Crush - Alan Jacobson [159]
Vail clenched her jaw. She couldn’t let Mayfield see what she was feeling. Truth was, she wanted to jump out of her chair and put her hands around his neck. She forced a smile instead.
“I had you there for a while, Vail, I know I did. You thought I was in Virginia, at Jonathan’s middle school. Bet you called your buddies, had them go apeshit protecting your precious little son. Looking for a phantom killer who wasn’t even there.”
Vail nodded. “That’s right, that’s exactly what I did. Because I’m not like your mother, John.” She noted his facial twitch. She leaned back and opened the file. “So you’re a mosquito abatement technician for the county of Napa. Pretty clever. You had access to all sorts of places without suspicion.”
He placed his left arm on the table. Vail watched but fought the urge to flinch. He smiled back at her. “I’ve been killing more than just mosquitoes.”
Vail nodded thoughtfully. “Indeed, you have. How many people have you killed?”
“Look it up. I sent you that list.”
“Yes, you did. Thanks for that. It was more important than you’ll ever know. But I know there are other names that aren’t on the list. Because narcissists like yourself lie. They lie all the time.”
“Oh, poor Agent Vail,” Mayfield sang. The smile evaporated from his face. He leaned forward, a sneer crumpling his mouth. “You think you got it all figured out. Well, fuck you. You ain’t got shit. There’s more to this than you know.”
Vail was usually able to let the slime of a serial killer slide off her as if she were made of Teflon. But John Wayne Mayfield, or George Panda, or whatever he wanted to be called, sent the creeps crawling up her spine. She couldn’t let him know, or even sense it.
She countered her repulsion by leaning forward, closer to him than was advisable. He could easily head butt her into oblivion. And given her fatigue, she wouldn’t be able to react fast enough to lessen its impact. A guy like Mayfield had nothing to lose. Doing more damage, adding another count of assault on a federal officer, was meaningless.
Mayfield shook his head, a tsk-tsk-tsk, shame-on-you movement. “You’ve missed the point, Karen. But you’ll probably get it eventually. And when you do, I think it’s probably safe to say this will have been unlike anything you or your profiler friends have ever seen before.”
Vail checked that off to a narcissist’s need to show he was better than everyone else. Superior. Special. Fine, I’ll give that to you if it makes you answer me. “Obviously,” Vail said, “you’re a superior killer to any we’ve dealt with in the past. So why don’t you tell me what I’m missing?” She shrugged. “I’m just a fuckup. Humor me. What don’t I know?”
Mayfield leaned back—the restraints offered no resistance. “Ask nicely. I want to hear you beg.”
“I’m sure you do.” She looked at him, trying to read his expression.
But the image of his large face, leaning into hers in the cave as he attempted to squeeze the life from her, kept invading her thoughts. She was speaking before she knew what she was saying. “But that just ain’t gonna happen. I’m not going to beg. Because I think you’re bullshitting me.”
Mayfield shrugged. “Maybe I am. And maybe I’m not.” He leaned forward again. “But aren’t you curious? It’s going to eat away at you, every night when you get into bed and turn off the lights. You’ll think of me, of this conversation. You’ll think about the lost opportunity to get to the bottom of this. And it’ll eat you up inside.”
Vail couldn’t argue with that. That’s exactly what’s going to happen. Goddamn it. This scumbag seems to have some kind of periscope into my thoughts.
Vail had to change the rules. She realized now she had approached this interview incorrectly. She was too close, had too much invested—the fucker tried to kill me—to be objective. She should have tried to strike a chord within him, talk to him and touch him like he’d never been touched before. I need to get him to connect to me in a way John Mayfield has never connected with anyone before.