1
Tobias
Dr. E. Tobias Eastman sat in an uncomfortable Queen Anne chair covered in a garish floral pattern, a wan smile plastered on his face as he pretended to listen to the man across from him justify the killing of an innocent girl. Tobias was a master at disguising his disgust. Nobody who looked at him would ever know he was hiding his own perverse thoughts—not about some poor innocent girl, but about the monster in front of him.
When he’d started his practice years ago, he’d had the noblest of intentions. Learn how the predator thinks to keep others from becoming a predator, too. Over the years, it had become clear that, for some of his clients, this was no longer therapy; it was story time, a way to gleefully unburden themselves while knowing Tobias was bound by doctor-patient confidentiality. They weren’t sorry. They weren’t repentant. They weren’t looking to be saved. They just wanted to flaunt their crimes, attempting to victim-blame while shedding fake tears with the smallest of smirks on their lips.
Patrick Killeen was one of the worst. Killeen liked to think of himself as a modern day “Whitey” Bulger, but, in reality, he was a high level mafia enforcer often tasked with the wet work that came from pissing off the mob. While he had a body count that rivaled some of the most notorious killers in history, he was happily married, living in a sprawling estate home with two kids in Ivy League schools and a wife who taught Sunday school every week. It was that dichotomy which kept Tobias interested in Paddy Killeen. Not the murders, not the impulse control, but the way the man somehow moved seamlessly between two worlds. Did Paddy’s wife know he was a secret monster? The man said he suspected, but like most of the wives in that line of work, they tended to look the other way as long as the checks cleared.
Tobias couldn’t fault her, he supposed. His own mother had also reached absurd levels of denial, standing by Tobias’s father with a level of smug repudiation that only came from humiliation and an inability to hold oneself accountable. Hell, his mother had denied the truth even after his father had confessed, desperate to hold onto her reputation within the community, sure that a haughty demeanor and her father’s last name were all that were needed for people to step over the bodies buried in their sprawling backyard.
“Hey, Doc. You with me?”
Tobias cut his gaze to the freckle-faced man with his easy smile and thinning red hair. He looked like a million other guys who could be found cheering the Red Sox and drinking a beer at the bar. The guy who could hold court, somehow making the most mundane stories seem fantastical. He was an everyman and he looked out of place on the fifteen-thousand-dollar overstuffed sofa. Everything about the man’s house was off-putting, from the large columns to the frescoes on the wall. Their designer had clearly found inspiration in their local Cheesecake Factory, and it set Tobias’s teeth on edge.
“Yes, I’ve heard every word you’ve said. I’m simply considering my recommendations. Clearly, the work we’ve done on impulse control hasn’t quite taken root, so perhaps we should talk about some anger management techniques.”
Killeen grinned, revealing teeth that could have done with braces in his teen years, his watery blue eyes cold. “That’s the thing about you brainiac types. You think that you can mumbo-jumbo your way out of your impulses. But it’s not true, Doc. I kill people because it’s my job, sure, but I love what I do.”
That grin made Tobias picture knocking each one of the man’s crooked teeth out with a hammer, but he ignored the visceral pleasure those images brought him. “The dancer you strangled… Was she a job?”
Killeen shrugged. “No, but she had a mouth on her. Trust me, nobody’s gonna miss her. Those broads are a dime a dozen, Doc.”
“She was somebody’s daughter,” Tobias reminded him.
Killeen shifted his position, crossing beefy arms over an equally muscular chest. “Why are you busting my balls over this? I had a little slip. It happens.”
Tobias steepled his fingers in his lap. “I’m not here to hold your hand or make you feel better. I’m here to figure out what your triggers are so that I can keep you from accidentally firing at innocent people.”
“Yeah, all right. All right. Sorry, Doc. I’ll do better next time,” Killeen said, still smiling like a shark.
* * *
“I’ll do better next time.”
Tobias gave a smile and a jaunty wave to the housekeeper, who was vacuuming as he left. She frowned at him and turned away, like he was the odd one in that house. Maybe she had some kind of sixth sense about people. Tobias knew how to move through society, was well versed in not only what made somebody “normal” but forgettable. While most kids had played video games or watched cartoons, Tobias had sat in front of the mirror, practicing what it was like to be a human. Not just any human, the best human. Perfect attendance, perfect grades, perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect son.
But it was all bullshit.
The locks disengaged on Tobias’s Volvo, and he opened the door, tossing his messenger bag in the passenger seat. He rode with the windows down, Beethoven’sMoonlight Sonatawafting melodically from his windows as he drove the distance from Killeen’s home to his apartment in Somerville.
Once inside, Tobias was on autopilot, removing his Brooks Brothers loafers and hanging his messenger bag on the coat rack before moving deeper into his home. “Mantis,” he called out.
The sound of tiny nails scratching over hardwood made him smile, and when the teacup Yorkie appeared, he scooped her up mid-stride on his way to the bedroom. He stopped short in his doorway, sighing at the crime scene before him. The small stuffed chihuahua Mantis had picked out at the pet store yesterday was no more. Its white fluffy entrails littered the floor, the husk of its skin laid out like a small bear skin rug, the button eyes missing.
Tobias gave a disapproving look to the ball of fluff in his hands. “We’ve talked about this, missy. No more toys if you can’t keep from maiming and killing them for more than twenty-four hours. You lack discipline.”
Mantis smiled at him, tongue lolling out of her mouth, as she panted happily, clearly proud of her kill. She was a weird little dog. It was why he’d kept her. Anomalies fascinated him and she was definitely an anomaly. He dropped her into her dog bed, retreating to his closet to hang up his work clothes, pulling on a black t-shirt and athletic shorts before punching a code to a door at the back of his closet, a rather extravagant purchase made with his inheritance money.
While most people had secret panic rooms, Tobias had a rage room. He closed the door behind him, enjoying the brief tomb-like silence as he looped the wrap over his thumb and began the rhythmic process of wrapping his knuckles. Once done, he opened and closed his fists, testing the give on his fingers before hitting a button on the surround sound, letting the throbbing rage of Norwegian death metal wash over him as he was finally able to shake off the husk of the somewhat ridiculous person he pretended to be on the other side of that door.
He gave the hundred-pound heavy bag a slight push, testing his footwork before starting a jab and cross combo to get his heart rate pumping, finally letting himself think about the things he couldn’t be trusted with out there in the real world. Things like his work, his near-death experience, meeting a group of killers who killed for vengeance as much as pleasure. It was fucking with him. All of it. Jab. Jab. Cross. Hook. No matter how many combos he laid on the bag, how much he panted, muscles burning, skin glistening with sweat, he couldn’t seem to lay his thoughts to rest.
Tobias wasn’t stupid. He knew there was no helping these poor dumb creatures; they were nothing more than slaves to their impulses. But they didn’t know that. They couldn’t know. They had to think he found something redeemable about them, even when it couldn’t be further from the truth. If he was honest—when he was honest—with himself, there in that room, he could admit that they weren’t patients, they were subjects. Unwitting subjects in a research project Tobias had started when he was barely old enough to understand things such as quantitative data.
Tobias gave a roundhouse kick to the bag, and took the brunt of the impact to his knee when it swung back, causing him to grunt in pain. He’d had countless subjects, forced them over time to answer hundreds of pre-selected questions over hours and hours of ‘therapy’ sessions, all in the hopes of answering a question no other criminal psychologist had ever managed to answer before:
What made a killer?
