Let there be no delusions, I am not a good investigator. I’m smart and I can see things others can’t, but I don’t have any patience. Also, I lack the drive actually to spend time putting a puzzle together. This new decision that our attacker was a woman was just information to me. I had some questions, but they were obvious questions. For instance, once drugged, how was she managing to get them to wherever she was planning to go with them? Dead weight is dead weight and people are awkward to move. It always looks easy in the movies, but a living person doesn’t get rigor mortis, they remain flexible. Wrapping people up in a carpet is also not a fast and friendly way to dispose of a body. The carpet helps with the flexibility issue, but you still have to put the person in it, roll it up, seal it, and then drag it.
Once, I had done something akin to rolling a person up in carpet to transport them. This was not the sort of information one shared with just anyone and that included members of the SCTU. They would have questions and the answers would expose more truths about people in my life than I cared to share. I rarely kept secrets, but this was a secret worth dying over.
Therefore, I said nothing and munched on a muffin. The fact that I had thought about murder and continued to eat a muffin as if I had been thinking about the morning crossword said all sorts of things about me, none of them good. However, I was past my identity crisis. The difference between Patterson and me might have been splitting hairs to some people, but to me, they were as different as galaxies. One day, that solitary incident might catch up to me. It might not either, and I was willing to let it rot in the ground.
Fiona brought up the biggest question, which led to some serious brainstorming. The drugs in the guys’ systems were memory altering. They would be in a weakened state, possibly incapacitated completely. She wanted to know how a woman would be able to lug these men around as much as I did. Everyone looked at me and I shook my head. Physically, I was closer to a psychopath than a sociopath, but there was no way I was getting away with dragging drugged men around, even in the French Quarter. It was a huge hole in the theory.
The other problem was the Los Angeles thing. The killer taking tattoos as trophies had definitely been killing people, so why change just to maiming them now? It made no sense. Worse, it seemed unlikely even a psychopathic female could get close enough to gang members to kill them and cut off their tattoos. Most gang members were mentally damaged. Those higher up in the hierarchies were mostly sociopaths and psychopaths.
Gangs worked like any other societal circle. They entered for whatever reason and then you rose in the ranks depending on your ability to fit in and comply. Killing people didn’t necessarily require you to be a sociopath or a psychopath, every day people did do it, but it wasn’t easy if you weren’t mentally different. Even in survival situations, the average person still suffered from guilt, remorse, and depression. The peer support and pressure to new recruits in gangs helped ease their guilt and remorse, until they eventually became sociopaths or psychopaths with Borderline Personality Disorder. At that point, they would no longer feel either of those emotions, which allowed them to rise to the top of the hierarchy.
Holes were a problem for my logical mind. I needed something to fill them in. With this case, there wasn’t anything. The person who killed in Los Angeles wasn’t doing it in New Orleans now. I had no idea what that person was doing. I didn’t even remember a case file from the database that resembled it. I made a mental note to look into it and then typed it into the notes function on my phone. Everyone looked at me as I did it.
“What?” I asked.
“You snorted,” Gabriel said.
“Sorry,” I shrugged, not remembering it. I wondered if Xavier’s experimental migraine treatments were causing something like blackouts.
“Do you have any thoughts?” Gabriel asked.
“Lots, but not many about this case. I do not know how she is doing it. She was not doing it in LA or if she was, it was not being reported. The LA tattoo keeper was killing victims. She is not because she has not worked up to that yet,” I told them. “When we have a dead body, we might learn something new. Her choice of murder weapon will be interesting.”
“We’d like to prevent finding dead bodies,” Gabriel reminded me.
