Anna Leonard - The Night Serpent

That was the theory, anyway. There was no quantitative proof either way. It could all be hand-waving and luck.

Patrick had, in self-defense, come up with his own theories about sociopaths and the making thereof. Forget the psychology, the biochemistry, the sociology. Jon Patrick was a believer in intent. Not that someone chose to be a stone-cold killer, but that they always had a trigger, something to make all the parts come together from where they lay latent in every single human being.

He focused on the ritual aspect rather than the actual violence—violence was universal in the end, while the steps chosen to get there were individual. Identify a strain of ritual, and determine where that particular mind might go, criminally. Find the pattern break the pattern and prevent a killer from being born.

The problem was that, without enough distinct data points to prove or disprove his ideas, he couldn’t get anyone to take them seriously. And being taken seriously was what Agent Jon T. Patrick was all about. Being taken seriously, and getting serious results.

He was damn good at his job, though, and even if his ideas were unsubstantiated, his results were getting him some notice at higher levels; the bureau cared less about theory than they did about getting results they could use. The suits back in D.C. were marking him as a player of note, and Patrick had goals above and beyond being a field agent with nightmare memories and a passable retirement package at the end. Ambition, to him, wasn’t a dirty word.

His career, if he didn’t screw up, was looking good. It was all good.

This, though…this wasn’t good. He made a circuit of the scene, aware of the technician taking additional photographs and jotting down measurements, observations and verified facts. Good—he would need the daylight shots, too. He knelt beside the small, still bodies, careful not to disturb the black cloth or the blood splatter around it, and pulled a pair of latex gloves from a pocket, sliding them onto his hands His last girlfriend had referred to them as fingercondoms. He had been amused by that: a pity that had been the extent of her sense of humor.

“Poor moggies,” he said again, reaching out to touch one of the bodies. The flesh was firm even in death, meat and muscle over the ribs. The cats hadn’t been abused before being killed. Small mercies. But that put a different spin on the scene, and his unsub. Usually animals were tortured before they were killed. It was all about power in most cases. Power, control, authority. To kill animals that, although helpless, were undamaged, especially in such a methodical, almost ritualistic manner? All it lacked was an athame—a ritual knife—and some candles, and the press would be screaming black magic.

He didn’t believe in magic, black, white, pink or polka-dot. He did believe in the power of belief, though. Believe something, and you could take power from it. Believe in it strongly enough, and it took power over you.

Normal people with normal emotions didn’t kill small cute cuddly animals. This killer was bent at best, and possibly a textbook sociopath, working his way up to more of a challenge.

Despite the violence inherent in the act, though, Patrick got the feeling that this guy wasn’t acting out of unformed rage or irrational fear. He wasn’t striking out in any desperate attempt to be heard, or regain control or any of the usual textbook profiles. There was a cooler, more rational mind behind this. A mind with a list, maybe, or a plan.

Intent. What was his intent? What triggered him to take cats, care for them, kill them, arrange them this way and then just leave them here?

“Is this guy just your everyday boring psychonutter,” he said, sitting back on his heels and looking at the bodies. “Or is there something else going on? And if so, what? Where is he coming from, that this is a logical progression?”

What he wouldn’t give to be able to talk to this guy, to unpack his brain and see where the wires went and which ones were crossed….

A noise behind him made him look away, up and toward the door to the backroom. Petrosian and the woman—Malkin—were coming back. The cop looked a little grim around the mouth, issuing soft-voiced directions to the painfully young uniform who had been first on the scene. Ms. Malkin—he tried to read her expression, and failed utterly. It was as though a stone wall had come up, leaving him no opening to see through. Even his charm might not be enough to win her back, if he needed her help with this case.

Then she looked up, and he almost recoiled. Even under the fluorescent lights overhead, there was no mistaking the fury in those wide-set eyes. He had never bought into that whole cliché of flashing or sparkling eyes—eyes were just bits of meat and veins, and they did not shoot anything except glares.

But he would have sworn an oath that Ms. Lily Malkin’s hazel eyes filled with dangerous green sparks as she stared at the dead cats under his hand.

It was scary. It was also, he admitted to himself, pretty damn hot.

Lily had gone outside to get some fresh air. She was waiting there, watching the cops canvassing the neighborhood, when Patrick and Petrosian finally came out. It was close to 4:00 p.m., and dusk was falling. She loved winter, but getting to it…Autumn just depressed her. She shivered, crossing her arms over her chest, less from the evening chill than the inner one. The spark of attraction that had warmed her earlier was long gone.

She tilted her head, looking for the first evening star. It was an old habit from her childhood, stargazing. But no matter how many times she looked, however much she read about constellations, the sky never seemed quite right to her, the ancient drawings in the sky never familiar. She kept looking, hoping that one night the patterns would suddenly make sense to her. They never did. They didn’t tonight.

“Sorry, took longer than I expected,” Petrosian said, breaking her concentration. “I just need you to give a report, and then you’re done. Okay?”

Normally she did whatever they needed her to do, and went home, or took the cats involved to the shelter for processing. This was different. Everything about this was different. Knowing that there were people who were cruel, who could do things like that; it was different actually seeing it. Experiencing it.

It made her ingrained distrust of the world suddenly seem like a good idea, not a handicap.

“Lily?” Petrosian was watching her, his careworn face filled with regret. “I’m sorry. I needed you to go in without any knowledge beforehand….” He had apologized more to her tonight than in all the time they had known each other.

Aggie and his daughter, Jenny, had adopted three cats from the shelter, two since she had worked there. Max, a red tabby, and Wilma, a calico shorthair. He had been the one to suggest her name when the department first needed a cat expert and had been her contact person ever since then. He knew more about her, simply through observation, than even members of her own family. He knew what he had asked her to do.

“Yeah. Me, too. Sorry, I mean.” Only she wasn’t sorry. She was angry. But without knowing where to direct that anger, it weighed her down and simply made her tired. And cold. The crisp night air seemed to cut into her bones. “It’s okay, Aggie.” No, it wasn’t. It was very much not okay. But it wasn’t Augustus Petrosian’s fault. “Let’s go.”

There were two police stations in Newfield, one uptown and one down. There was a substation, Lily knew, that was closer, but Petrosian took them to the uptown station instead. Agent Patrick excused himself the moment they arrived to make a phone call, and the detective handed her over to a sketch artist, a tall, rounded woman with a ready smile and ink stains on her fingers and a smudge on her freckled snub nose that made her look too young to be working in the police department. She introduced herself as Julia, and brought Lily to a square table in a small room off the main hallway, out of the flow of traffic. There wasn’t a door to the room, but the chatter, slams and creaks of station activity flowed around them, turning into a babble of white noise.