The Next Accident - Lisa Gardner [76]
Dr. Andrews had led her to the chair. He had brought her a glass of water. Then he had sat patiently on the other side of his cluttered desk, his hands folded and his expression steady while he waited for her to recover. He didn’t offer any platitudes or comforting noises. It wasn’t his style.
In his ten years at NYU, Dr. Marcus Andrews had garnered a reputation for reducing even the most brilliant Ph.D. candidates to tears with his unwavering blue stare. Speculation placed his age anywhere between sixty and older than dirt. He had thinning gray hair, a perpetual scowl, and a penchant for tweed. While in reality he was an average-sized man, trim from a lifelong devotion to yoga, he had an uncanny ability to seem four times his natural size as he stood at a podium and railed at his students to try harder, think broader, and for heaven’s sake, be smarter.
According to the grapevine, he’d started his career as a psychiatrist assigned to the fabled San Quentin prison. The work had intrigued him so much, he’d gotten a Ph.D. in criminology and made a name for himself doing groundbreaking work on the institutionalization of criminals, and how the very nature of prisons guaranteed further acts of brutality when hardened inmates were released back into society.
He was hard, gruff, and demanding. He was also brilliant, and Kimberly respected him immensely.
“Maybe you should start at the beginning,” he told her.
“No. I don’t want to go through it again. It’s painful, and I can’t afford to be in pain right now. It’s funny, I never understood how my father could come home from his job and look so composed. All the cops on TV, they came back from crime scenes and they drank, or smoked, or cursed, or raged. My sister and I, we understood that. It made sense to us. Then my father would come home again, and it was . . . He was like a pool of still water. No matter how long you studied his face, you never saw a thing beneath the surface. I get that now. The job is war. And you can’t afford any emotion. It’s your enemy.”
“What do you think your father would feel right now if he could hear you?” Dr. Andrews asked.
“He would be hurt.”
“And this person who is targeting your father, what is his goal?”
“To hurt him,” she replied, then bowed her head as she saw his point.
Dr. Andrews gave her his lecturer’s stare. “If this is war, Miss Quincy, which side is currently winning?”
“My mother hated his job.”
“Law enforcement has a disproportionately high rate of divorce.”
“No, she hated his job. The violence. The grit. The way he seemed to belong more to it than to us. She created a beautiful home. She produced two beautiful daughters. And still he’d rather live in the shadows.”
“It’s a calling. You understand that.”
“But that’s my whole point. My mother is dead and I’m sad and I’m furious but I’m also . . . motivated. For the first time in months, I feel awake. One moment I was existing in some sort of fugue state, and now . . . I want to find the bastard. I want to read the crime-scene reports. I want to trace this monster’s steps, I want to tear apart every little facet of his personality and unmask him. And I am thinking about him more than I’m grieving for my mother. Dr. Andrews, what is wrong with us?”
Dr. Andrews finally smiled, an unheard-of softening of his hard-lined face. “Ah, Miss Quincy. Haven’t you ever noticed that criminologists never do a study on criminologists?”
“We’re sick, aren’t we?”
“We’re intellectualists. Our desire to understand why things happen outweighs our rage at the events.”
“Rage is purer,” she said bitterly.
“Rage lacks constructiveness. Think of it this way: Cops are doers. They get angry at what they encounter. They make arrests. In that way, they help control crime, but their intervention is always after the fact. Criminologists, sociologists, criminal behaviorists, are thinkers. We get curious. We do studies.