Sociopath

SOCIOPATH

A Thriller by

VICTOR METHOS

PROLOGUE

Screams filled the forest as the darkness closed in.

Her legs were cut and bleeding from the bushes that tugged at her exposed flesh as she sprinted in the night. It was difficult to see and the trees were so tall they occasionally blocked out the moon, the only light she had.

She was sobbing and
felt tears rolling down her cheeks as she came to a small stream. Careful not to fall on the slick rocks, she spread her arms for balance and waded across. On the other side she looked back and saw the dark figure come out of the brush, the hunting knife gleaming in his hand. He stood silent as a shadow and she felt his eyes on her body.

She dashed up the embankment. Digging her fingers into the soft forest floor, she rose over the top and tried to run down too quickly. She felt her knee give out and she hit the ground hard and rolled until she hit a tree,
pain shooting through her ribs. She was on her back only a moment before lifting herself up.

The forest was cold at night and filled with noise.
Owls and coyotes and crows. She could hear them all on the periphery of her consciousness, like the voices one ignores at a restaurant when focusing on their own conversation.

Trying again to run, she collapsed onto her stomach and grunted in pain. Her knee had been injured snowboarding years ago and she’d had surgery to repair it but it
had never been the same. Now it was tattered and she felt the instability as she pushed herself off the ground.

Hobbling through the dense
forest, the smell of wet pine in her nostrils, she heard footsteps behind her.

“No! Please! Please don’t.”

Flung onto her face, she pulled herself up using a tree for balance and felt a burning sensation across her stomach. She looked down to see her organs slipping out of the slit in her belly. She tried to run, but it was too late.

Another blow to her head and she was on the ground
. The figure spun her onto her back, and got on top of her.

JON STANTON

I exploded out of the ocean and sucked in breath like a drowning man. The surfboard was connected to my ankle and I felt it tugging at me from somewhere behind.

The Pacific was warm and the sunshine hot and I wondered if I really needed the wetsuit. I treaded water for a few moments before reaching down and pulling on the cord. As the surfboard came near, I climbed on top.

I could see Emma on the beach. Sitting on a towel with an umbrella over her
, reading a magazine. Her body was tan and slender as opposed to the pasty white she’d been when we’d first arrived in Honolulu almost eight months ago. It was a vacation but we’d both had an eye toward moving here, and after the first week we knew it was for us.

I paddled in until I caught my wave.
The wave was slow but I stood and eased into shore. She looked
at me and smiled and it sent butterflies up and down my stomach. She had that affect on me. Not only was Emma a brilliant chemist with a mind far superior to my own, she was strikingly beautiful in that appealing, librarian kind of way that young boys daydream about. Men were always hitting on her wherever we went and she thought that it offended me but it never did. But I didn’t find it flattering either that other men saw me as so minor a threat that they could hit on my fiancé in front of me.

I wasn’t muscular or brutish looking. Physicality had never been one of my strong suits. In fact if it
wasn’t for surfing and jogging I wouldn’t get any physical activity at all.

My own skin was dark brown and my hair had developed blond highlights again and appeared washed out. I slicked my hair back and away from my eyes as I saw Emma pick up my cell phone and answer.

When I hit the shallows I unhooked my board and lifted it as I came ashore. Emma had hung up the phone, and waited until I sat next to her before placing her hand over my chest and running her fingers across it.

“I think I like you in a wet suit,” she said. “You look like an adorable little seal.”

“Thanks. Let’s hope the sharks don’t feel the same way. Who was on the phone?”

“Someone named Kyle Vidal. He asked that you call him when you get a sec.”

“Vidal? You sure that was his last name?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I only know one Kyle Vidal but I haven’t spoken to him in about a decade.”

“Who is he?”

I hesitated. This was the hardest part of any day. The time when, invariably, my past life came back and showed me who I had been.

I retired from the San Diego Police Department as a homicide detective years ago.
After that, I tried the life of a private investigator, and though the money was great, as Emma had pointed out to me, it wasn’t that much different from being a cop. When we moved to Honolulu I abandoned it and starting teaching full-time at the University of Hawaii in their psychology and criminal justice departments.

Teaching had always been relaxing for me. Something about passing down knowledge to future generations
—though I didn’t know how much of what I knew could be passed down—really appealed to me, but I had very … specific knowledge, and I didn’t know how many people could understand it. Or that the students would want to if they could.

Emma had taken a job at a
private laboratory that paid four times what I made as a professor. She was one of the leading physical chemists in the country and probably could have had a tenured position in any university she wanted. But she stayed here, with me, because she saw how good the sunshine and sea was for me.

I realized I’d hesitated too long and she knew something was wrong.

“What is it, Jon?”

“He’s with the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI. I’m sure he’s just calling wanting advice on a case.”

