Hannah had decided. There was something wrong with her.
She’d been stalling for a while, lying in her bed, trying to ignore the thought by debating how to spend this last week of vacation before she had to go to summer school to catch up on everything she’d missed in her junior year. There were no good movies to see. The beach was too far a drive from Kat’s downtown apartment. Besides she didn’t have a car. All her old friends, the ones she’d lost touch with, lived in the San Fernando Valley. And she hadn’t made any new ones since her life turned into a cautionary tale.
But despite her attempts to keep her brain occupied, her thoughts kept returning to the conclusion she’d reached. Finally she decided to look at the web page again. The Mayo Clinic page was specifically about antisocial personality disorder, or sociopathy. They described it as a mental disorder “in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others.” It also said they “tend to antagonize, manipulate, or treat others harshly or with callous indifference. They show no guilt or remorse for their behavior.”
Sounds kind of familiar.
Even before Dr. Lemmon started asking her questions in their therapy sessions that led down this road, Hannah had wondered why she behaved certain ways. Why had she reacted to her adoptive parents’ murders with curiosity more than horror? Why had seeing a serial killer slaughter a man in front of her and try to get her to do the same not filled her with the revulsion she would have expected? Why did the murder of Garland Moses, an old guy who had only been sweet to her, leave her with no strong reaction other than generally missing his curmudgeonly presence?
Then the last question, the one that ate at her the most, popped into her head again. How would she feel if something happened to Jessie— her half-sister, the person who’d assumed guardianship of her, her fierce protector? She’d be “sad,” of course. But would it be due to the loss of a loved one or just because of the loss of someone who made her life easier and more stable? Would she mourn the relative who was gone or merely be put out because it would make her own life harder?
Is there something truly wrong with me?
She resolved to find out. She’d taken enough science courses to know the basic rule: any theory needed to be tested in order to validate or disprove it. But how best to go about it?
There was a knock on the door and Kat poked her head in.
“Whatcha up to?” she asked casually.
“Oh, just looking over my summer reading requirements so I don’t get surprised when I start up at school next week,” she lied sunnily.
“Okay,” Kat said, apparently satisfied. “I have to head out for a case. Are you good here by yourself for a while?”
“No problem. I’ll probably just watch TV. That or see what’s flammable in your apartment.”
Kat swallowed whatever comment she intended to make.
“Sounds good,” she replied instead. “See you later.”
Kat closed the door again, leaving her with her thoughts.
That was easy.
She had lied with ease and without thought or purpose.
Is that normal?
She decided then and there that some more formal experimentation was in order. Before she could determine if her limits were standard stuff, she needed to find out what those limits were.
I wonder if I can get extra credit for this.
*
Jessie was stalling.
She’d been sitting in her car in front of Garland Moses’s quaint, one-story, mid-century Mid-City home for ten minutes. Finally, reluctantly, she got out and walked to his door. She’d been avoiding this chore for days.
Garland Moses, her mentor and friend, who was murdered by her vengeance-seeking ex-husband, had only one living relative. His niece was a pleasant enough woman whom Jessie had met at his funeral. But she and Garland hadn’t been close and she’d only come out to Los Angeles to pay her respects.
She had no interest in going through his personal effects or dealing with his estate. So she’d asked Jessie, who she knew was close to him, to take over that duty. Jessie had unenthusiastically agreed, mostly out of a sense of obligation to the man who’d taught her how to be both a criminal profiler and a semi-functional human being.
But as she stood on the man’s porch and prepared to follow his elaborate security measures to get in, she felt the urge to bail on the whole thing. The last thing she wanted to do after visiting her incapacitated, potentially brain-damaged boyfriend was go through the private possessions of a man whose death was directly attributable to knowing her.
Enough of this. You made a commitment. Keep it.
Shaking her head in frustration with herself, Jessie stepped up to the front door of Garland’s small but immaculate home. Once there, she followed the detailed instructions the lawyer had given her before her initial visit here.
She punched a six-digit code into the keypad next to the doorbell. A metal cover pulled back to reveal a small scanning device. Jessie bent down slightly and the device scanned her eyes. Then she placed her palm on a plate of glass below the scanner and waited while it read her fingerprints. After that, she whispered the words “Nickel Diner black coffee” into a speaker. Only then did the front door lock click.
Jessie stepped inside and looked around. She had conferred with Garland’s lawyer and they’d agreed that the house would be sold at whatever was close to market value. The furniture would be donated to several women’s shelters in the area.
She only had to go through his papers and personal items. Still, it was a daunting task. The last time she’d been here, a week ago, she discovered that he’d kept records on every case he’d handled, both at the FBI and later as an LAPD consultant. There were multiple banker’s boxes’ worth, most of which hadn’t been converted to digital files.
There were a few exceptions. In his safe were thumb drives with material on approximately two dozen unsolved cases, ones that clearly still troubled Garland. There was, however, only one case in which all the material, both paper and digital, was kept inside a fireproof lockbox within the safe. That case was the Night Hunter.
Jessie was intimately familiar with it. The case was taught at the FBI and in local police departments everywhere. The Night Hunter was a notorious serial killer who killed and dismembered over fifty people along the East Coast in the 1990s before Garland caught up with him. Unfortunately, the Night Hunter got the upper hand, capturing and torturing Garland for two days before the profiler was able to free himself and use the killer’s own machete against him before the man ran off into the night.
Because his identity was never determined and there were no more killings that fit the Night Hunter’s profile after that, most folks thought that he must have died from his injuries. But clearly Garland wasn’t among them. He’d never mentioned the case to Jessie but his notes on it were as recent as three months ago, suggesting that he thought the guy might still be out there somewhere. She decided that she wouldn’t be tossing any of that material.
She sat down at Garland’s desk, imagining how many times he must have settled into the comfy leather chair to muddle through a case in his head. Suddenly she felt an unexpected rush of emotion.
Since the funeral, she’d largely blocked thoughts of Garland out of her mind. It was just too painful. Her birth father was a serial killer who’d disappeared after murdering her mother when she was six. Her adoptive father and mother had been killed by that same serial killer father just a few years ago. And now, the closest she had to a paternal figure was gone too, again at the hands of someone she was supposed to have been able to trust.