Ethan was holding her hand.
“That’s the point. Just do what you normally do, and we’ll get through it. Part of his process is leaving fake bullshit along with good information. We just have to determine which is which. A profile is never going to lie.”
Yeah, well, about that.
“Why is he doing this?” she asked.
He laughed.
“I knew that was coming,” he admitted. “I almost called in sick today,” he joked.
She elbowed him.
“He’s got to be doing this for a reason,” she admitted. “Men don’t just wake up one morning and decide to fabricate deaths so that they can hump a dead body.”
Ethan was amused.
“I mean, that’s a pretty picture.”
She knew what he meant.
“Seriously. Men like women, but almost ninety-nine percent of the time, they like them alive. That he doesn’t…what is his fixation on women who are dead?”
Ethan was trying to pinpoint this for her, and it wasn’t easy. Something clearly broke this person.
“Well, there’s only a few possibilities. He was born this way, and death fascinates him to the point where he can’t distinguish between a dead body and a non-dead body.”
She stared at him.
“Uh, one is cold and just lies there.”
He was aware.
“And he might prefer that since women don’t want him, or he can’t perform with women who are alive. Maybe he’s been damaged psychologically by a woman or women who keep telling him no. It’s a slippery slope, Elizabeth. I can’t diagnose him, but I can tell you that he’s doing the dirty deeds because hefeels he can’t get what he needs from a relationship. He’ll hide his true nature and never let anyone see his depravity.”
She was thinking about what he said.
“So he wants control.”
He nodded.
“He’s using them like they’re nothing, because to him, they are nothing. He doesn’t want to love them. He wants to collect them. It’s his way of having power when he feels out of control.”
Ethan pulled out his tablet, and pulled up the driver’s license photos for all of the women they had confirmed dead. Each and everyone was smiling and pretty.
“He admires their beauty, but he hates it at the same time. He takes their head because what he admires most is his ability to collect them.”
Elizabeth didn’t like this.
“He has a type,” she said. “They’re all brunettes.”
He nodded.
“He’ll want to play this with you to end your life, but he likely is intrigued because you found his cache of bodies. You are the first one, in a very long time who has.”
This posed a whole bunch of different questions.
Gene went there.
