Tape recorder. Crime scene reports.
“So, where to first?”
“Ed’s apartment. Due diligence.” He smiled, before adding:
“Historians like going over and over the same thing. So retrace the cops. Then …”
He stopped. Then was a notion he wasn’t ready to explore. Yet.
9
A Second Conversation
Jeremy Hogan knew there would be a second call.
This belief was not based so much on the science of psychology as it was on instinct honed over years of trying to understand the why of crimes instead of the who, what, where, when that routinely bedeviled police detectives. If this killer is truly obsessed with me, he won’t likely be satisfied with a single call—unless he has it all planned out, and my next breath is my last. Or close to last.
He racked through his memory, picturing killers of all stripes. It was a gallery of scars and tattoos, a cavalcade of ethnicity—black, white, Hispanic, Asians, and even one Samoan—of pale men who heard voices and grizzled men who were so cold that the word remorseless seemed an understatement. He remembered men who writhed in their chairs and sobbed as they told him why they had killed and men who had laughed uproariously at death as if nothing could be a bigger and funnier joke. He could hear echoes of matter-of-fact murder reimagined as littering or jaywalking, reverberating off cinder block cell walls. He could see harsh, unshaded prison lights and gray steel furniture bolted to the cement floors. He could see men who grinned at the thought of their own execution and others who shook with rage or quivered with fear. He remembered men who’d stared at him with an undeniable longing to wrap their hands around his throat, and others who wanted a reassuring embrace and a friendly pat on the back. Faces like ghosts filled his imagination. Some names popped in and out, but most were lost in the flux of remembering.
They weren’t important.
What I said or wrote about them, that was what was important.
He took a shallow breath, almost like an asthmatic’s wheezy, near-helpless pull at the air, trying to fill stifled lungs.
He admonished himself as if speaking to himself in the third person: Once you finished your assessment and wrote your report, you didn’t think they were worth remembering.
You were wrong.
One of them is back. No handcuffs this time. No straitjacket. No injection of Ativan and Haldol to quiet psychosis. No heavily muscled armed guard in the corner fingering a truncheon, or watching in an adjacent room on a television monitor. No red panic button hidden under your side of the steel desk to protect you from being killed.
So, one of two things will happen: He will want to kill you right away, because making that first call was the only trigger he needs and he’ll be satisfied with getting on with the murder. Or he will want to talk and tease and torture you, prolong the entire performance because each time he hears your uncertainty and fear it caresses him, makes him feel more powerful, more in control—and after he has stretched the limits of your fear, then he will kill you.
He will want to do everything possible to make your death meaningful.
This obvious but subtle observation had taken him several days to reach. But once it flooded him—after his initial fears had dissipated—he knew there was only one real option left to him.
You cannot run. You cannot hide. Those are clichés. You would not know how to disappear. That’s the stuff of cheap fiction, anyway.
But you cannot just wait. You’re no damn good at that, either.
Help him enjoy your killing. Draw it out and draw him out. Buy yourself time.
That’s your only chance.
Of course, he had not decided what he might do with the time he purchased.
And so, he’d taken a few steps to ready himself for the second call. Modest steps—but they gave him a sense of doing rather than sitting around patiently while someone planned his death. He made a quick trip to a nearby
“So, where to first?”
“Ed’s apartment. Due diligence.” He smiled, before adding:
“Historians like going over and over the same thing. So retrace the cops. Then …”
He stopped. Then was a notion he wasn’t ready to explore. Yet.
9
A Second Conversation
Jeremy Hogan knew there would be a second call.
This belief was not based so much on the science of psychology as it was on instinct honed over years of trying to understand the why of crimes instead of the who, what, where, when that routinely bedeviled police detectives. If this killer is truly obsessed with me, he won’t likely be satisfied with a single call—unless he has it all planned out, and my next breath is my last. Or close to last.
He racked through his memory, picturing killers of all stripes. It was a gallery of scars and tattoos, a cavalcade of ethnicity—black, white, Hispanic, Asians, and even one Samoan—of pale men who heard voices and grizzled men who were so cold that the word remorseless seemed an understatement. He remembered men who writhed in their chairs and sobbed as they told him why they had killed and men who had laughed uproariously at death as if nothing could be a bigger and funnier joke. He could hear echoes of matter-of-fact murder reimagined as littering or jaywalking, reverberating off cinder block cell walls. He could see harsh, unshaded prison lights and gray steel furniture bolted to the cement floors. He could see men who grinned at the thought of their own execution and others who shook with rage or quivered with fear. He remembered men who’d stared at him with an undeniable longing to wrap their hands around his throat, and others who wanted a reassuring embrace and a friendly pat on the back. Faces like ghosts filled his imagination. Some names popped in and out, but most were lost in the flux of remembering.
They weren’t important.
What I said or wrote about them, that was what was important.
He took a shallow breath, almost like an asthmatic’s wheezy, near-helpless pull at the air, trying to fill stifled lungs.
He admonished himself as if speaking to himself in the third person: Once you finished your assessment and wrote your report, you didn’t think they were worth remembering.
You were wrong.
One of them is back. No handcuffs this time. No straitjacket. No injection of Ativan and Haldol to quiet psychosis. No heavily muscled armed guard in the corner fingering a truncheon, or watching in an adjacent room on a television monitor. No red panic button hidden under your side of the steel desk to protect you from being killed.
So, one of two things will happen: He will want to kill you right away, because making that first call was the only trigger he needs and he’ll be satisfied with getting on with the murder. Or he will want to talk and tease and torture you, prolong the entire performance because each time he hears your uncertainty and fear it caresses him, makes him feel more powerful, more in control—and after he has stretched the limits of your fear, then he will kill you.
He will want to do everything possible to make your death meaningful.
This obvious but subtle observation had taken him several days to reach. But once it flooded him—after his initial fears had dissipated—he knew there was only one real option left to him.
You cannot run. You cannot hide. Those are clichés. You would not know how to disappear. That’s the stuff of cheap fiction, anyway.
But you cannot just wait. You’re no damn good at that, either.
Help him enjoy your killing. Draw it out and draw him out. Buy yourself time.
That’s your only chance.
Of course, he had not decided what he might do with the time he purchased.
And so, he’d taken a few steps to ready himself for the second call. Modest steps—but they gave him a sense of doing rather than sitting around patiently while someone planned his death. He made a quick trip to a nearby
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