They were coming across a bridge over a reservoir on Interstate 25 outside of Shoshoni, Wyoming, at around eight thirty the next morning when Kit in the Nissan Armada’s passenger seat closed her laptop.
There were a couple of large cardboard coffee cups with bucking broncos on them in the drink holders from a place near their hotel called the Cowboy Coffee Company. Leaving just after six, they wanted to get a jump on things so instead of sitting down for breakfast, they just grabbed some coffee and takeout.
Gannon watched as Kit lifted one of the cups out and took a sip.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Gannon said.
“Sorry,” Kit said. “I haven’t said anything for an hour, have I? I’m just rereading the autopsy report.”
“Rereading it?” Gannon said with a squint. “I thought you were memorizing it.”
“I know, I know,” Kit said, laughing. “Sometimes I start digging in and I look up and it’s the next day. Dennis was funny. He would say, ‘Earth to rain woman. Come in, rain woman.’”
Gannon looked out the windshield on the left, where a mesa-like landform was slowly rising up out of the flat horizon as if it were coming up out of the ground.
It reminded him of a crude arcade game he had played as a kid where you were a prism-like tank on an endless horizontal battlefield made of straight green lines.
That’s what driving in Wyoming is like, he thought, yawning. Flat and straight-edged as vintage Atari.
“I read in the paper your partner was a cop before he became an agent,” Gannon said. “Where again? In Boston?”
“Yes. He was in charge of Boston Homicide. How about you? How long were you a cop?” Kit said.
“Thirteen years,” Gannon finally said. “Five as a detective.”
“And you said you did thirty murders? Wow, that’s a lot in five years.”
“Five years. Are you kidding? I worked in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the middle of a gang war. Most of the thirty I did was in only eighteen months. They were shipping us in and out like it was Vietnam.”
Kit shook her head.
“That’s an incredible volume. That’s what? One every two weeks?”
He nodded.
“It was busy all right. A real bloodbath but practically all of them were drug-related. No serial killers. How about you? How did you become a serial killer investigator?”
“I was a field agent in LA for about five years, and I was looking for a change and the slot came up. I’ve been doing it for about seven years,” she said.
They drove on for another mile.
“You know, I’ve always wondered why serial killers actually do what they do,” Gannon said, glancing out at the open fields.
“Making light conversation, are we?” Kit said with a smile.
Gannon laughed.
“Exactly. Weather, sports, torture, murder. Polite small talk is my specialty.”
Kit took a sip of her coffee and looked at him.
“Dennis actually taught me a basic working theory he had come up with that I’ve found helpful. Would you like to hear it?”
“Definitely,” Gannon said.
“Let me ask you a question first. Why do you think they do it?”
“I don’t know,” Gannon said, glancing at her. “Some folks are born nuts?”
Kit shook her head.
“No,” she said. “Dennis thought most of the complex psychiatric and psychological and even neurological theories are just a bunch of TV show flimflam. It’s really not that complicated. Most serial killings, like most mass shootings, hell, like most crimes in general, are merely acts of societal revenge.”
“Societal revenge?”
Kit placed the laptop back in her bag as she nodded.
“Though no one really talks about it, when we are children our first entry into society is often quite brutal. Peers that are put together, especially males, away from the eyes of adult authority will immediately create animalistic pecking orders based on strength, natural social acceptability and competence. Handsome, tall, strong, confident children will be at the top of the human ladder of prestige and those who are less so will be relegated to its bottom rungs.”
“So you’re talking about childhood bullying?” Gannon said.
“Bullying,” Kit said and laughed. “Dennis said he loved when people talked about bullying like it’s a bad habit that can be curbed. He especially laughed when people talked about stopping it. As if human beings could stop assessing and outdoing each other.”
Kit took a sip of her coffee.
“Every face that we look into we measure and judge. All of us do this. Where there are groups of people, there is bullying. Bullying is just a ham-handed strategy of climbing up the human pecking order ladder. Since to be more socially accepted is to have a better chance of surviving and thriving, social positioning isn’t just a hobby or something that some mean snot-nosed punk does to make fun of a skinny nerd. It actually lies at the core of everyone’s existential human nature.”
“Come on. We’re not that monkey-like, are we?”
Kit folded her hands in her lap as she gave him a small smile.
“In every game—even a casual game of, say, cards, checkers, Monopoly, you name it—who wants to win?”
“Everyone,” Gannon said.
“Exactly. Everyone,” she said. “Now, who wants to lose?”
“No one,” Gannon said, looking at her.
“Precisely. It’s embedded in the depth of our nature to want to win, to be better than others. It’s one of the major prime directives built into nearly everything we do. For example, do you ever get tense as you approach the checkout line at the supermarket? Or feel an inordinate amount of joy when a new slot opens and the clerk says you’re next? That’s your primal human nature aching to score the best spot over everyone else there.”
Gannon laughed.
“You’re right. I actually have felt that. But how did you know? You profilers can’t read minds, too, can you?”
“Not quite,” Kit said with a small smile.