The Perfect Husband - Lisa Gardner [35]
“In addition to VICAP, the FBI is providing profiling support. Here with us today is Special Agent Quincy, who you just saw on film interviewing Jim Beckett. He’s going to tell us what to look for. Agent.”
Lieutenant Houlihan stepped away from the podium. No one stirred. Police briefings could be rowdy affairs, punctuated by gallows humor and good-natured ribbing. Not this morning. Every officer sat quietly, feet flat on the floor, eyes forward. The seriousness of the matter was etched into every face and the fresh lines creasing each forehead.
Special Agent Quincy stepped up to the podium. He could identify with the officers staring back at him; he’d served as a homicide detective in Chicago and then with the NYPD before getting his doctorate in criminology and joining the Investigative Support Unit at Quantico. Now he worked over one hundred cases at a time, traveling two hundred days a year to profile unsubs, advise local law enforcement agencies on how to catch the unsub, and aid with interrogation of the caught unsub. It was stressful work. One wrong piece of advice and the investigation could head in the wrong direction, costing lives. It was hard work, logging eighty hours a week and thousands of miles. Even when he was back in Quantico, he was shut up in a windowless office sixty feet belowground. Ten times deeper than the dead, they said.
It took its toll on everyone’s life. First his wife had complained about the travel. Then she’d complained about his hours. Then one Saturday, when he’d made a point of being home, she’d accidentally sliced off her finger while chopping carrots. She’d walked into the living room, carrying her index finger and appearing one step away from fainting. Quincy had looked at her bloodied hand and severed digit, and he’d thought of the Dahmer crime scene, the Vampire Killer, Kemper’s victims, and he’d heard himself say, heaven help him, “It’s only a scratch, dear.”
The divorce papers had arrived last week.
But Quincy still couldn’t give up his work. Jim Beckett had been wrong in the interview; FBI profilers did understand about passion, obsession, and compulsion.
Quincy began: “Jim Beckett is a pure psychopath. Most of you out there probably think you know what that means. I’m here to tell you that you don’t. Forget what you’ve read in the papers. Forget what you’ve seen in the movies. I’ll tell you what to look for and we want you to focus on that. We know this man. We knew him when he killed the first victim, and we knew him when he returned six months after his first disappearance to kill his wife. We knew him in prison and we know him now. Working together, we’re going to get him.
“Beckett is a master of disguise. His high IQ and natural charm enable him to blend into almost any situation. Two and half years ago he successfully hid from one of the largest manhunts in New England history for six months. We still don’t know where he hid or how he did it. The bottom line is, forget what he looks like. From here on out, he’s the unidentified subject, the unsub. And like any unsub, we can catch him without a physical description. We can catch him because of who he is. That’s the one thing the unsub can’t change.
“All right. Our unsub is a thirty-six-year-old pure psychopath. This means he is highly compartmentalized. On the one hand, he is perfectly aware of community standards and norms. He knows how to fit in, how to be successful, and how to make people like him. He’s charming, outgoing, and self-assured. On the other hand, he considers himself outside of societal norms and above anyone he meets. He has no feelings of guilt, remorse, or obligation. He lies easily and is obsessed with appearance. He has a powerful sex drive and in fact, for all his outward disdain toward women, he is dependent