Page 33 of Two Kinds of Stranger (Eddie Flynn #9)

Logan

Logan sat in his rental car outside the clinic, waiting for the man to come out.

He took out his phone and opened the photo album.

It was a picture of a refrigerator door, with bills and final demands pinned to it with magnets.

The photo had been taken last night, in Grace’s apartment.

Rent, tuition fees and electric – Grace was behind on everything.

She had come back into the kitchen after using the bathroom and they had enjoyed a coffee together.

It had felt awkward. Logan liked Grace. Last night, sitting beside her on her old couch, he knew what could happen next. It was a question of who would make the next move. Logan had felt sweat on his forehead. His heart rate was up. His stomach churned, and not just from the bad coffee.

She was beautiful, sweet and somehow remarkably innocent. Something in her eyes captivated him.

Logan had felt confused on that couch. Not about the situation. This was an internal conflict.

Sitting there, listening to Grace talk about her love of books, he couldn’t help but wonder what she would look like in bed, asleep, with the morning sun’s first rays falling across her face.

And yet another part of him wondered whether her eyes would still have the same glow after he had strangled the life from her body.

Sitting on that couch last night, he had blinked and cleared his throat, as if this might help clear his mind.

It didn’t work.

Images flashed before him.

The two of them in bed. Grace’s soft hair on his shoulder, her breath on his cheek and her fingers stroking his bare chest. He could almost feel the softness and the warmth of her.

And then the image was replaced by one of shock on her face as Logan grabbed her throat and squeezed.

He shook his head, as if he had been trying to dislodge that last image from his brain.

‘It’s funny, you know?’ said Grace. ‘Where I grew up, I could walk for a mile and not see a single other person on the road. Here, I’m just surrounded by millions of people, but the difference is at home I never felt like I was alone. I never had that feeling until I came here.’

His heart was beating way too fast, the pulse loud in his ears along with a single thought – God, we are so alike.

She understands me. I understand her. We feel the same way.

The connection with Grace made him feel like he was a puzzle piece that never quite fitted together with the rest, and it wasn’t until he’d met her that he realized she didn’t fit in either, but together everything made sense – together they fitted.

It was a joyous moment for Logan. But also terrifying.

‘I’m sorry. I have to leave,’ he said.

He watched the surprise register on her face.

‘Oh, you have to be somewhere now?’

‘It’s not that,’ said Logan, getting up and moving to the kitchen. He poured his coffee into the sink and rinsed his mug, then placed it on the drainer.

‘It’s just, if I stay here, I don’t know what might happen between us,’ he said.

Grace said, ‘Wait, you don’t have to go. We can just talk if—’

‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t . . . I don’t really date. Things are moving fast. I’m going to be busy for a few days with work. Maybe I can call you at the weekend?’

She got up from the couch and followed him to the hallway.

‘Look, I’m sorry if I said something to offend you or—’

‘No, Grace,’ Logan said firmly. A trickle of sweat ran down his left temple, onto his cheek.

He was breathing hard now, fighting the urge to take her head in his hands.

For what reason he didn’t yet know. Either to gently draw her into a passionate kiss, or violently twist her head, snapping her vertebrae.

‘You are just . . . perfect, Grace. And I will call you. The truth is I like you. I like you so much that I don’t want to do anything tonight that might mess this up.’

Her confusion and slight irritation seemed to disappear with those last words, as if she understood. She smiled.

Logan didn’t want to kill Grace. He knew that.

The images of her death were simply his subconscious warning him.

He could not remember having had such a special evening before.

Even though he had just met this woman, he had watched her from afar for a long time.

His feelings for her were somehow supercharged.

It was more than a crush, or any base desire.

If he were not a sociopath, he might simply surmise that he was experiencing the first flush of love.

And it frightened him.

The memory of his hasty exit from her apartment brought heat to his neck, and he found himself clenching his jaw. Logan stared at his phone, at the picture of bills and final demands on her fridge and decided then to help Grace with her problems.

