Her shoulders slumped. “Me neither.”
She gazed out the foggy window for a long moment before lifting a finger to trace a drop of water as it created a path through the haze.
“May I ask how you found me?” Thomas asked, taking a sip of his lukewarm coffee.
She was quiet for a long moment, stirring the carbonation out of her soda. “When I realized my son wasn’t…normal, I started researching. The usual stuff at first, but the more I tried to find help for my son, the clearer it became that there was nobody with any kind of definitive answers on my problem.”
She wasn’t wrong. “How did that lead to me?”
Calliope’s gaze met his. “It didn’t. At first. Then I found Dr. Molly Shepherd. Her research on sociopaths was groundbreaking but purely theoretical. So, I hacked her files and found…you.”
Molly Shepherd. She was the reason his whole project existed, the reason for the entire experiment. The reason he was raising seven psychopathic sons to become killers. He supposed the correct term would be vigilantes. Dr. Shepherd didn’t approve of his methods, but she kept track of his research just the same. They all did.
“Me?” Thomas asked.
“Are we going to do this the whole time?” she asked. “I know who you are. I know what you’re doing. I know what your sons are. I know who they are and where to find them. I know your bank account info, your social security number. I know the color of the last pair of underwear you bought.I know.Please, stop wasting our time.”
Before Thomas could question the validity of her statements, she slid a piece of paper towards him. On it was his social security number. Was that proof she had what she said she did? No. But why would he doubt her when she clearly knew more than anybody else?
“How can I help you, Calliope? If you’re looking for somebody to take your son, that’s not how I work.”
Calliope looked at him with wide eyes. “What? No. I-I’m not trying to give you my son. I’m asking for help. I need to know how to take care of him. How to keep him from growing up to be a monster.”
That was the thing about psychopathy. There was no real way to keep them from becoming whoever they would be. Not all psychopaths were murderers. In fact, most weren’t. But that didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous, that they were good people. Psychopaths were born weapons. Thomas just made sure those weapons were pointed at those deserving of whatever fate they received.
But he couldn’t tell any of that to her.
Thomas leaned in. “We don’t diagnose psychopathy in children.”
She thrust her jaw forward, crossing her arms over her chest. “Yet, somehow, you have a household full of child psychopaths.”
Okay, she wasn’t wrong. But he hadn’t specifically set out looking for psychopaths, just children who were showing psychopathic tendencies. “Have you had him evaluated?”
Calliope hesitated before nodding. “Yes. Like you said, they don’t diagnose children, but I know they see it. Even if they won’t say it. The last therapist he had…whatever he said to her, she refused to see him again after that. Do you know how fucked up you have to be to scare off a child therapist in our neighborhood?”
Thomas didn’t. He didn’t even know where her neighborhood might be. But he believed her. She looked like somebody who wasn’t used to feeling helpless. Her frustration was evident in the draw of her mouth, the exhaustion behind her eyes.
“Can you give me specifics?”
She shook her head in a sort of helpless motion. “He has no empathy…for anybody. No impulse control. His rage is instantaneous. When other kids piss him off, he reacts fast and with violence. A little boy stole his truck on the playground, and Dimitri shoved him off the jungle gym. The boy broke his arm in two places. I watched my son pick up his truck and begin playing again like there wasn’t a boy screaming in agony a foot to his right.”
Thomas understood the woman’s concern, but the boy was young. Kids compartmentalized. They were often selfish and possessive of toys. “Anything else?”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “He set our neighbor’s bed on fire.”
Thomas’s eyes went wide. Arson. That was a bad sign. “Tell me what happened.”
“There’s a little boy next door. Small. Shy. Really quiet. Dimitri has developed a kind of fixation on him. He’s very protective. The boy’s always got bruises on him. After what happened on the playground, I thought maybe Dimitri was hurting him.”
Thomas’s tone was grim. “Was he?”
“It was the boy’s father. Dimitri stayed over there for a sleepover after a soccer match. It was him and a few other boys. While the other boys were sleeping, he poured nail polish remover on the parents’ bed and set it on fire. They were still in it.” She stabbed her straw into the ice in her soda. “How does a five-year-old even know how to do that?” she said, giving a humorless laugh.
“And the police didn’t step in?” Thomas asked.
“The man didn’t press charges because he only had a small burn on his leg, and he obviously didn’t want the cops to get a look at the bruises on his son. I lucked out, I guess.”
Thomas sighed. “The arson is concerning, but it’s encouraging that he did it in retaliation for injuries inflicted on another person. Any abuse of animals? Bed wetting?”