“We came out here to get away from that.”

“I know. I’m not calling him back.”

She smiled and leaned down and kissed me and then went back to her magazine.

2

We left the beach later that afternoon and stopped
at a sandwich shack we both loved. We’d discovered it by accident. Our power had gone out during a particularly brutal rainstorm and we couldn’t cook so we went out and explored the streets. We had to cover our heads with a newspaper because we hadn’t researched Hawaii enough to know that we would need umbrellas. Emma had held my hand as we went up the street and nearly went into an expensive Italian restaurant. She’d then looked back and saw this gray shack with red lettering announcing the best pulled pork sandwich in the islands.

The sun was shining down on my head and warming me now
, and just thinking back to the rain put me in a different mood. Weather affected people in strange ways and I always thought it would be an interesting research project to plot cultural idiosyncrasies with the climate the people lived in.

We sat in a bo
oth by the window and she ordered a Cherry Coke and I had an orange juice and we asked for two pulled pork sandwiches with fries. She was twirling the straw in the glass and not looking me in the eyes.

It had been the call. The last time I received a call like that I had to kill someone who nearly killed me
, down in a dark hole underneath Joshua Tree, a young, naked girl crawling through a tunnel to safety as I stayed with the monster who had taken her.

The stink of the hole didn’t leave me for several weeks and I remember
ed constant showers and laundry. Emma told me she couldn’t smell anything but I knew it was there and I’d smell it in the night and it would wake me up.

Eventually, I had to burn the clothes I had been wearing that day.

“I’m not calling him back.”

“I know,” she said.

“Then why the long face?”

“I just don’t like being reminded of it.”

“It was who I was, not who I am. Not anymore.”

“You can’t change who you are, Jon. You loved what you did. I see you sometimes late at night on the Mac when you think I’m asleep. You’re reading news stories about cases in your old district.”

I had nothing to say so I kept quiet.

“Do you miss it?”

“No.”

“Be honest with me,” she said.

“No, I don’t miss it. I’m curious.”

“Why?”

The sandwiches came and I laid the napkin on my lap and took a bite, hoping she would forget to follow up. Though I doubt she forgot, she didn’t ask about it again and we ate in silence. It was the first time since coming to Honolulu we couldn’t think of anything to say to each other.

“I think you should get a new cell phone,” she said.

“What would that do? He’s a supervisor at the FBI. If he wanted to find me he could.”

She exhaled. “Why can’t they leave you alone?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

3

Our beach house sat on a quarter acre in Hawaii Kai, one of the most exclusive sections of Honolulu made up of homes on a stretch of beach and the surrounding hills. I went out to the patio and sat in a chair, sipping ice water and watching the waves roll in and break on the sand. The wind was blowing and my hair would fall in front of my sunglasses and then be lifted again.

Emma had gone to her yoga class and wouldn’t be back for
a while. I took out my phone and dialed my ex-wife’s number. She lived somewhere in Florida. Her new husband had been a halfback with the Chargers before being traded to the Patriots. Last I’d heard from my son, he’d blown out both his knees and had to leave the NFL. They were now living in a quiet suburb of Miami while he started a real estate business.

I let Melissa move with the boys wherever she wanted. My oldest, Mathew, told me once that she needed him more than I needed him. I understood the need for a son to look after his mother and I never protested, even though I could have forced the issue and gotten them to stay in San Diego with me. Considering that I’d moved now too, it was a good call.

No one answered and I tried Matt’s cell.

“Hey
Dad.”

“How are
ya, buddy?”

“Good.”

“What’re you up to?”

“I’m over at my friend Andy’s house. Just playing Xbox.”

“Your mom told me you got straight A’s this term. That true?”

“Kind of. I got two
A minuses.”

“In what?”

“Japanese and pottery.”

“I think those can be forgiven. I’m sending you over a present.”

“What is it?”

“You’ll have to wait and see.”

“Just tell me, Dad.”

I grinned. “Sorry
, buddy. Anticipation makes it that much sweeter.” I sipped my water. “Where’s Johnny?”

“He’s
right here. Hold on.”

I heard the phone transfer hands.

“Hi Dad.”

“Hey
, kiddo. You hanging out with your brother today?”

“Yeah.”

Though he was now ten, I still remembered him as the tubby one-year-old running around in his diaper, his fingers stained with food and his lips surrounded by a dim tint of juice.

“Are you taking care of your mom?”

“Dad … can I come live with you?”

My heart dropped. I didn’t say anything for a moment. “Why would you want to live with me, Johnny? Your
mom and brother are in Florida.”

“I miss you. I
wanna come live there.”

