Ted Dekker: The Bride Collector

“I choose beautiful women,” Brad said, staying in the killer’s role. “Tell me why without thinking too much.”

She stepped up beside him. “Because you’re jealous.”

“I kill out of jealousy, why?”

“Because you were made to feel ugly.”

“If killing beautiful women makes me feel better about myself, why don’t I abuse the bodies?”

Nikki hesitated. She had been the first to employ this form of rapid response, plumbing the mind for thoughts that sometimes only surfaced in a form of pressured speech.

“You let them have their beauty but take their soul.”

“Why do I take their soul?”

“You need it to make you beautiful on the inside.”

“Why do I drain their blood?”

“Because the blood is their life force. Their soul.”

“No, I take their blood to make them beautiful,” he said.

Another hesitation. Brad felt a trickle of sweat break from his hairline. It was all conjecture at this point. Nikki stepped into the role of interrogator.

“Why do you drill their heels?”

“Because it’s the lowest point in the body, largely unseen, so it doesn’t spoil their beauty.”

“Why do you need to kill seven beautiful women?”

“Because seven is the number of perfection. The number for God.”

“Do you fear God?”

“Yes.”

“Are you religious?”

“Deeply.”

“Are you a Christian?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you Catholic?”

“No.”

“Protestant?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They’re all liars. Unable to live the life they suggest others live.”

“But you, on the other hand, live the truth?”

“All of it. That’s what makes me special. That’s why I kill, to be true to myself.”

“Why seven women?”

“I told you, because seven is a perfect number.”

Cycling back provided a thread of intellectual honesty that mirrored normal interrogation techniques. A simple aid to both of them.

“Okay, let’s talk about how you choose your victims. Why-”

“They’re not victims.”

“What are they?”

“I’m not hurting them.”

She paused, probably because he hadn’t answered her questions.

“Why is Eden lost?” she asked.

“The beauty of Eden is lost. Innocence was corrupted.”

“Where is intelligence centered?”

“In the mind. Innocence was lost in the mind.”

“Are you the serpent?”

“No.”

“Who smashed the serpent’s head?”

“She did.” Brad nodded at the wall of crime scene photographs.

“She hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not the serpent. Are you the serpent?”

“No. Not always.”

“Why do you kill her?”

“So that I can kill again.”

Only that’s not what Brad meant to say. He lifted his hand, considering the response.

“Kill again, or live again?” Nikki asked. “‘She will rest in my Serpent’s hole. And I will live again.’ His poem seems to indicate that he’s doing this so that he can live again.”

“I meant to say live again.”

They both stared at the confession posted on the wall.

“But if he’s playing the role of the serpent in this self-fulfilling tale of his, it does stand to reason that he kills so that he can live as the serpent and kill again,” Nikki said.

“It does.”

She looked at him. “So then, Temple could be right. We’re looking for a delusional schizophrenic who’s suffered a psychotic break.” She swept a long strand of dark hair from her cheek and absently touched her neck where it met her jaw. Long, delicate fingers, French manicure.

He had always found Nikki’s attention to seemingly insignificant detail appealing. She lived her life with passion; truth be told, with far more energy than he could usually muster. Running an hour every day to bring stability, she said. Putting in long, twelve-hour days. She seemed to have energy left over to keep up an active nightlife, if all the stories were true, and he had no reason to think they weren’t.

Their relationship had always remained purely platonic. There were times when Brad regretted his avoidance.

“Maybe,” Brad said. “We established last night that he was probably psychotic.”

“You might have, but I’m not convinced. A mentally ill serial killer is atypical, short of mental illness caused by severe trauma to the frontal lobe through a head injury. Otherwise, nearly all pattern killers are middle- to high-income earners, are good looking in general, and usually articulate. Nearly all kill out of either a sexual compulsion or a need for revenge. In both cases, most have been severely abused by their mothers and are reacting to that abuse through some ritualistic act, which relieves their compulsion for gratification or revenge. Environment, not psychosis, forms most serial killers. This is not the profile of the mentally ill.”

He knew all of this, naturally, but investigative work was an exercise in rehearsing details, coaxing new truth from them.

“And yet the note indicates delusions of grandeur, which is a form of psychosis.”

“Yes,” she said.

He looked at the drill, pacing. “His killing doesn’t appear to be sexually motivated. It’s ritualistic. He’s courting delusions of grandeur. He’s intelligent. He’s killing so that he can kill again, because in his mind, unless he carries out his role, he can no longer play that role and live.”

“Right,” she said. “And whatever that role is, it’s not the role of executioner or punisher. He thinks he’s serving his victims well. He’s loving them.”

They stood in silence for a full minute.

“So. We take an exhaustive look at the mental health facilities in the Four Corners state hospitals,” Nikki said. “Residential care facilities, nursing homes, state prisons, convictions involving the mentally ill… That’s a ton of data.”

“Frank’s got six agents buried in the data already. We’ve put in a request for additional assistance from the field offices in Cheyenne, Colorado Springs, and Albuquerque. I’ve asked him to cross-reference the confession with all related databases. He left the note because he wants us to find something.”

“Agreed.”

He put his hands on his hips and studied the walls. “Meanwhile, we have the mysteries hidden here, in his place of work.”

Nikki nodded. “You ever get tired of it?”

“Fieldwork?”

“Trying to see past what a person allows you to see.”

An odd choice of words. “Can’t say that I do.”

“I mean, think about it, we all have our mysteries, right? We live our lives letting people see only what we want them to see. It takes years, even in a marriage, to know someone. Not that you’d know that, Brad.”

She’d said the last part with a good-natured smirk.

“Even then,” she continued, “how many spouses are eventually blindsided by some deep, dark revelation about the person they thought they knew?”

“No argument here,” he said, hoping he’d avoided the whole morass. “Everyone hides something.”

She nodded. “Classic existentialism. In the end the human being is alone. We are all confronted by our own complexity, which we try to unravel, but all the while we’re confronted by our own isolation. This is what we eventually learn. It’s why so many lean on faith, a relationship that isn’t dependent on another human being.” She crossed her arms and studied him. “So how about it, Brad? What mysteries are you hiding?”

At first he wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. They’d always been candid with each other, but never probing. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about it.

“I don’t mean to pry,” she said. “Not too deep, anyway.”