“True, but a dead body does make it easier to catch a killer. Right now, she is sort of in Limbo Land for me. I cannot figure out if she is deranged or damaged, or just an average girl with a very serious grudge.” I put my phone down and looked at him. “I cannot think like her. In my mind, it is easier to kill them than take their tattoos. Living people flop and scream. The only reason not to kill them is to make a statement, but the statement is lost on me. I do not do causes.” This was true. I had once received a piece of mail telling me that Only I Could Save the Giant Panda From Extinction. I’d sent a check. If more was required, I was going to miss pandas, but they were going to go extinct. Like most sociopaths and psychopaths, there were few things on the planet that could hit my passion button. Learning and catching killers, that was it. Everything else was nothing more than a fleeting interest and heaven forbid I have to expend any energy on it. If one thought about it, sociopaths and psychopaths were incredibly dull people. We didn’t have hobbies, not really. Malachi had his X-Files fascination and catching serial killers, that was it for him. His real personality was like chalk, bland. Mine too for that matter. My only saving grace was a desire to learn everything I possibly could. I was still struggling with figuring out what the universe was expanding into and how people functioned as people, but the rest of it could be nicely figured out by reading the right books, watching the right documentaries, and good old fashion observation. Knowing a lot meant I could talk about a lot, which made me more interesting. Malachi talked about aliens and serial killers when he wasn’t trying to get in some girl’s thong. I didn’t even have that going for me. I didn’t understand sex either. I had tried it, once, and it hadn’t been all that interesting and had required a lot of energy. By the time we were done with foreplay, I was bored out of my brains and the night had ended with him taking a cold shower alone and me going to my apartment wondering what all the fuss was about. “Okay, so what if it is sexual?” I suddenly blurted.
“You rarely think killings are sexually motivated,” Lucas pointed out to me.
“That is because they rarely are. Just because a killer gets off on it does not mean it was motivated by sex, it just meant the killer enjoyed it. Nyleena treats cheesecake like serial killers treat victims. However, maybe the taking of flesh is some sort of symbolic sexual thing.”
“Symbolic sexual thing?” Xavier smiled at me.
“Yeah, like,” I thought for a minute. I had no idea. “Well, I don’t know, like a foot fetish or something. She uses the flesh to masturbate or something.”
“Do you know anything about sex that didn’t come from a book?” Green asked me.
“Yes,” I answered. I considered pointing out that I owned an adult toy, but was worried they might ask me how often I used it. Since it was still in the packaging, I didn’t want to answer that question. I tried really hard not to outright lie. It was a bad habit for a sociopath to adopt. For a while, Nyleena had thought being asexual was a phase I’d grow out of. She was still somewhat shocked that I hadn’t. Honestly, most people found it stranger that I was asexual than that I was a sociopath. Our society was doomed. “Plus, sexually motivated would explain why I am completely in the dark about the end game to mutilating people. If it was just for giggles, there are easier ways to do it. Since she is not killing them, they are not exactly trophies. Also, she is settling at times for birthmarks and scars. There are plenty of tattooed men on this planet that she should not have to settle for the other. Meaning that it has more to do with the guy than with the physical deformation of their skin. Serial killers only get that picky when they are symbolically killing someone they hate and cannot kill, or when they have a sexual motivation. That is why most killers are motivated by killing, not sexual gratification. Getting off on it is a side effect of the endorphin rush that gets released by killing someone.”
“But not all serial killers have an orgasm when they kill,” Lucas pointed out.
“That is because some serial killers do not respond to the endorphin rush with a physical reaction,” I answered. I didn’t. There was no sexual thrill. The endorphins that flooded my veins did not flood my loins. Instead, it was a mental reaction. I felt like a god when I had to kill someone and the endorphins put me in a state of euphoria unlike any other on the planet. Euphoria was hard to achieve, especially as a sociopath. However, voicing that was like explaining what the universe was expanding in to. Normal people were able to experience euphoria when good things happened, I’d seen it on their faces at the birth of a child or grandchild or a promotion or a new house. Sociopaths and psychopaths did not get euphoric from such pedestrian events. Dying or almost dying could do it, which was probably why I enjoyed busting down doors when I knew the serial killer was on the other side armed to the teeth.
“A sexually motivated female mutilator,” Xavier said. “Damn, the world is going to hell. That’s our third female this year.”
“And when she gets a taste for more than just the removal of tattoos, it is going to get messy, again. She might be in this for the skin, but taking skin is messy. I believe when she starts killing, it will be bloody,” I told him.
“Why can’t women go back to poisoning people and men go back to using hatchets?” Xavier asked.
“Women’s liberation,” I said. This got me a few stifled giggles. Even Fiona found it funny. She grew a little more likeable all the time.