Logan loved solving all kinds of problems.

When he was a child, he never really understood toys.

He once caught his mother looking at him strangely.

He was in kindergarten, surrounded by other boys and girls who were involved in roleplaying games – making up their own stories as they ran around with plastic unicorns, soldiers, fluffy animals or wearing cowboy hats or long scarves, which doubled as the veils of a princess on her wedding day.

Logan had sat in the middle of the floor, bewildered by the goings-on around him, unable to see the attraction of inventing stories or living in a fantasy world.

He couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do that when the real world was so fascinating.

While the other children played, Logan sat with his puzzle books.

He could read and complete simple math problems from the age of three.

The problems came from a book that had a shiny red apple on the cover, one which Logan thought was particularly juvenile.

One day, when he was much older, he found his father’s sudoku book.

It was only half completed, and he finished the rest of the book in a single afternoon.

When his father came home from work that night, he grabbed the book from the coffee table and showed it to him. Logan expected his father to be pleased. He wanted him to be proud. Something that Logan had not yet experienced.

Logan had completed twelve puzzles to finish the book.

That night, his father lashed him with his belt twelve times.

One for every puzzle. That was his father’s way.

No emotion. No love. Nothing but pain. His father wanted Logan to know that he shouldn’t take things that didn’t belong to him.

The twelve bloody welts on his back were a reminder for a month or two.

So Logan did his own puzzles. Crossword puzzles were a new challenge, but he found, as he grew older and read more, and his vocabulary expanded at an exponential rate, he could decipher the clues more easily.

Logan was perhaps fourteen years old when he realized that there was a greater mystery out there in the world. Something that had baffled the world’s greatest minds for centuries. The problem was understanding the human mind. Why do people do the things that they do?

Why did his father beat him so much?

And why didn’t his mother care?

His father was a banker, and his mother held parties in the house that he wasn’t allowed to attend. He understood their so-called social roles, but he couldn’t figure out why they didn’t love him.

What determines human behavior? It wasn’t an equation that could easily be written down, nor was it a cryptic, or linguistic question.

Numbers, letters and words – these things were tools that he could easily use.

People were what ultimately confounded him.

And at that age, and ever since, his lack of understanding of people, their emotions and behaviors, had led him into isolation.

He could stand in the middle of the schoolyard, surrounded by hundreds of his fellow students and classmates, and feel totally and completely alone, like an alien that had just landed on earth.

His comprehension of science, mathematics and language far exceeded most of the school faculty, yet he could not understand why girls sometimes giggled as he passed them in the hallway, why the boys were obsessed with sports, nor why music played such a huge part in all of it.

Logan didn’t get it.

There had to be a process, a method, an approach, some tactic or way of understanding other people.

In high school, he bought his first book on psychology.

It was an old, out-of-date textbook he’d found in the Strand Bookstore.

That night, he’d read it cover to cover.

All two hundred and thirty-eight pages. When he’d finished, it was almost dawn.

He’d made a mental note of some of the names that had kept cropping up in the text – Freud, Adler, Wundt, Jung, Pavlov, Skinner, Thorndike and Piaget.

It was a night he would never forget. He felt as though he had found a key to what he had been looking for all his life.

A way to understand the people around him.

Most of the book dealt with something called mental disorders, or diseases of the mind.

But there were other sections that simply talked about behavior and why people do the simplest things, why they make the same mistakes.

This subject was a map he could follow. The names of those psychologists were markers along his route to knowledge and understanding, not just of other human beings and wider society, but also a mirror through which he could look deeper into himself.

For Logan had read something in that book, a chapter about a category of people known as sociopaths.

According to the book, and backed up later by further reading, these people did not have a mental illness, although some had symptoms of mental disorders including narcissism and a lack of empathy.

Logan knew that night that he was reading about himself.

And he was reading about his father.