Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [47]
Lieutenant Loomis laughed. “Maybe you are.”
I had to bypass Andrew’s resentment and call on Kelsey before Galloway started wondering. She was waving both arms like she had to stop a train.
“Just so you know,” she informed us breathlessly, ‘‘‘lust killer’ is a dated term.”
There it was again. Dated.
“How would you describe it?”
“This man is homicidal,” she said, “due to a sadistic personality disorder.”
“My way is shorter.”
Got a laugh.
“Besides that,” Kelsey insisted, “I have to disagree with a lot of what you said.”
“What Ana has presented here,” said Rick, “is based on the information we now have. That could change. Even though there are over six hundred pages in Rapid Start—”
“I know,” Kelsey said, “I’ve read them all.”
Andrew was giving me the “what an asshole” look.
But Galloway was lowering his reading glasses. “I’m curious to hear what Kelsey has to say.”
My blood pressure hit the red zone.
“First of all,” she began primly, “the offender is not a power-assertive rapist.”
“He’s not.”
“Definitely not.”
People were turning in their seats to watch her with a mix of skepticism and bemusement. Most were ready for the meeting to end.
“He has a sadistic personality disorder, which means the purpose of his infliction of cruelty is not to become sexually aroused, but to cause physical and psychological pain—”
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted, “but sadistic rapists often do need to inflict pain in order to become aroused. Sex and torture of the victim are fused for them.”
“This attack,” she countered, “seems to fit the profile of a sadistic rape. It was calculated. He bound and humiliated her—”
“Yes, out of rage.”
“No.” Kelsey lifted her chin. “It was punishment. It was about pain. The more it went on, the more powerful he felt. As a trained psychologist, I need to say that we’re talking two fundamentally different personality structures.”
“Believe me, I’m aware—”
“Well it makes a significant difference as to what he will do next.”
I had to take a breath. I had to take two. I was really, really holding back from taking her apart. But the words that came flying at me—“respect,” “experience,” “snotty little upstart”—had nothing to do with the argument at hand. We were discussing anger, after all, and I had once pulled a phone out of the wall and thrown it across the bull pen. Things did not end well.
“Maybe Kelsey can explain what she means by ‘sadistic personality disorder,’” suggested Rick. “Many of us are unfamiliar with the concept.”
Rick long ago had earned his supervisor spurs.
Now she had license to go on for another five minutes. To me it was everything wrong with specialists coming into the Bureau as a second career. They each think their area of expertise is what’s going to crack the case, all that matters is whether they, as individuals, get points, because that was the corporate culture they came from, and they’ll argue endlessly from their one little narrow point of view. They haven’t been around long enough to get the bigger picture of what it means to be an agent.
I have noticed the more specialized you are, the more pompous.
“Okay, we’ve got two opposing points of view,” Rick said at last, “which we have to look at in terms of the best interests of this case. We have to go forward without biases on either side.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. All I knew was Kelsey had created a divide in which she, suddenly, had authority. An equal say. And she wasn’t even on the squad.
“Pardon me, but this is bullshit.” Andrew was on his feet. “Why split hairs, when it’s staring you right in the face?”
It threw everybody off. Even Eunice arched her eyebrows and folded her arms skeptically.
“You want academic theory, or how about nailing this cretin?”
I heard some handcuff ratcheting, but I was thrilled. Nobody stood up for you like that at the Bureau.
After a moment Rick composed himself and asked, “Detective Berringer, would you like to share?”
Andrew said, “This guy is former military.”
Now there was interest.
“The