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“May be why our unsub has held off on killing him.”
My eyes flit to the innocuous blue house that sets idly between two white ones. This town is outside of the sheriff’s jurisdiction. Something tells me Carl Burrows moved here for a reason.
“Let’s deal with this before we go digging into Kyle,” I tell Leonard.
“Sheriff Cannon and Johnson are going to block us from speaking to Kyle. I don’t get why Johnson would cover up a true killer. Even at his worst, he’s still a fucking agent.”
“Because he fucked up. His ego is more important than justice could ever be,” I say as I get out.
Kyle would have been nineteen at the time
. Nineteen seems too disorganized to be the killer from back then, but he fits the profile in every other way.
Unless Lindy May is right and he’s a sociopath. We’re looking for a psychopath. Sociopaths can’t imitate empathy or anything else. Psychopaths can.
As we walk up the sidewalk, I notice someone peering out of the window, watching us as we approach the door. The curtains pop closed and sway from the disturbance, and the door swings open before we even make it to the stoop.
He’s short, has a touch of oriental in his bloodline, given the shape of his eyes and cheekbones. His hair is dark and long, tied back in a ponytail. He looks like he doesn’t get out too much either, given the disarray of his wrinkled clothing and the pungent smell of body odor I get a whiff of from here.
“Are you SSA Logan Bennett and Agent Stan Leonard?” he asks as we step onto his small stoop.
Creasing my lips to hide my surprise, I hold up my ID, as does Leonard.
Burrows adjusts his glasses on his nose as he reads our names, then he looks up and then gestures for us to hurry inside. I resist the urge to cover my nose when we walk in. Old food is lying haphazardly around, covered in flies and sealed in aquariums. Various other aquariums have other things inside them, though my stomach is reeling too much for me to focus on it.
Leonard coughs and covers his nose.
“Your sense of smell is the weakest sense. Give it a few minutes, and you won’t smell it anymore,” Burrows assures us as he leads us through his house.
“What is all this?” Leonard asks, coughing back a gag.
“I study the decaying process and the insect activity that follows. It’s part of the forensics program I run to help identify time of death in hard to date cases.”
“In your home?” Leonard asks, gagging again.
“My lab has several other experiments going on, and I can monitor things better from home anyway.”
“How did you know we were coming?” I ask him as we move through his kitchen, where several more ‘experiments’ are underway.
It smells like death met a rotten asshole and had five puke babies.
Burrows shudders, popping a piece of nicotine gum and chewing it frantically.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asks us seriously, looking around nervously.
Leonard tilts his head. “No, why?”
“Because I do. I’m a man of science, but I believe there are too many unexplained variables in the course of a lifetime to believe things are as cut and dry as science implies. A psychic actually solved one case I was involved in one time.”
Confused, I lean against the wall, letting him ramble.
“He said the killer had one eye. He saw the killer through the eyes of the dead victim, and he described him down to the eye and snake tattoo on his neck. Police found the guy, and they also found his next victim in the trunk of the car. She was still alive. And no, the psychic was in no way linked to him. He actually helped solve many cases. He called himself a medium, but I still refer to him as a psychic. Because psychics see shit the normal person can’t, right?”
I look over to Leonard, and he looks back at me.
As one, our gaze swings back to the looney toon doctor who has apparently spent too much time in solitude with rotting food. I’m not sure what an extended period of time in an environment like this would do to one’s psyche. But I bet we’re looking at the product of that answer.
“Why are we talking about psychics?” I ask him warily, trying and failing to follow his thought process.
