Page 72 of Two Kinds of Stranger

What determines human behavior? It wasn’t an equation that could easily be written down, nor was it a cryptic, or linguistic question. Numbers, letters and words–these things were tools that he could easily use. People were what ultimately confounded him. And at that age, and ever since, his lack of understanding of people, their emotions and behaviors, had led him into isolation.

He could stand in the middle of the schoolyard, surrounded by hundreds of his fellow students and classmates, and feel totally and completely alone, like an alien that had just landed on earth. His comprehension of science, mathematics and language far exceeded most of the school faculty, yet he could not understand why girls sometimes giggled as he passed them in the hallway, why the boys were obsessed with sports, nor why music played such a huge part in all of it.

Logan didn’t get it.

There had to be a process, a method, an approach, some tactic or way of understanding other people.

In high school, he bought his first book on psychology. It was an old, out-of-date textbook he’d found in the Strand Bookstore. That night, he’d read it cover to cover. All two hundred and thirty-eight pages. When he’d finished, it was almost dawn. He’d made a mental note of some of the names that had kept cropping up in the text–Freud, Adler, Wundt, Jung, Pavlov, Skinner, Thorndike and Piaget. It was a night he would never forget. Hefelt as though he had found a key to what he had been looking for all his life. A way to understand the people around him.

Most of the book dealt with something called mental disorders, or diseases of the mind. But there were other sections that simply talked about behavior and why people do the simplest things, why they make the same mistakes. This subject was a map he could follow. The names of those psychologists were markers along his route to knowledge and understanding, not just of other human beings and wider society, but also a mirror through which he could look deeper into himself.

For Logan had read something in that book, a chapter about a category of people known as sociopaths. According to the book, and backed up later by further reading, these people did not have a mental illness, although some had symptoms of mental disorders including narcissism and a lack of empathy. Logan knew that night that he was reading about himself.

And he was reading about his father.

He wasn’t scared. He didn’t really feel fear, which could also have been part of his symptoms. If anything, he felt calm. He was not alone in this world. There were others like him. There had always been others like him. That was also the brilliant part of the book. He learned that certain aspects of human behavior had not changed in thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands. And whatever the book said about sociopaths didn’t really change his view of himself. He could already see the advantages open to him.

He could do things that others could not.

There was no doubt what Logan would study in college, and beyond. He would dedicate his life to this field so that he could first know himself, and then know everyone else.

So that he could understand people.

And control them.

He wondered how long it would take to understand the man he was waiting for.

That man had just walked out of the clinic across the street from where Logan had parked. He had his arm in a sling and an elaborate padded plastic brace covered the same limb. He looked pale to Logan. Like he didn’t enjoy the sun. He wore a white T-shirt and gray pants. White sneakers. His feet tended to flap on the sidewalk, his stride wide. His legs didn’t move straight ahead–they tended to be thrown to the side with every step. It was a strange gait. Arthur Cross walked like an exotic bird, more at home in the air than on the ground. His eyes were very large and dark, his eyebrows drawn together in a tight scowl, which may have been due to the pain.

The injury to his arm appeared extensive and was no doubt painful.

Logan glanced at his phone, closed the photo album and returned to the search results on Arthur Cross.

Had Logan and Arthur met when they were younger, perhaps Logan’s early upbringing would not have been so solitary. There was something about this man, something familiar.

With his history of criminal fraud, cruelty to animals, sexual deviancy and violent behavior, Logan supposed Arthur had undiagnosed narcissistic personality disorder with psychopathic or sociopathic tendencies. The first restraining order had been obtained by Kevin Pollock, which also covered his wife Christine White and her daughter, Amy Flynn. The restraining order appeared to stem from intimidating behavior exhibited by Cross. An earlier search of court records had revealed the origin of the dispute. The last will of Arthur’s late wife, Elizabeth Le Saux, whom Logan had no doubt that Arthur had married and then murdered so that he could benefit from her estate. Except his late wife’s lawyer, Kevin, had gotten in the way. And Arthur was putting as much psychological pressure on Kevin and his familyas possible, perhaps in the misguided view that it may change things for him, or perhaps because of a more primal instinct–revenge.

The restraining order Cross had obtained alleged that Christine White had arranged for hooded men to visit Cross and assault him.

Cross had dark potential, but he lacked the clarity of mind that Logan enjoyed. This is what made Logan non-existent to the authorities. While Logan knew how to control others, he began to wonder about his own self-discipline. He had almost lost control last night in Grace’s apartment. No one is perfect. Not even Logan. Certainly not Arthur Cross.

Yet Arthur could prove most useful.

He watched Arthur get into the back of an Uber. Logan turned on the engine of his new rental car and followed Arthur home. At first, he kept his distance, always allowing at least one car between him and Cross’s Uber. As he drove across the city, he wondered how he should handle the approach.

Cross was not the first psychopath that Logan had encountered. Dealing with large corporations at the highest levels, one invariably encountered the more ruthless and selfish of human beings, individuals whose psychological states gave them every advantage in climbing over their colleagues to reach the top. In Logan’s experience, these people, while not always very clever, possessed an animal or primal instinct. They could very easily discern when someone was telling them a lie. It was almost as if untruths had a smell that only they could detect. He would need to tell the truth. A direct approach would be best.

As Cross’s Uber entered a suburban area, there was no longer a buffer car for Logan to hide behind. He decided not to hide and tailed the Uber through the streets until it stopped outside a low 1960s suburban home with an unkempt lawn and rusty chicken-wire fencing surrounding the property.

Cross got out of the Uber.

Logan killed the engine and got out of his car.

He had been right not to try to hide. Cross was waiting outside his home, staring at him as he closed the car door.

The Uber driver took off.

Logan didn’t move. He stared at Cross.