“Why would you think that? You don’t know me,” I answered.
“You took care of Beryl. As a rule, women are more intuitive, more compassionate than men,” he said.
Perhaps it was that simple. Perhaps Hunt was here because he believed I would not humiliate him.
He was staring at me now, a wounded, woebegone look in his eyes that was on the verge of becoming panic.
He asked, “Have you ever known something with certainty, Dr. Scarpetta, even though there is absolutely no evidence to support your belief?”
“I’m not clairvoyant, if that’s what you’re asking,” I replied.
“You’re being the scientist.”
“I am a scientist.”
“But you’ve had the feeling,” he insisted, his eyes desperate now. “You know very well what I mean, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think I know what you mean, Al.”
He seemed relieved and took a deep breath. “I know things, Dr. Scarpetta. I know who murdered Beryl.”
I didn’t react at all.
“I know him, know what he thinks, feels, why he did it,” he said with emotion. “If I tell you, will you promise to treat what I say with great care, consider it seriously and not– Well, I don’t want you running to the police. They wouldn’t understand. You see that, don’t you?”
“I will very carefully consider what you have to say,” I replied.
He leaned forward on the couch, his eyes luminous in his wan El Greco face. I instinctively moved my right hand closer to my pocket. I could feel the rubber grip of the revolver against the side of my palm.
“The police already don’t understand,” he said. “They aren’t capable of understanding me. Why I left psychology, for example. The police wouldn’t understand that. I have a master’s degree. And what? I worked as a nurse and now I’m working in a car wash? You don’t really think the police are going to understand that, do you?”
I didn’t respond.
“When I was a kid I dreamed of being a psychologist, a social worker, maybe even a psychiatrist,”
he went on. “It all came so naturally to me. It was what I should be, what my talents directed that I should be.”
“But you’re not,” I reminded him. “Why?”
“Because it would have destroyed me,” he said, averting his eyes. “It isn’t something I have control over, what happens to me. I relate so completely to other people’s problems and idiosyncrasies that the person who is me gets lost, suffocates. I didn’t realize how dramatic this was until I spent time on a forensic unit. For the criminally insane. Uh, it was part of my research, my research for my thesis.”
He was getting increasingly distracted. “I’ll never forget. Frankie. Frankie was a paranoid schizophrenic. He beat his mother to death with a stick of firewood. I got to know Frankie. I very gently walked him through his life until we reached that winter’s afternoon.
“I said to him, ‘Frankie, Frankie, what little thing was it? What pushed that button? Do you remember what was going through your mind, through your nerves?’
“He said he was sitting in the chair he always sat in before the fire, watching the flames burn down, when they began whispering to him. Whispering terrible, mocking things. When his mother walked in she looked at him the way she always did, but this time he saw it in her eyes. The voices got so
loud he couldn’t think and next thing he was wet and sticky and she didn’t have a face anymore. He came to when the voices were still. I couldn’t sleep for many nights after that. Every time I’d close my eyes I’d see Frankie crying, covered with his mother’s blood. I understood him. I understood what he’d done. Whoever I talked to, whatever story I heard, it affected me the same way.”
I was sitting calmly, my powers of imagination switched off, the scientist, the clinician deliberately donned like a suit of clothes.
I asked him, “Have you ever felt like killing anyone, Al?”
“Everybody’s felt that way at some point,” he said as our eyes met.
“Everybody? Do you really think so?”
“Yes. Every person has the capacity. Absolutely.”