I swallowed and looked out over the ocean. I had been alone until I
’d met Emma and I’d gotten used to that loneliness. As much as I loved them, the thought of them living with me filled me with a gray dread, fearing that I would be exposing them to things they shouldn’t be exposed to, that they would remind me every day of what I could lose at just the squeezing of a trigger by madness. Every second I would be living at the end of a gun, thinking of the things the world could do to them and knowing I would be unable to stop it.

“Let me talk to your mom first.”

“If she says yes can I come?”

“
Let me talk to her and then we’ll talk again.”

“Okay. Love you
, Dad.”

“Love you too.”

I hung up and placed the cell phone down on my lap. I stared at the ocean about as long as I had spoken on the phone and counted six waves. Some type of bird, probably a heron, dipped under the water and I watched for him to come out when the phone rang. I looked down; it was a Facetime call.

I opened
Facetime and answered and Kyle Vidal’s tan face came on the screen. I knew Kyle from only a few encounters at law enforcement training seminars. He’d offered me a position once with the Bureau and I’d turned it down. I told him I wanted less red tape, not more, and he never brought it up again.

“Jon.
How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“You get my message earlier?”

“I did.”

“But you weren’t going to call me back, were you?”

“Maybe you didn’t hear
, but I retired a couple of years ago.”

“No, I heard.
David told me. That’s actually why I’m calling. Sorry about the Facetime but I just thought you would be more likely to answer if you could see me.”

Why would
you think that?

“What can I do for you, Kyle?
If it’s about David’s message, I didn’t call him back either.”

“
David’s actually the reason I’m calling … I don’t exactly know how to say this. I know you two were pretty close. He’s passed away, Jon.”

I went silent.

David and I had met on a case nearly fifteen years ago, my first year as a uniformed patrol officer. It was a DUI that turned into a big child pornography bust and the Bureau had come in for assistance. He showed me the ropes, what to say to my superiors and how to spin the events on a police report. We’d stayed friends after that and went on three vacations together with our families, until his wife passed away a number of years ago.

I still remember
his smile the time we caught a trout the size of a baseball bat in Lake Tahoe. I saw his face when his wife passed, hardened, like it had been carved out of stone, unable or unwilling to show the emotion it needed to begin healing.

I also remember his face when he’d told me he was
disintegrating from loneliness. He had, as a badge carrying federal agent, been frequenting prostitutes. His wife had passed and he was deathly alone and depressed. He’d just wanted some company. So he hired escorts, wanting to feel the warmth of someone lying next to him at night again. He’d never been able to lie on her side of the bed after his wife’s passing and he just wanted to reach over and feel somebody there.

I spent time with him, going to counseling sessions and taking him out to ball games and letting him spend time with us. He seemed to have grown stronger but he’d always been difficult to read.

“I … didn’t expect you to say that,” I said. “How?”

“
David was killed in the line of duty.”

“How?”

“Somebody stabbed him to death. It happened in the field, in a hospital in Utah.”

“
David should have been in a classroom. Not out in the field.”

“I know.
But he was getting bored and asked for a transfer and I granted it.”

“What happened?”

“He was there on a double homicide and was hurt. He had to be hospitalized.
He must’ve been close cause the son of a bitch snuck into the hospital and killed him. And a nurse that was there with him. I have agents from the Salt Lake field office in Heber right now. They’ve been there two weeks and they haven’t turned up shit. I was thinking of sending down the best from Behavioral Science when I thought of you.”

“Hospitals have cameras,” I said. Clearly, the FBI had thought of that but my mind was a soft mess and I couldn’t organize my thoughts enough to be coherent.

“Nothing on the cameras. Wore gloves and long sleeves with jeans and a mask, like a Halloween mask.”

“Murder weapon?”

“Taken with. No DNA obviously. Not even boot prints on the linoleum. He cleaned those up.” A pause. “Anyway, the reason I called, I know how much David respected your work. He always told me you were the best he’d ever seen at what we do. I was wondering if you could go out to Heber and have a look?”

“A look at what?”

“I don’t know. Just have a look. I’m authorizing the agents I have there for another month and then I’m sending down a few more for another month after that. Then, if we don’t have anything, we’ll be forced to close up shop. It’ll be an open-unsolved file for a few years and then get archived and that’s it. I know it’s one of our own, and I’m going to fight for as long as I can, but I don’t call the shots. Terrorism is eating up our resources. I wanted to try and reach out to you first. I thought David deserved that at least.”

I could
n’t speak. My mouth opened but nothing came out.

“Can I send you the initial police reports? Take a look at that and the autopsy and tell me what you think. If you don’t think you can help, don’t come out.”

“Yeah. Yeah, email them to me.”

“Okay, I’ll get those out right away. And Jon
… thanks.”

“Yeah.”

I hung up, my eyes not leaving the ocean. I heard rustling behind me and turned to see Emma standing at the sliding glass doors with her arms folded, staring at me. She turned without a word and went inside.