The Perfect Husband - Lisa Gardner [31]
BECKETT: I didn’t panic.
QUINCY: Your uniform was ripped, wasn’t it? You’d left semen in her body and were vulnerable to DNA matching. People had probably seen you pull her over. What to do next?
BECKETT: I wrote her ticket, of course.
QUINCY: Yes, that was good. You got into your car. Gave a status report and said you were continuing on. But you didn’t continue on. You hid your police cruiser, then you returned to the scene. You dressed the victim, you placed her in her car, covering her with the blanket from your trunk so it looked like she was sleeping. You needed to hide her body, but you can’t drive too far away because how will you get back? So you drive her car into the nearby lake, knowing the water will do your dirty work for you. If she’ll just stay in the water four, five days . . . It’s hard to gather evidence from a floater.
BECKETT: Particularly after a year.
QUINCY: You got a good break, didn’t you? The woman is listed as missing, your superiors call you in to ask since you gave her a ticket. You handle it cool as a cucumber, all paperwork appropriately filed—
BECKETT: I already said that half the fun was reporting to shit-for-brain lieutenants who never suspected a thing.
DIFFORD: Son of a bitch, we caught you in the end!
BECKETT: Ten bodies later . . . that you know about. But, Quincy, I’m still not impressed. So the first murder was unplanned. So the body was dumped in a lake to cover the crime. That’s all logic. Tell me something cool. Tell me something that will send goose bumps up my spine.
QUINCY: The night you killed the first victim, Lucy Edwards, your wife was in the hospital, giving birth to your daughter. That was the stress you couldn’t handle, Jim. The birth of your daughter.
Pause.
BECKETT: Too easy. You have the date on the ticket, so you know she disappeared that day.
QUINCY: That doesn’t mean she was killed the day she was last seen. You know it’s impossible to accurately pinpoint the time of death of a body that’s spent a year underwater.
BECKETT: It’s still just logic.
QUINCY: No, it’s statistical odds, Jim. All killers have a triggering event. For disorganized killers, it’s generally the loss of their job or a major confrontation with their mother. For organized killers like you, birth of their first child rates right up there. The new addition to the family, the financial strain—particularly for a police officer who was already living beyond his means. Your arrogance is your Achilles’ heel, Jim. You want to think you’re unique. You want to think you’re the best, but really, you’re just like all the others. And we can profile you the same way we profile them, by looking at what the others did.
Pause.
BECKETT: Then you don’t need to talk to me, do you?
QUINCY: It’s not the what we’re trying to figure out, Jim. It’s the why. You killed ten blond women, beautiful, loving, caring women. What drives a man to do such a thing?
BECKETT: You mean watch a woman beg for her life, snap her neck, then go to the hospital to see his newborn daughter? That was a good night, you know. Have you ever met my daughter, Samantha? She’s a beautiful little girl, bright too. Tell him, Difford. You know Sam. Sam is the best thing that ever happened to me.
DIFFORD: And if the world has any justice, she’ll never know who you are, Beckett. Theresa told her you were dead. She even bought a grave marker. You have a pink marker, Beckett. What do you think of that?
BECKETT: You’re bitter, Lieutenant.
QUINCY: Jim, why did you kill those women?
BECKETT: They were immoral, godless sluts who deserved to die.
DIFFORD: He’s lying. He doesn’t have a religious bone in his body.
BECKETT: Laughter. For a change, Difford’s right. But I get so bored with the my-mother-toilet-trained-me-at-gunpoint excuse.
QUINCY: Did you hate your mother?
BECKETT: Which mother? Adoptive or biological? Actually, it doesn’t matter. Neither of them was worth hating.
QUINCY: