psychopaths thought of the world as a giant chess game. All the other people were pawns and knights and bishops. Just pieces to be moved around the board at the whim of the psychopaths, who did whatever it took to get ahead. They faked empathy, because it made them appear normal to everyone else and allowed them to get whatever it was they wanted.
Some of them wanted to kill people.
But others simply were satisfied with excelling in their fields. They were lawyers and doctors and CEOs.
Others settled for controlling people. Abusive husbands. Cult leaders. Dictators.
All of those men and women had the same sickness, but it caused them to behave in different ways. And she knew all about it, because she had studied it and made it part of herself. She had formed profiles of so many different psychopaths that she understood the condition from the inside out.
She watched Simon, scribbling in his notebook and then showing the page to Jordan.
If her son was a psychopath, she would know.
Wouldn’t she?
* * *
When Simon was about six years old, he had gotten completely caught up with his peers in terms of speech. He’d had trouble with several different sounds, including Ls and Rs and Ws, but by then, he’d learned to say them clearly and distinctly. In the wake of all of that, he suddenly became desperately interested in Pixar movies. He loved them all, and he wanted to watch them over and over again.
It was his special interest at the time.
But he didn’t only like to watch the movies, he liked to recite them. He memorized every single word uttered in Toy Story and The Incredibles and A Bug’s Life, and for one horrifying month, he refused to say anything except quotes from the movies.
He liked to start at the beginning of the movie and recite every single line of dialogue, and he was precise about it too. He didn’t just say the words, he mimicked the accents and inflections of the actors. He was nearly perfect at it, so that if she wasn’t in the room with him, she couldn’t always be sure if it was Simon speaking or the movie playing.
But he also liked to simply pluck passages out of the movies and use those in place of conversation. Sometimes they fit, sometimes they didn’t.
Trying to have a conversation with him during this period of time nearly drove her mad.
“Simon, here are your pancakes.”
“Excuse me, I think the word you’re searching for is ‘Space Ranger,’” he’d respond.
“Okay, well, you can have space rangers then. You want syrup?”
“You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity.”
She was frustrated. She was terrified. It was summer, and he wasn’t at school. She wondered if he had been, if he might have snapped out of it. He was always a high achiever academically. His pride might have driven him to start speaking normally.
His only social outlet was playing with Jordan, but Jordan found the entire thing hilarious and vastly entertaining. She would sit wide-eyed while he would perform entire movies for her. She kept trying to get him to expand his repertoire to other movies as well, like some Disney animated movies, but Simon wasn’t interested.
At her wit’s end, Lorelei had taken him to a doctor, who dismissed the entire thing as an Asperger’s special interest and said there was little they could do. It might be possible to lure him to some other interest, if she could figure out something he might be intrigued by. But otherwise, by virtue of his condition, he was singularly focused on doing whatever made him happy, and he didn’t see much reason in modifying that behavior. He loved quoting the movies. He couldn’t get enough of it. He was going to do that, because he enjoyed it. She was going to have suffer through it.
Mercifully, it didn’t last very long.
One morning, he woke up and said, “Can I have French toast for breakfast, please?” And that was that. He never quoted the movies again. He never even watched them again. He was done with them.
But his interest in movies hadn’t entirely waned. When he and Jordan were young teenagers, they had worked for a summer on recreating one of the Christian Bale Batman movies. They’d done it shot for shot with action figures, and the two had voiced all the characters in the movie themselves. Simon was still capable of perfectly mimicking an actor’s inflection and tone and accent.
Usually, Simon spoke in a bland voice, nearly devoid of emotion, but he could sound emotional. If he was copying someone else’s emotion, he could do it very well.
* * *
Jeremy Walsh came into the bar Sunday night. He sat at the bar and ordered shot after shot of tequila, and Lorelei didn’t want to serve him.
She toyed with the idea of throwing him out. As bartender, her word was law in the bar. Everyone there was fairly drunk, and whatever she said went. She had the right to throw out customers if they were being disruptive or violent.
Jeremy was being neither, however. He was drinking his shots and leering at her, though, and it made her uncomfortable.
She ignored him.
After about the sixth shot, she decided that was probably more than his share. “I think you’ve had enough,” she said.
His hand shot out and grasped her wrist. He pulled her across the bar so that they were face to face. “Did you ask him about chess club?” said Jeremy.
She tried to get free. “Let go.”
“He knew that girl. Other kids in the club say he was always flirting with her.”
“Simon couldn’t flirt his way out of a paper bag.” She normally wouldn’t say something so disparaging about her son, but the fact was, she’d been drinking too, and she was panicking. Her word might be law in the bar, but if she needed to enforce her word because someone wasn’t listening to her, she had to call hotel security, and she couldn’t very well call anyone when Jeremy wouldn’t let her go.
