"If you really want to stop, why haven't you sought help?"

"I thought I could stop on my own. I thought I could."

Zillis began to cry. His eyes were still glazed from the Mace, but these were real tears.

"Why have you done those things to the mannequins in the other room, Stevie?"

"You can't understand."

"Yeah, I'm just stodgy old Billy Wiles, got no zing, but give me a try anyway."

"That doesn't mean anything, what I did to them."

"For something that doesn't mean anything, you sure put a lot of time and energy into it."

"I won't talk about this. Not this." He wasn't refusing as much as pleading. "I won't."

"Does it make you blush? Stevie? Does it offend your tender sensibilities?"

Zillis cried continuously now. Not wrenching sobs. The steady, scalding tears of humiliation, of abashment.

He said, "Doing it isn't the same as talking about it."

"You mean what you do to the mannequins," Billy clarified.

"You can... you can blow my brains out, but I won't talk about it. I can't."

"When you mutilate the mannequins, are you excited, Stevie? Are you huge with excitement?"

Zillis shook his head, hung his head.

"Doing it to them and talking about it are so different?" Billy asked.

"Billy. Billy, please. I don't want to hear myself, hear myself talking about it."

"Because when you're doing it, then it's just something you do. But if you talk about it, then it's something you are."

Zillis's expression confirmed that Billy had gotten to the quick of it.

Not much could be gained by harping on the mannequins. They were what they were. Rubbing Steve Zillis's face in his perversion could be counterproductive.

Billy had not yet gotten what he needed, what he had come here to prove.

He was simultaneously tired and wired, in need of sleep but strung out on caffeine. At times, his pierced hand ached; the Vicodin had begun to wear off.

Because of exhaustion staved off with chemicals, he might not be conducting the interrogation cleverly enough.

If Zillis was the freak, he was a genius of emotional fakery.

But then that's what sociopaths were: voracious spiders with an uncanny talent for projecting a convincing image of a complex human being that obscured the insectile reality of icy calculation and ravenous intent.

Billy said, "When you do what you do to the mannequins, when you watch those sick videos, do you ever think of Judith Kesselman?"

In the course of this encounter, Zillis had been surprised more than once, but this question shocked him. Bloodshot from the residual effect of the Mace, his eyes widened. His face paled and went loose, as if he had taken a blow.

Chapter 63.

Zillis shackled to the bed. Billy free on the chair but with a growing sense of being trammeled by his prisoner's evasiveness.

"Stevie? I asked you a question."

"What is this?" Zillis said with apparent earnestness and even the merest trace of righteous affront.

"What is what?"

"Why did you come here? Billy, I don't understand what you're doing here."

"Do you think of Judith Kesselman?" Billy persisted.

"How do you know about her?"

"How do you think I know?"

"You answer questions with questions, but I'm supposed to have real answers to everything."

"Poor Stevie. What about Judi Kesselman?"

"Something happened to her."

"What happened to her, Stevie?"

"It was in college. Five, five and a half years ago."

"Do you know what happened to her, Stevie?"

"n.o.body knows."

"Somebody does," Billy said.

"She disappeared."

"Like in a magic show?"

"She was just gone."

"She was such a lovely girl, wasn't she?"

"Everybody liked her," Zillis said.

"Such a lovely girl, so innocent. The innocent are the most delicious, aren't they, Stevie?"

Frowning, Zillis said, "Delicious?"

"The innocent-they're the most succulent, the most satisfying. I know what happened to her," Billy said, meaning to imply that he knew Zillis had kidnapped and killed her.

Such a full-body shudder pa.s.sed through Steve Zillis that the handcuffs rattled protractedly against the metal bed frame.

Pleased with that reaction, Billy said, "I know, Stevie."

"What? What do you know?"

"Everything."

"What happened to her?"

"Yes. Everything."

Zillis had been sitting with his back against the bed, his legs splayed on the floor in front of him. Now he suddenly drew his knees up to his chest. "Oh, G.o.d." A groan of abject misery escaped him.

"Precisely everything," Billy said.

Zillis's mouth softened and his voice grew tremulous. "Don't hurt me."

"What do you think I might do to you, Stevie?"

"I don't know. I don't want to think."

"You're so imaginative, so talented when it comes to dreaming up ways to hurt women, but suddenly you don't want to think?"

Shivering continuously now, Zillis said, "What do you want from me, what can I do?"

"I want to talk about what happened to Judith Kesselman."

When Zillis began to sob like a young boy, Billy got up from the chair. He sensed that a breakthrough was coming.

"Stevie?"

"Go away."

"You know I'm not going to. Let's talk about Judi Kesselman."

"I don't want to."

"I think you do." Billy didn't go closer to Zillis, but he squatted in front of him, coming down almost to his level. "I think you want very much to talk about it."

Zillis shook his head violently. "I don't. I don't. If we talk about it, you'll kill me for sure."

"Why do you say that, Stevie?"

"You know."

"Why do you say I'll kill you?"

"Because then I'll know too much, won't I?"

Billy stared at his prisoner, trying to read him.

"You did her," Zillis said with a groan.

"Did what?"

"You killed her, and I don't know why, I don't understand, but now you're going to kill me."

Billy took a deep breath and grimaced. "What've you done?"

For an answer, Zillis only sobbed.

"Stevie, what've you done to yourself?"

Zillis had drawn his knees to his chest. Now he stretched out his legs again.

"Stevie?"

The crotch of the man's pajamas was dark with urine. He had wet himself.

Chapter 64.

Some monsters are pathetic rather than murderous. Their lairs are not lairs in the fullest sense because they do not lie in wait. They take to ill-kept burrows, with minimal furniture and the objects of their misshapen sense of beauty. They hope only to indulge their mutant fantasies and live their monstrous lives in as much peace as they can find, which is precious little, for they torment themselves even when the rest of the world leaves them unmolested.

Billy resisted the conclusion that Steve Zillis was one of this pathetic breed.

To admit that Zillis was not a homicidal sociopath, Billy must accept that much precious time had been wasted in the pursuit of a wolf, presumed fierce, that was in fact a meek dog.