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BECKETT: Sure. Ed’s a big guy. Six nine and three hundred pounds. That’s a hell of a lot of psychopath. I work out everyday here, you know. I’m up to bench-pressing three-fifty. [Beckett pulls up sleeve and flexes for camera.] Impressive, huh? But I still got a ways to go to catch Ed.

QUINCY: Ed’s IQ is also 145, did you know that?

BECKETT: He’s a real Renaissance man.

QUINCY: He killed ten people as well. Is that why you decided to write to him? His victims were closer to home though—his grandparents, his mother, and her best friend. . . .

BECKETT: Yeah, Ed’s read a little too much Freud. All he talks about is how much he hated his mother. For God’s sake, he attacked her with a claw hammer, decapitated her, then raped her corpse. It’s time for him to move on. Have you heard about the larynx?

QUINCY: I read the interview notes.

BECKETT: Now, is that irony or what? Poor, bed-wetting, traumatized Ed is jamming his mother’s larynx down the garbage disposal as a last symbolic act, and the disposal jams and throws the bloody voice box back up at him. Ed says, “Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me. I couldn’t get her to shut up!” That’s one of my favorite stories.

QUINCY: Did your mother bitch at you? Was she demanding?

BECKETT: My birth mother was a weak, pathetic hypochondriac without an intelligent thought in her head. When she dropped dead, she merely fulfilled her own prophecy.

QUINCY: Your father?

BECKETT: My father was a good man, don’t bring him into this.

QUINCY: Would he be ashamed of you now, Jim?

BECKETT: For what?

QUINCY: I think he would be, Jim. I think you know that. I think Jenny Thomson really got to you.

BECKETT: Who?

DIFFORD: You know who the hell he’s talking about, Beckett. Little Jenny Thomson. The seventeen-year-old from Enfield. The girl whose head you cut off.

QUINCY: You didn’t decapitate anyone else, Jim. Only her. You also let her get dressed after you had raped her. I think she shamed you. I think she told you that she was driving home from visiting her dying father in the hospital. That he needed her, she was his last reason to fight for life. That she loved him very much. But she’d seen your face. You had to kill her. So you did, but you didn’t feel good about it, not like the others. The others you looked in the eye, but not Jenny. She was manually strangled from behind, but even then you didn’t feel right about it. You were troubled and you were angry because you didn’t want to be troubled. So you cut off her head, classic depersonalization. You hid it under a pile of leaves, not able to look at her. You left her body covered, not exposed like the others. But you still felt shame, didn’t you, Jim? Every time you think of her, you feel shame.

BECKETT: No.

DIFFORD: You’re shifting in your seat, Jim. You don’t look so comfortable anymore.

BECKETT: My leg’s fallen asleep.

DIFFORD: Sure, Jim.

BECKETT: I saw Jenny’s father in the hospital.

QUINCY: What?

BECKETT: The nurses never put it together, did they? I went to the hospital. I wanted to see if her father was really there, if he was really dying. You can’t trust what a woman says, particularly once you have her. They’ll say anything if they think it will save their life. So I checked up on it.

I found him in an oxygen tent in intensive care, Mister Quincy. He wasn’t allowed visitors, but I told the nurses I was working on his daughter’s case and I had good news for him. Of course they let me in. Young nurses. One of them was quite beautiful but she was a brunette.

I leaned over until I could press my face against the oxygen tent. And I told him how beautiful his daughter was and how wonderfully she’d screamed. I told him she’d begged for her life and she’d prayed to God, but God hadn’t saved her. She belonged to me and I took her. He died the next day.

You want to know what makes me, Mister Quincy? If you want to understand me, forget the mommy-hating or the bed-wetting, animal-torturing, fire-starting triad you guys developed. It’s so much