Jeremy sneered. “Maybe not. What passes for flirting from him, then. He’s not exactly normal, is he? How could he be, with a mother like you?”
“Let go, Jeremy. You’re drunk. You know better than this.”
He let go of her. “It’s no wonder Simon grew up to be a killer. He’s been twisted from a young age by you and all your problems.”
“I think you should leave.”
He sat back on his bar stool. “Sometimes I’m glad it happened the way it did between us, because I know that it wouldn’t have gone my way in court. They would have given her to you, and she’d be just as messed up.”
She pointed at the door. “You have exactly ten seconds to get out of my bar.”
“Your bar? You don’t own this place. You don’t own anything. You’re too much of a screw-up for that. I don’t even know how it was that I eve
r allowed myself to be attracted to you.”
She wasn’t sure how she’d been attracted to him either. Jeremy was the only person she’d dated since Isaac, and it had gone disastrously. She hadn’t sworn off men afterward, not exactly, but she had to admit that she wasn’t actively looking for another boyfriend. She had decided it was best to focus on Simon, focus on being a mother. She was a much better mother than she was a girlfriend. And since she wasn’t the best mother in the world, that probably meant that she had no business trying to be a girlfriend.
“Yes, well, if you leave,” she said, “you won’t have to look at me anymore, will you?”
“I don’t have to go anywhere,” he said.
“I’m calling security,” she said, and marched over the phone behind the bar. Usually, if it came down to this, she never had to actually call security, because just the threat was enough to put most people back in line. But not Jeremy. He just laughed.
She dialed.
It rang.
She waited.
It rang.
She waited.
It rang sixteen times.
She was about to hang up.
“Woodlands Evergreen Resort Security. This is Ivan.”
“Geez, Ivan, I was going to hang up. What good are you guys if you don’t answer the phone?”
“Sorry, we’re shorthanded tonight. I was doing a round.”
“Oh,” she said. She was still annoyed. “Look, this is Lorelei. I need your help at the bar. I’ve got a guy here who won’t leave.”
“Got it. On my way,” said Ivan.
Lorelei hung up the phone and turned back to Jeremy. “If I were you, I’d just get out of here now before you make a spectacle of yourself.”
“I’m not doing anything except telling the truth about you and all the awful things you’re responsible for,” said Jeremy. “Don’t suppose you’d reconsider pouring me another shot?”
She was aghast. She hadn’t realized how deep his hatred for her ran. Maybe because she didn’t hate him. She didn’t like him or anything, either. Her feelings about him weren’t strong. He was part of her past, a part she was happy to have let go of, and she barely thought of him at all. She certainly didn’t have this seething rage toward him that he seemed to have towards her. She glared at him. “This business with Simon is all about me, isn’t it? You’re trying to punish me.”
“That’s just an added benefit,” said Jeremy. “I’m waiting for those girls to show up dead and for there to be some connection to your son. I know I’ll find it.”
She was opening her mouth to respond when Ivan burst in. Mia was with him. She gave Lorelei a little wave. “I heard you were having issues.”
Jeremy stood up straight at the sight of Mia. He smoothed his shirt down the front and cleared his throat. “I think I’ll be going.”
“Oh, good,” said Mia. “That sounds like a plan.”
Jeremy couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
Lorelei was glad to see him go, but she couldn’t help but be the tiniest bit wistful that she wouldn’t get the chance to see Ivan punch Jeremy in the nose. However, it was easier with Mia here. Cleaner, too.
Everyone knew that Jeremy was on strict orders not to get on Mia’s bad side, since the local police department relied on Mia’s financial contributions. And everyone also know that Mia didn’t much like Jeremy, so he wasn’t going to have to do much to tick her off. He tended to tread carefully around her.
Mia came over to the bar. “You poor thing.”
Lorelei felt bone tired all of the sudden.
“Close the bar and come back to my place for a drink, hmm?” said Mia.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“How are you feeling?” Mia was pouring wine for them as they sat outside on the veranda of her house. Mia lived in an enormous Colonial on the property. It was three stories, and it had been in the family for generations. It was beautiful and perfectly decorated.
“I don’t know. Everything has been so crazy lately.” Lorelei wasn’t sure she should still be drinking, but it had been a stressful night. She already had a bit of a buzz on and she didn’t mind keeping it going.
Mia picked up a glass and took a drink. “Crazy? In what way? I feel like we haven’t talked in a while. Last time, you were preoccupied. What’s going on?”
“Well, it has to do with Jeremy.”
Mia scoffed. “Well there’s a surprise.” She was sarcastic.
“Yeah, right.” Lorelei remembered that Mia had never liked Jeremy, even when she had been first dating him. Mia had been prescient. Lorelei hadn’t known any better back then. Anyway, all that was behind her now.
