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“Um,” I said, still wallowing in uninspired monosyllables. “So, you know. I work backward from what we can see. Using what I know. I mean,” I added quickly, “what I know from research, and, uh, studying these things. In books, and …”
“Work backward,” Jackie said. “What does that mean?”
“It’s, um, you know,” I said, feeling exceptionally awkward. “There’s something unique about every murder, so you try to see what would make somebody do that.”
Jackie blinked at last. “Okay,” she said. “So this time, he rips off her nipple. And that tells you what?”
“It depends on how it was taken off,” I said. “If it’s slashed off, that means, ‘I am punishing you for having a nipple, and now you don’t.’ ”
“This was bitten off,” Deborah said. “What does that say?”
“ ‘I love you,’ ” I said without thinking, but a happy hiss from the Passenger said I was right.
Deborah made a throat-clearing sound and Robert muttered, “For fuck’s sake.” But Jackie looked completely floored. “ ‘I love you’?” she said. “He bites her nipple off to say, ‘I love you’?”
“It’s, um,” I said. “It’s not absolutely normal love as we might know it.”
“No shit,” Deborah said.
“But the whole thing with this guy, it’s sexual,” I said. I felt a bit defensive, and was not quite sure why. “It’s a mix of compulsion and sex and love, and it’s all so powerful and so frustrating that he can’t even express it except, um”—I shrugged—“like he did.”
I looked around at my little audience. Deborah had resumed her normal stone-faced cop expression, and Robert looked like he was trying very hard not to laugh out loud. But Jackie looked past me, somewhere in the great distance over my shoulder, and slowly began to nod her head. “I think I see it,” she said.
Deborah twitched her head in disbelief. “You do?” she said. “Jesus Christ, how do you see that?”
Jackie looked at her. “It’s kind of like acting,” she said. “I mean, like, when you’re doing Shakespeare? He doesn’t tell you anything in the script, like how you should react, or how you should say things. So you look at what he has you do, what he has you say, and you work backward from that.” She turned and gave me a quick smile. “Like Dexter said.”
The warmth I’d been feeling in my face suddenly slid down into my chest. Somebody understood me. Jackie understood what I had done. It was so wildly unlikely that this goddess of the silver screen should understand anything, let alone something like me, that I just stood and looked at her and felt a small and grateful smile creep up onto my lips.
But of course, Robert could not allow me to feel any real happiness. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “This isn’t fucking Shakespeare, sweetheart. This isn’t your goddamn thee-ate-ter. This is the real world. This is a fucking wacko, psycho, out-of-his-skull asshole who likes to bite your tits off, and playing Neighborhood Playhouse acting games in your head isn’t going to catch him.”
“Neither is throwing up every time you see a little blood, Bob,” Jackie said sweetly.
Robert opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. But Deborah spoke before he could get out his no-doubt-stinging reply.
“All right, fine,” Debs said. “I’m glad you see it, Jackie. I don’t see it, but what the fuck; that’s why I put up with Dexter.”
“What about my stunning competence?” I said. “And my understated wit? And—”
“What I still don’t see,” Deborah said, riding over the rest of my modest list of good qualities, “is how it connects to where you started. About the eyes. I mean,” she said, holding up a hand to stop me from saying something I wasn’t going to say, “all right, he rips out an eye, he fucks the eye socket, and he kills her.”
“And he keeps the eyeball,” I said.
“You don’t know that,” Robert blurted out.
“I think I do,” I said.
“Most of these guys keep souvenirs,” Deborah said, and I enjoyed a rare moment of having a sister who backed me up now and then. “That’s cold fact, right out of the book.”
“So we’re supposed to look for a guy carrying around a bunch of eyeballs?” Robert said, making a face of great disbelief and distaste. “Jesus fuck.”
Jackie snorted. “Good idea, Bob,” she said. “Let’s just start frisking people, and when we find somebody with a baggie full of eyeballs, he’s our guy.”
“I’m not the one who brought it up,” Robert said, and he was going to say more, but Deborah stopped him.
“Shut the fuck up, both of you,” she said, and they both did. She looked at me. “What are the odds he’s done something like this before?” she asked me.
I thought about it. “Pretty good,” I said. “Maybe not a lot, but almost certainly once or twice before.”
