Henry watches her intently, as if curious to see her reaction.
“Congratulations,” she says, sitting a little straighter in her chair. She won’t give him the satisfaction of surprise. Henry blinks, but his expression does not change.
“How are you, Beverley?” he asks after a while, with a tilt of the head, as if he pities her. She is not here to be pitied. She is here to find outwhyhe did what he did.
She knows she is going to have to flatter him, to use her own weakness, her fragility, to make him think he is the one with the power. Her cheeks tremble slightly as she draws them into a smile. “I need your help.” She swallows again, watches for his reaction.
“Sure,” he says without hesitation, but she sees something strange flicker across his face. “Whatever you need.” He clasps his hands together and places them on his knee.
How can it possibly feel as if he is toying with her when he is the one behind glass? She glances at the guard waiting in the corner of the room. He looks half asleep, linked fingers resting on his convex belly. The woman at the far end has ceased her sobbing and has moved on to apology, palm flat like a starfish against the glass.
Beverley leans in, lowers her voice. “There’s someone killing women around Berryview.”
Henry’s fingers suddenly unlace, and his boot thuds to the floor.
“Are the kids okay?”
She won’t be drawn in. “I want to try to learn about him.”
Henry looks confused. “You don’t know who it is, right? Or are you in here to tell me my uncle Marvin’s been misbehaving?” That empty bravado again. Always with the jokes, deflections.
“I want to know about the sort of person this killer might be.”
He raises his thumb and forefinger and wipes at each dry corner of his lips. Then he looks up at her and she is pinned, once again, by those eyes. “Bev, I’m not a headshrinker.” He smiles.
“No, but you are a killer.”
His smile becomes wider then—but there’s a chill to it, as if he’s resentful of being bested. He reassembles his features. He always was so conscious of how he appeared.
“Go on, then,” he says, waving a hand. “Try me.”
She doesn’t pause for breath or to give him the opportunity to change his mind. She tells him about the girls, Cheryl, Emily and Diane. She tells him of the ways in which Cheryl and Emily were killed, the ritualistic nature of their murders, the posing, the props, the arrow, the tattooed knuckles. She tells him how she went into his study and found his road maps, how the locations of the cases all intersect at one very specific part of the interstate. The whole time, Henry watches her intently, his eyes never leaving her face.
“So, what do you need me for? Sounds like you’ve become some sort of detective since I got locked up.” He forces another laugh, a fox-like scrape.
She leans back in her chair, tries to mirror his posture. She is sure she has read about this technique in a book somewhere. Mirror someone; it makes them trust you.
“I want to know aboutyou. I want to know why you did what you did.”
He doesn’t tell her to stop as she had expected him to.
“How did you choose your victims?” she asks.
He smiles and does not blink, watching her for a while. His hand goes to the back of his neck, scratches. He seems reluctant, at first, to answer, and she wonders if that is because he cares about what she thinks or because he has become accustomed to lying.
“I just went for whoever was easiest,” he supplies eventually, with a shrug.
“Easiest?”
“Yep. Whichever house looked easiest to get into, wherever there wasn’t a man home.”
Beverley looks briefly to the floor, wonders if she is strong enough for this. But then the faces of Henry’s victims appear in her mind’s eye, the women he killed. Some of them mothers. One girl in her teens. A housewife in her forties. All of them had tried to fight back, every single one, but given Henry’s strength, they never had a chance.
“You watched them?”
“Yeah.” He says it as easily as if he is talking about a ball game. “For a while. Just to check there was no boyfriend or anything.”
She recalls evenings he spent out of the house, returning late, telling her he’d had a job that went on too long, or that his boss had called him into the warehouse for a meeting. Was this what he was really doing? Watching women? Checking whether they double-locked their doors at night, whether they left windows cracked in hot weather, whether their yards were easy to access?
