Page 84 of What Boys Learn

I texted Robert:Check the news. Police think they’ve found the killer. His name is Christopher Weber.

I hit Send and then stared at my own text.Think they’ve found.

I wanted to take it back. To delete that wordthink.

29

Iwas ill at ease, sitting down with Curtis in his office a half hour later. He’d dragged in a third armchair and it was a snug fit.

“You’re welcome to stay,” Curtis said to Benjamin. “There’s nothing I’m going to say to your mother that I wouldn’t also be willing to discuss with you.”

“I’d rather not.”

Today we’d be doing the full debrief Curtis had promised and I knew that once we dug into the details, little else would seem to matter. Not wanting to forget, I rustled in the inner pocket of my laptop bag for the thumb drive, past several other thumb drives, coins, and lip balm. Curtis took it and slid it into his pocket with barely a nod, eyes still on Benjamin.

“I agree with Dr. Campbell,” I said to Benjamin. “You’re old enough to hear whatever he has to say.” Benjamin was looking down at his hands on his knees. “Or, if you prefer, you could go sit in the car.” I pulled the keys from my pocket. “Just don’t—”

“Go anywhere,” Benjamin completed my sentence. “Obviously.” He directed his irritated gaze to Curtis. “See how she doesn’t trust me?”

Curtis smiled. “If she didn’t trust you at all, I don’t think she would have handed you a set of car keys.”

When we were alone again, Curtis said, “Thanks for bringing me a coffee.” He picked up the thin brown envelope of MRI scans. “We have a lot to cover—”

“I just heard some important news that will factor into Benjamin’s case. They found the person who is responsible for the deaths of Izzy and Sidney. Evidently, he was a former inmate of an institute for troubled teens near Madison.”

“I know,” he said, taking a moment to adjust the coffee sleeve and take an agonizingly slow sip. “The car wreck happened in the middle of the night and the institute was informed by law enforcement within hours. They contacted all researchers and former staff, knowing we would get ‘gotcha’ calls from the media.”

“So you worked there, at some point.”

He looked at me with a bemused smile. “I’ve mentioned it to you. It’s the preeminent institute of its kind in the country. My affiliation is in my bio. It’s no secret, Abby.”

“Were you . . . shocked?”

“Shocked that a psychopath would engage in high-risk behaviors that would lead him to drive his car off the road?”

“Another car was involved.”

“I would assume that Christopher was a reckless and aggressive driver. Maybe he pissed somebody off. It’s all part of the profile. Shall we get back to today’s priority? Let the authorities be happy that there’s one less recidivist psychopath in the world.”

I was taken aback by both his brazen attitude and his word choice. “I didn’t expect you to call him a psychopath.”

“We both know it’s a problematic word, but we also know what it means. Antisocial personality disorderwith psychopathic traits. The institute wasn’t founded to serve that kind of person per se, but that does represent our population. We do extreme interventions with violent, intransigent individuals. None of it is secret. We get a lot of press.”

His sober expression failed to mask his pride.

“I know you can’t talk about him in detail, because he was a client. But why do you think he picked Sidney and Izzy? Was it just about sex and then his plans went awry, or do you think he planned to kill them from the start?”

“Theoretically? People like Christopher explore fantasies and decide when they’re ready for fantasy to become reality. We often see that with serial killers.”

“The newspapers didn’t label him a serial killer.”

I was still resisting that phrase and all of its tawdry associations.

Curtis shrugged. “He died young. Two known victims. With more time there would have been others.”

He was speaking matter-of-factly, just as Robert spoke about criminals. It bothered me more than it should.

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s a common pattern. Those first flawed kidnappings. The break-ins that stop short of murder. The not-quite rapes, especially in the case of a tentative individual without a lot of real-life experience, where women are involved. Even for those killers motivated by sexual gratification, there’s a lot of variety.”