"You sat in on the interview with Anderson after the body was found." Berger knows this. Someone has told her. Marino, probably.
"Yes, I did."
"And the story of what happened that night while Anderson was eating pizza and drinking beer at Bray's house?"
"They got into an argument_this is according to Anderson. So Anderson left angry and soon after there is a knock on the door. The same pattern of knocking that Anderson always did. He imitated the way she knocked just as he imitated the police when he came to my house."
"Show me." Berger looks at me.
I knock on the console between the front seats. Three times, hard.
"This is how Anderson always knocked on the door? She didn't use the doorbell?" Berger asks.
"You've been around cops enough to know that they hardly ever ring doorbells. They're used to neighborhoods where doorbells don't work, if they exist."
"Interesting that Anderson didn't come back," she observes. "What if she had? Do you think Chandonne somehow knew she wasn't going to come back that night?"
"I've wondered that, too."
"Maybe just something he sensed about her demeanor when she left? Or maybe he was so out of control he couldn't stop," Berger ponders. "Or maybe his lust was stronger than his fear that he might be interrupted."
"He may have observed one other important thing," I say. "Anderson didn't have a key to Bray's house. Bray always let her in."
"Yes, but the door wasn't locked when Anderson came back the next morning and found the body, right?"
"Doesn't mean it wasn't locked when he was inside attacking Bray. He hung out a closed sign and locked the convenience store while he was killing Kim Luong."
"But we don't know for a fact that he locked the door behind him when he entered Bray's house," Berger reiterates.
"/ certainly don't know it for a fact."
"And he might not have locked up." Berger is into it. "He might have shoved his way in and the chase begins. The door is unlocked the entire time he is mutilating her body in the bedroom."
"That would suggest he was out of control and taking big risks," I point out.
"Hmmm. I don't want to go down the road of out of control." Berger seems to talk to herself.
"Out of control isn't at all the same thing as insane," I remind her. "All people who murder, except out of self-defense, are out of control."
"Ah. Touche." She nods. "So Bray opens the door, and the light is out and there he is in the dark."
"This is also what he did to Dr. Stvan in Paris," I tell Berger. "Women were being murdered over there, same MO, and in several cases Chandonne left notes at the crime scenes."
"That's where the name Loup-Garou comes from," Berger interjects.
"He also wrote that name on a box inside the cargo container where the body was found_the body of his brother, Thomas. But yes," I say, "he apparently began leaving notes, referring to himself as a werewolf when he began murdering over there, in Paris. One night, he showed up at Dr. Stvan's door, not realizing that her husband was home sick. He works at night as a chef, but on this particular occasion, he was home unexpectedly, thank God. Dr. Stvan opens the door and when Chandonne hears her husband call out from another room, he flees."
"She get a good look at him?"
"I don't think so." I conjure up what Dr. Stvan told me. "It was dark. It was her impression that he was dressed neatly in a long, dark coat, a scarf, his hands in his pockets. He spoke well, was gentlemanly, using the ruse that his car had broken down and he needed a phone. Then he realized she wasn't alone and ran like hell."
"Anything else she remembered about him?"
"His smell. He had a musky smell, like a wet dog."
Berger makes a strange sound at that comment. I am becoming familiar with her subtle mannerisms, and when a detail is especially weird or disgusting, she sucks the inside of her cheek and emits a quiet rasping squeak like a bird. "So he goes after the chief medical examiner there, and then goes after the one here. You," she adds for emphasis. "Why?" She has turned halfway around in her seat and is resting an elbow on the steering wheel, facing me.
"Why?" I repeat, as if it is a question I can't possibly answer_as if it is a question she shouldn't ask me. "Maybe someone should tell me that." Again, I feel the heat of anger rise.
"Premeditation," she replies. "Insane people don't plan their crimes with this sort of deliberation. Picking the chief medical examiner in Paris and then the one here. Both women. Both autopsied his victims and therefore in a perverse way are intimate with him. Perhaps more intimate with him than a lover, because you have, in a sense, watched. You see where he has touched and bitten. You put your hands on the same body he did. In a way, you have watched him make love with these women, for this is how Jean-Baptiste Chandonne makes love to a woman."
"A revolting thought." I find her psychological interpretation personally offensive.
"A pattern. A plan. Not the least bit random. So it's important we understand his patterns, Kay. And do so without personal revulsion or reaction." She draws out a pause. "You must look at him dispassionately. You can't indulge in hate."
"It's hard not to hate someone like him," I reply honestly.
"And when we truly resent and hate someone, it's also hard to give them our time and attention, to be interested in them as if they are worth figuring out. We have to be interested in Chandonne. Intensely interested. I need you to be more interested in him than you have in anyone else in your life."
I don't disagree with what Berger is saying. I know she is pointing out a significant truth. But I desperately resist being interested in Chandonne. "I've always been victim-driven," I tell Berger. "I've never spent my time trying to get into the soul and mind of the assholes who do it."
"And you've never been involved in a case like this, either," she counters. "You've never been a suspect in a murder, either. I can help you with your mess. And I need you to help me with mine. Help me get into Chandonne's mind, into his heart. I need you not to hate him."
I am silent. I don't want to give Chandonne any more of myself than he has already taken. I feel tears of frustration and fury and blink them back. "How can you help me?" I ask Berger. "You have no jurisdiction here. Diane Bray is not your case. You can drag her into your Molineux motion in Susan Pless's murder, but I'm left hanging out to dry when it comes to a Richmond special grand jury. Especially if certain people are trying to make it appear that I killed her, killed Bray. That I'm deranged." I take a deep breath. My heart races.
"The key to your clearing your name is my same key," she replies. "Susan Pless. How could you possibly have had anything to do with that death? How could you have tampered with that evidence?"
She waits for my answer, as if I have one. The thought numbs me. Of course, I had nothing to do with Susan Pless's murder.
"My question is this," Berger goes on. "If the DNA from Susan's case matches your cases here and possibly the DNA in the Paris cases, doesn't that mean it has to be the same person who killed all these people?"
"I guess jurors don't have to believe it beyond a reasonable doubt. All they need is probable cause," I reply, playing devil's advocate in my own dilemma. "The chipping hammer with Bray's blood on it_found in my house. And a receipt showing that I bought a chipping hammer. And the chipping hammer I actually bought has vanished. All sort of sticks out like a smoking gun, Ms. Berger, don't you think?"
She touches my shoulder. "Answer me this," she says. "Did you do it?"