Claire got out of the car and walked over to one of the patrol cars.
“So you think that he works at one of the schools?” Susan asked Anne.
Anne extracted a diet Coke from her large purse and opened it. A tiny spray of sticky brown liquid shot out in a two-inch diameter. “I don’t know.” She gave Susan a look. “And don’t start with me about the diet Coke. I know. I just have one a day. To kick-start my morning.”
“I think that warm diet Coke is delicious,” Susan lied. She pushed ahead. “So do you like profiling?”
“Yeah.” Anne smiled and took a sip of the Coke. “I’m good at it most of the time. And every workday is different.”
“How did you get into it?”
“I went to med school. I wanted to be a pediatrician. I thought they were so cool. They were always the nicest docs at the hospital. No ego. Weren’t in it for the money.”
“So you wanted to be a pediatrician so you could hang out with other pediatricians?” Susan asked.
Anne laughed and her bracelets jingled. “Basically.” She leaned her head back on the headrest and looked thoughtfully at Susan. “The first day of my pediatrics rotation, I diagnosed a kid with lymphoma. Stage four. She was seven years old. Completely adorable. One of those kids with old souls, you know? I was devastated, and by devastated, I mean crying-in-the-bathroom devastated.” Anne was quiet for a minute, lost in thought. Susan could hear her soda fizzing. Then she shrugged. “So I decided to go into psychiatry. My husband’s people are in Virginia. He got a job there and I needed one and Quantico was looking to train some women in the dark arts. Turned out I wasn’t bad at it.”
“Profiling seems like a weird field to end up in if you wanted to get away from death.”
“Not death,” she said. She licked her thumb and ran it over a tiny stain of soda spray on her black slacks. “Pity.” She glanced out the window. A kid flew by on a skateboard. She turned back to Susan. “The victims we deal with are already dead. We do what we do to prevent other deaths. We catch killers. And I don’t feel sorry for them.”
Susan thought of Gretchen Lowell. “What makes a person do this sort of thing?”
“There was this study of prisoners serving time for B and E. They asked them all the same question: ‘Would you rather run into a dog or a person with a gun?’ You know what the majority of them said?” She spun the soda can slowly in her palm. “The person with a gun. The dog won’t hesitate. The dog will rip your throat out. Every time. Eight times out of ten, you can wrestle the gun right out of the person’s hands or just walk away. Know why?”
“Because it’s hard to shoot someone.”
Anne’s black eyes were electric. “Exactly. And that’s broken in our guy. I don’t think he works for the school district. I hope he does. Because if he does, we’ll catch him. If he doesn’t, I don’t know.”
“But how does it get broken?”
She made a small toasting motion with the can. “Nature, nurture. A combination. Take your pick.”
Susan hooked her clasped hands over her knee and leaned in even closer. “But someone can break it for you, right? Like Gretchen Lowell did. How did she do that? How did she get people to kill for her?”
“She’s a master manipulator. Psychopaths very often are. She chose particularly vulnerable men.”
“And she tortured them?”
“No,” Anne said. “Much more foolproof. She used sex.”
Claire suddenly appeared at the car door. Her cheeks were scarlet. “The fucker took another girl last night.”
CHAPTER
35
A ddy Jackson’s family lived in a two-story adobe house on a terraced hill on the corner of a busy street in Southeast Portland. The house was painted pink and had a red tile roof and it looked as out of place surrounded by its Craftsman neighbors as it now did surrounded by police cars. Susan noticed a shiny black helicopter with the Channel 12 news logo on the side already circling overhead.
Claire took the cement steps that jackknifed up the hillside to the house two at a time, followed by Anne and finally Susan. It was already getting too warm for the trench coat, but Susan kept it on so she could have her notebook at the ready in one of the coat’s deep pockets. She felt sick to her stomach at the notion of walking into a budding family tragedy and she didn’t want to make herself feel worse by walking around clutching a reporter’s notebook that screamed hello-I’m-with-the-media-I’m-here-to-exploit-you. I am a serious journalist, she told herself in an effort to mollify her growing unease. A. Serious. Journalist.