He was curious about what the “neat thing” she was talking about might be. Penny was always upbeat and optimistic, and he was tempted to call her. But the day had left him feeling unsettled. All his professional training emphasized that reaching out and sharing his feelings was the recommended way of coping with unpleasant emotions and traumatic experiences. It was one of the most basic pieces of advice that psychologists gave to their patients—and to each other. But he didn’t feel up to speaking to anyone now, at least not about himself.
Ironically, talking to criminals didn’t bother him anymore. But that was because he shared nothing of himself with the convicts he interviewed. They were always eager to take part in studies. Some thought it might help buy them early parole. Others just liked being interviewed because even an audience of one made them feel important. The psychopaths were the most challenging interview subjects. They came from many different social, economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. But Verraday noted that there were certain characteristics that they all had in common. Chief among them was that they were cocky, self-assured, and always shifted blame for their crimes onto their victims. “She should have known better than to get in the car with a stranger,” or “Anybody who keeps that much cash around is just asking for trouble.” He had observed that psychopaths contrived to avoid first-person pronouns. They used a distinctive syntax that employed a passive voice and made the victim the subject of the sentence rather than the object so that a statement of fact like “I killed her” or “I beat him and robbed him” became “She lost her life” or “He was beaten and robbed,” so that they, the perpetrator, were strangely absent from their accounts of the crimes they had committed.
Their uniquely self-serving manner of speech had irritated him when he had first started going into prisons to interview convicted murderers for his profiling research. But Verraday was now inured to their manipulative behavior, unaffected by their bullshit, their attempts to curry favor and minimize the heinousness of what they had done. What did affect him still, and deeply, was the thought of the victims’ ordeals, their deaths or life-shattering injuries, and the toxic outcome it had, not only on them, but on their families, spouses, and significant others. He knew what it felt like to be one of those survivors, knew what it had done to his father and his sister.
Verraday strode across the living room into the kitchen and extracted a bottle of red wine from a rack, a big Cabernet from the hot, dry Yakima Valley. He uncorked it and poured himself a large glass. He swirled it around, inhaled its nose of blackberries and leather, and allowed himself the sensual pleasure that momentarily transported him away from the ugliness of the world. He took a sip of the wine and held it in his mouth a moment, savoring it, imagining he could feel the heat of the sun locked within it.
He carried the glass into the living room and, still feeling a chill despite the warm air now rising out of the vents, switched on the gas fireplace. Trying to shake off the leaden emotions that the day had left him with, he selected a book that Penny had given him for Christmas the year before last, The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Inner Peace. Penny had told him, in her blunt but affectionate manner, that it might help him with his anger and anxiety issues. His older sister had a particular gift when it came to dealing with the vicissitudes of life.