“What crazy crap is Jeremy doing now?”
“It’s about Simon.”
“What about Simon?”
“You remember about the murder of Brittany Lewis?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve been following that. You know I find that sort of stuff interesting.” Mia was always watching true crime documentaries and shows on TV, and then asking Lorelei questions about whether or not they were actually accurate. She was astonished to know that even shows where the story was purportedly true took so many liberties with the facts. What made good TV wasn’t always exactly what had happened. “What does that have to do with Simon?”
“Jeremy thinks Simon killed her.”
Mia’s eyes widened. “What? That’s the craziest thing I ever heard. They’ll laugh him out of the police station. Everyone will see that he is only doing that because he has a grudge against you.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I guess it’s worrying me a little is all.” Lorelei considered explaining to Mia what she knew about the chess club and the pictures and everything else. But she just couldn’t bring herself to do so. Even though Mia was her best friend, there were some things that she didn’t want to tell anyone. The fact that she’d opened up to Isaac was only a testament to the fact that they had known each other and been very close at one time in her life. No, she was going to keep the pictures to herself for now.
“Listen, Jordan is in love with Simon. And Jordan is an excellent judge of character. Jordan would never fall in love with a murderer.” Mia took another drink of wine. “So, you can see there’s no reason to worry.” She gave Lorelei a little smile as if what she had said actually made any kind of sense.
Lorelei resisted the urge to roll her eyes at her friend. Mia’s relationship with Jordan was a complicated one, considering that Mia’s idea of Jordan didn’t match the reality of Jordan herself.
But thinking that thought make Lorelei quiver inside. Was she the same way? Had she built up some image of Simon in her head that didn’t match the truth? Was her son really capable of something monstrous? She didn’t want to believe it.
So when Mia changed the subject, Lorelei was actually glad of it.
“Speaking of Jordan, I’ve been worried about her lately. I feel like she’s pulling away from me. I know maybe that’s typical for teenage girls and their mothers.” Mia looked dolefully into her glass of wine. “What do you think? Do you think I’m overreacting?”
Lorelei didn’t know how to respond. Overreacting? Mia had simply made a comment. She hadn’t lost her head or punished Jordan or something. Then again, Lorelei supposed she wouldn’t quite put it past Mia. She chewed on her bottom lip. “Distant how?”
“I feel as though she used to tell me everything. We’ve always been the best of friends. Now, she just wants to spend all her time in her room. And when we are together, she’s on her phone all the time.”
Lorelei chuckled. “That’s just normal teenage stuff. You are overreacting.”
Mia drew in a deep breath. “I had a feeling that I must be. And you’re worrying over nothing with Simon. Jeremy will drop this nonsense. Everything will work out.”
Lorelei wondered if Mia was right and she was overreacting. She thought again about filling in more of the blanks for Mia. But again she decided against it. However, she couldn’t think about much else beside
s her worry over her son. And that made trying to have a conversation nearly impossible. She didn’t know what else to say. So she just sat, sipped her drink, and waited for Mia to talk.
Mia sat down her glass and leaned forward. “Well, you’re drinking now. How about you tell me something? A story from back in the day when you were working as a profiler.”
“What do you want to know?” Lorelei said. Truthfully, she wasn’t in the mood for one of these explanations of her job, but Mia ate them up, and always requested them. She found it all very fascinating and exotic.
“Oh, anything. What about that guy mummified the people? The Under-something.”
Lorelei shuddered. “Oh, anyone but him.”
Mia pouted. “You never talk about him.”
Lorelei inspected her fingernails. “That’s because that’s the case the made me quit the FBI. I don’t like to think about it. Not even when I’m drunk.”
“Well, something else than. What about that guy who killed prostitutes?”
Lorelei made a rueful face. “Which one? I can think of at least five cases off the top my head for prostitutes. It really is a dangerous line of work.”
Mia laughed. “Well, I wasn’t considering going into it. Just tell me about a serial killer already.”
“You have a morbid interest in this sort of thing.”
“It’s therapeutic for you, and you know it.”
Lorelei wasn’t sure about that. She’d rather bury it all. But sometimes, when Mia asked, it did feel a little bit cathartic for the words to start spilling out, as if it were washing away the memories. “All right. How about Louis Bitner.”
“Have you told me about him before?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did he do?”
“Cocaine,” said Lorelei. “A lot of cocaine. He’d bring prostitutes back to his big mansion in South Carolina. He was from old money, and his family had basically built the town where he lived. He practically owned the entire town. He’d go and pick up the prostitutes in the city, an hour and a half away, and then bring them back and snort mountains of cocaine. And—”
Child of Mine: a psychological thriller Page 7