The skies were gray and the streets were wet from washing when Benton and I drove through downtown on Walnut Street a little past seven the following morning. Steam rose from grates and manholes, the morning damp and cool. The homeless slept on sidewalks or beneath filthy blankets in parks, and one man looked dead beneath a No Loitering sign across from the police department. I drove while Benton went through his briefcase. He took notes on a yellow legal pad and thought about matters beyond my ken. I turned onto Interstate 76 West, where taillights were strung like red glass beads as far ahead as I could see, and the sun behind us was bright.
“Why would someone pick a bathroom as a point of origin?” I asked. “Why not some other area of the house?”
“Obviously, it means something to him, if we’re talking about serial crimes,” he said, flipping a page. “Symbolic, perhaps. Maybe convenient for some other reason. My guess is that if we’re dealing with the same offender, and the bathroom is the point of origin that all of the fires have in common, then it is symbolic. Represents something to him, perhaps his own point of origin for his crimes. If something happened to him in a bathroom when he was a young child, for example. Sexual abuse, child abuse, witnessing something terribly traumatic.”
“Too bad we can’t search prison records for that.”
“Problem is, you’d come up with half the prison population. Most of these people come from abuse. Then they do unto others.”
“They do worse unto others,” I said. “They weren’t murdered.”
“They were, in a sense. When you are beaten and raped as a child, your life is murdered even if your body isn’t. Not that any of this really explains psychopathy. Nothing I know of does, unless you believe in evil and that people make choices.”
“That’s exactly what I believe.”
He looked over at me and said, “I know.”
“What about Carrie’s childhood? How much do we know about why she’s made the choices she has?” I asked.
“She would never let us interview her,” he reminded me. “There isn’t much in her psychiatric evaluations, except whatever her manipulation of the moment was. Crazy today, not tomorrow. Disassociating. Depressed and noncompliant. Or a model patient. These squirrels have more civil rights than we do, Kay. And prisons and forensic psychiatric centers are often so protective of their wards that you would think we’re the bad guys.”