The Perfect Husband - Lisa Gardner [33]
It’s the power of being alone with a woman and having her plead for her life. It’s the power of having her on her knees and watching her implore God to intervene. He doesn’t. She’s mine. I am the strongest, I am the best. I used to not understand the Nazi officers and what they did during the Holocaust—I respected their discipline, but I didn’t quite get them. Now I do. I’ve held a beating pulse between my fingers and I’ve squeezed. And it’s the best goddamn feeling in the world.
DIFFORD: You’re sick, Beckett. You are fucking sick.
BECKETT: Get over it, Difford. It’s guys like me who keep you employed. You were just a backwater no-name county lieutenant until I came along. I was the best thing that ever happened to your career. You should like me.
QUINCY: Jim—
DIFFORD: You’re wrong, Beckett. You’re not the most powerful person in the world. Theresa is.
BECKETT: What?
DIFFORD: You heard me. Who brought you down, who put you in jail? Face it, you married a sweet eighteen-year-old girl you thought you could control, manipulate, and terrorize to your heart’s content. But instead of simply rolling over and playing dead, she figured you out. She learned you, she fought you. She toppled the omnipotent Jim Beckett.
BECKETT: Theresa is a weak, stupid woman who couldn’t even stand up to her own father. All you had to do was raise your voice and she cowered in the corner.
DIFFORD: She kept a log on you. All the times you said you were on duty when you weren’t. All the times you came home with unexplained scratches and bruises.
BECKETT: She was a jealous wife.
DIFFORD: She tracked the mileage on your odometer. She kept a whole little book of evidence against you, writing in it secretly every night until she finally had enough to call the police. And you never suspected a thing.
BECKETT: Theresa is not that smart!
DIFFORD: She turned you in, Jim. You terrorized her, you traumatized her. You burned everything she owned, told her day in and day out that she was worthless, and still she stood against you.
BECKETT: I made her pay. Every time she takes a step now, she thinks of me.
DIFFORD: And every time you hear the cell doors slam shut, you can think of her.
Pause.
QUINCY: One last question, Jim—
BECKETT: Do you know what I dream of, Difford? Do you know what I think about every night? I dream of the day I see my wife again. I picture sliding my hands around her neck and feeling her hands flail against my chest. I envision choking her to the edge of unconsciousness. And then, while she’s lying there, staring at me helplessly, I pick up a dull Swiss Army knife and hack off her fingers one by one. Then her ears. Then her nose. And then, then I cut out her beating heart. I’ll do it someday, Difford. And when I do, I’ll mail her heart to you.
LIEUTENANT RICHARD HOULIHAN walked to the front of the debriefing room and shut off the film projector. At his signal the lights came back on and sixty-five police officers and federal agents blinked owlishly. The room held the largest task force Massachusetts had ever seen. The second largest task force had been assembled two and a half years ago for the same purpose—to find former police officer and serial killer Jim Beckett.
“Now you know what we’re up against,” Lieutenant Houlihan said without preamble. “Jim Beckett has always prided himself on his superior intelligence, and last week he demonstrated again what he can do. At nine A.M. two corrections officers escorted Beckett from 10 Block at Walpole to the Multipurpose Room where he had signed up for time to conduct legal research. The corrections officers had followed proper protocol—Beckett’s hands were cuffed behind his back, his legs were shackled, and they were with him at all times. Yet somehow he managed to slip free of the cuffs—we believe he may have fashioned a homemade lock pick—and the minute they entered the Multipurpose Room he turned on the two officers. In two minutes he beat both men to death with his bare hands. One officer managed to activate