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I roll my sleeves halfway up my arms, buttoning the cuffs around my elbows. The tattoos are visible now, and I catch a few students staring before they remember themselves.

I’ve heard it enough times that I look like I should be on the other side. The kind of man they expect to see in a case file instead of at the front of a classroom.

What they don’t know is that it all came later. After the mistakes, and after the violence.

The scars and the tattoos didn’t mark the angry young man, they buried him.

All I can think about is how not true this is. The worst criminals I caught were not what they thought they looked like. Stupid brains teach stupid things to their kids and stupid things happen because of that. Most of them think the criminal mind is something distant, exotic almost. Like a switch that flips randomly.

Monsters, not people.

They haven’t learned yet that no one wakes up violently one morning. It’s erosion, years of pressure, neglect, learned anger, and small justifications that pile up until something gives up.

I won’t teach them how to catch criminals. I’ll teach them how people break.

I see it before anyone says a word. Legs bouncing beneath desks, fingers worrying at sleeves, shoulders drawn tight. Fear, apprehension, confusion, curiosity, trying to mask itself as confidence.

A few of them sit too still, overcorrecting, others lean forward without realizing it. They don’t know yet that their bodies speak long before their mouths do.

I clear my throat as I click on the remote. The projector hums, illuminating a grid of photographs: all the victims of the serial killer who was never caught.

The Chain Poet.

The students lean back, reassured by the “Closed” label, and they think the case is finished.

“Look closely,” I say. “What do these victims have in common?”

A hand twitches in the back, the student looks confused and hesitant, maybe because he’s scared of giving a wrong answer. “Uh… maybe… they all lived in the same city?”

I tilt my head, studying him. “Close,” I say. “But no. Not close enough.”

The student nods, trying again. “They all went out on weekends?”

I shake my head. “Observe more carefully. Notice patterns, not guesses.” I take a deep breath before continuing, “This class is Applied Behavioral Profiling. You’ll learn to see details most people miss. I’m Mister Caldwell, and today I want to evaluate all your answers before we move forward. Pay attention because every detail matters.” I click to the next slide. “This course isn’t about fictional scenarios. You’ll work on closed cases, with real people, real patterns. The files are sanitized, but the behavior is genuine. This is how people break, how killers operate, and how cases unfold.”

I’m not a teacher, never have been. But I know what I’m doing. I’ll teach them the way I learned, by seeing it, noticing it, and surviving it.

“Based on these pictures,” I say, clicking again, showing a slide of notes and pictures from the crime scenes, “How did profilers back then describe the perpetrator?”

A pause follows, pen hover, and a few students glance at each other.

“Older maybe?” one mutters.

“Solitary too?” another adds, eyes meeting mine.

I raise an eyebrow, crossing my arms. “Okay, keep going, what else?”

A hand twitches in the back, “Old, solitary and paranoid?”

“Possibly,” I reply. “But you need to think about behavior, not just labels, it’s too generic.”

I switched to the historical profiler’s notes from the team who worked on this case years ago. “Mid-forties, living alone, avoid attention. Meticulous and socially withdrawn. Do you all agree?”

A quiet and soft voice from the middle row says, “No.”

I look up, searching for the person who just replied, and she meets my gaze, swallowing audibly before looking up at the screen behind me again.

Long raven hair, sad eyes, and a pen in hand as if she was doing something before I interrupted her with this lesson and she got curious enough to follow.