Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(123)
The monster, like most killers, had once been a victim himself.
It was a textbook case: Granger had been severely abused—essentially tortured—as a child. The MPD was, in essence, a coping mechanism. As an adult, he suffered occasional, inexplicable episodes of amnesia, particularly during times of overwhelming stress.
He genuinely seemed to have no memory of anything “he” had said or done while Edie or one of the other, nonviolent alters—alternative personalities—were in control of him.
“By the way,” Annabelle cuts into Vic’s thoughts, “I hear birthday wishes are in order.”
Surprised, he tells her, “Actually, it was last month—while I was in Chicago.”
“Ah, so your party was belated, then.”
His party. This past Saturday night, Kitty surprised him by assembling over two dozen guests—family, friends, colleagues—at his favorite restaurant near Dupont Circle.
Feeling a little guilty that Annabelle wasn’t invited, he informs her, “I wouldn’t call it a party. It was more like . . . it was just dinner, really. My wife planned it.”
But then, even if Vic himself had been in charge of the guest list, Supervisory Special Agent Wyatt would not have been on it.
Some of his colleagues are also personal friends. She isn’t one of them.
It’s not that he has anything against no-nonsense women. Hell, he married one.
And he respects Annabelle just as much as—or maybe even more than—just about anyone else here. He just doesn’t necessarily like her much—and he suspects the feeling is mutual.
“I hear that it was an enjoyable evening,” she tells him with a crisp nod, and he wonders if she’s wistful. She doesn’t sound it—or look it. But for the first time, it occurs to Vic that her apparent social isolation might not always be by choice.
He shifts his weight in his chair. “It’s my wife’s thing, really. Kitty’s big on celebrations. She’ll go all out for any occasion. Years ago, she threw a party when she potty trained the twins.”
As soon as the words are out of his mouth, he wants to take them back—and not just because mere seconds ago he was insisting that Saturday night was not a party. Annabelle isn’t the kind of person with whom you discuss children, much less potty training them. She doesn’t have a family, but if she did, Vic is certain she’d keep the details—particularly the bathroom details—to herself.
Well, too bad. I’m a family man.
After Annabelle bids him a stiff good night and disappears down the corridor, Vic shifts his gaze to the framed photos on his desk. One is of him and Kitty on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary last year; the other, more recent, shows Vic with all four of the kids at the high school graduation last June of his twin daughters.
The girls left for college a few weeks ago. He and Kitty are empty-nesters now—well, Kitty pretty much rules the roost, as she likes to say, since Vic is gone so often.
“So which is it—a nest or a roost?” he asked her the other day, to which she dryly replied, “Neither. It’s a coop, and you’ve been trying to fly it for years, but you just keep right on finding your way back, don’t you.”
She was teasing, of course. No one supports Vic’s career as wholeheartedly as Kitty does, no matter how many nights it’s taken him away from home over the years. It was her idea in the first place that he put aside his planned career as a psychiatrist in favor of the FBI.
All because of a series of murders that terrorized New York thirty years ago, and captivated a young local college psych major.
“Back when I first met him, Vic was obsessed with unsolved murders,” Kitty announced on Saturday night when she stood up to toast him at his birthday dinner, “and since then, he’s done an incredible job solving hundreds of them.”
True—with one notable exception.
Years ago, the New York killings stopped abruptly. Vic would like to think it’s because the person who committed them is no longer on this earth.
If by chance he is, then he’s almost certainly been sidelined by illness or incarceration for some unrelated crime.
After all, while there are exceptions to every rule, most serial killers don’t just stop. Everything Vic has learned over the years about their habits indicates that once something triggers a person to cross the fine line that divides disturbed human beings from cunning predators, he’s compelled to keep feeding his dark fantasies until, God willing, something—or someone—stops him.
In a perfect world, Vic is that someone.
But then, a perfect world wouldn’t be full of disturbed people who are, at any given moment, teetering on the brink of reality.
Typically, all it takes is a single life stressor to push one over the edge. It can be any devastating event, really—a car accident, job loss, bankruptcy, a terminal diagnosis, a child’s drowning . . .
Stressors like those can create considerable challenges for a mentally healthy person. But when fate inflicts that kind of pressure on someone who’s already dangerously unbalanced . . . well, that’s how killers are born.
Though Vic has encountered more than one homicidal maniac whose spree began with a wife’s infidelity, the triggering crisis doesn’t necessarily have to hit close to home. Even a natural disaster can be prime breeding ground.
A few years ago in Los Angeles, a seemingly ordinary man—a fine, upstanding Boy Scout leader—went off the deep end after the Northridge earthquake leveled his apartment building. Voices in his head told him to kill three strangers in the aftermath, telling him they each, in turn, were responsible for the destruction of his home.