“Physically … a monster?”

“Physically, mentally, spiritually—any way, every way, whatever way. Do you think he’s a monster?”

“He did kill six people.”

“Six monsters. Which makes him a hero, right?”

“Why do you think that all his victims were monsters?”

During this dialogue the camera had been zooming in very gradually, like an intruder on tiptoes, as if to explore the slightest tic or wrinkle in their faces.

Jimi Brewster’s eyelids were quivering without quite blinking. “Easy. You piss away a hundred thousand dollars for a car—a fucking car—you are, de facto, an evil piece of shit.” His voice was intense and accusatory and seemed, like everything else about him, less mature than his chronological years. He looked and sounded more like a troubled member of a high-school chess club than a man in his late thirties.

“An evil piece of shit? Is that the way you felt about your father?”

“The great surgeon? The fuckface money-grubbing piece-of-shit surgeon?”

“Your father. You still hate him as much now as you did back then?”

“Is my mother still as dead now as she was back then?”

“Sorry?”

“My mother killed herself with sleeping pills he prescribed for her. The great genius surgeon. Who got his genius head blown off. You want to hear a secret? When they called me to tell me, I made them repeat it three times. They thought I was in a state of shock. I wasn’t. I was in a state of such pure joy that I wanted to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I wanted to hear the news again and again. It was the happiest day of my life.” Brewster paused, radiating excitement, fixated on Kim’s face.

“Aha!” he cried. “There it is! I can see it in your eyes!”

“See what?”

“The big question.”

“What big question?”

“Everybody’s big question: Could Jimi Brewster be the Good Shepherd?”

“As I said before, that idea never occurred to me.”

“But it’s there now. Don’t lie. You’re thinking, ‘All that hate. Was it enough hate to blow away six pieces of shit?’ ”

“You said you had an alibi. If you had an alibi—”

He interrupted her. “Do you believe that some people can be physically in one place and spiritually someplace else?”

“I … I’m not sure what that means.”

“There are Indian yogis that people have reported seeing in two different places at the same time. Time and space may not be what we think they are. I seem to be here, but I might also be somewhere else.”

“Sorry, Jimi, I don’t really—”