Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [55]
Lee sat in the back of the lecture hall, watching as Nelson surveyed the young faces, blank as unformed clay. It was Monday morning, and today the heat was on with a vengeance. Hisses of steam erupted at irregular intervals from the radiators lining the assembly room walls. As soon as the lecture was over, Lee planned to give Nelson Chuck’s urgent invitation to join their investigation. He had tried to reach Nelson by phone the day before without success—sometimes, he knew, Nelson would turn off both his phone and answering machine.
“Anybody?” Nelson continued, a smile struggling to break through the corners of his mouth. “So you’ve all had a violent fantasy at one time or another in your life, then. Good—then you’ll be able to follow what I’m about to say next.” He picked up the remote and aimed it at the slide projector.
One click and a familiar face appeared on the screen: the hangdog, boyish features of Jeffrey Dahmer, with his sad, basset hound eyes and splotch of blond bangs. A murmur floated up from the crowd and dissipated, smokelike, when Nelson turned to face them.
“I see most of you recognize him. Ask yourselves: what separates him from us?”
The blond girl snaked an arm tentatively into the air.
“Yes?” Nelson said.
“Uh…nothing, sir.”
“Nothing? You mean you don’t have an answer?
She cleared her throat and pushed a strand of straight pale bangs from her eyes. “No, sir; I mean ‘nothing’ as in nothing separates us.”
“That’s an interesting point of view. Would you care to elaborate?”
The girl shifted in her seat and tightened her grip on her notebook.
“What I mean is that they’re more like us than us than they are different from us. I mean, they’re different in degree but not in kind, you might say.”
Nelson raised his left eyebrow. “Nicely done, Ms. Davenport—I couldn’t have put it better myself.”
Lee smiled. For all his arrogance, Nelson was always ready with praise for students who asserted their own opinions. Lee had never really studied Dahmer’s face before, but now, seeing him closely, he looked lost, so lost, like a little boy abandoned by his parents—which, of course, he was.
Nelson cleared his throat. “Mr. Dahmer was not an alien, a scientific oddity, an exotic species of some kind—a mutation, a marsupial, or a manta ray.”
He paused and looked at Ms. Davenport, who gazed up at him with rapturous devotion.
“Alike in kind,” he mused. “I want you all to consider Ms. Davenport’s felicitous phrasing. We are all alike in kind—even the most degraded, despised, or dispossessed.”
He walked back to the slide projector and picked up the remote again. A click and Dahmer’s face disappeared and was replaced by a colorful illustration. Two interwoven strands—one red, the other blue—climbed like vines around one another, twisting in and out in perfect symmetry.
“This is what we all share: DNA, the double helix, the structure of life as we know it. Or perhaps this is only the starting point, and everything we are cannot be reduced to ink stains on a piece of paper.” He clicked again, and a symmetrical, dark-on-white design appeared—a black splash of ink that Lee recognized immediately as a Rorschach blot.
“What is this?” Nelson asked, stroking his chin. “A butterfly? Or maybe an anvil? Or do some of you see a manta ray? Or a uterus? How about a dead body? If you do see a dead body, are you a serial killer in the making? Or maybe the serial killer is so repressed that he’s the one who sees the butterfly?”
He seated himself on the edge of the desk and swung his right leg back and forth. “Flaubert famously said, ‘Madame Bovary, c’est mois.’ In order to write about a character, a writer insinuates himself into the character’s mind—slips into his skin, as it were. The criminal profiler must do the same, like the actor who becomes the character he plays.”
The theater had certainly lost a gifted actor when Nelson turned to a career in psychology. With his forceful personality, resonant voice, and charisma, Lee