Sociopath Read Online Free

to leave?”
    “Sure. Where you going?”
    “Some breakfast sounded good.”
    “Well,” she said, standing, “you might as well take me too. And you’re buyin’ for getting me up so early.”
     
     
    We sat at a café on Main Street and I ordered hash browns with eggs and an orange juice.
    “They got some’a the best ham in the state up here,” she said.
    “ I’m trying to cut back on my meat. My fiancé thinks I’m going to get high blood pressure.”
    “I’ve never met a cop that doesn’t have high blood pressure. The job takes a piece of you with it everyday.”
    “I’m not a cop anymore.”
    She leaned back in the seat. “So the FBI people said you were some consultant. You must be pretty special to be the expert the FBI calls when they need help.”
    “I was just his friend and he trusted me.”
    “You know, not three weeks ago, I sat in this very café with him and we talked. I liked him.”
    “He was a good man.”
    “He never told me how … well, how his wife died.”
    I took a bite of hash browns and didn’t say anything. “I haven’t seen the reports from the initial investigation that he was out here on.”
    “ Tiffany and her boyfriend?” I nodded. “Why do you want those?”
    “Because that’s how we’re going to find him .”
    “ The person that killed David? Wouldn’t be better to investigate his actual murder?”
    “ In this person’s mind, this was a necessary killing. He felt David was too close to him. This killing wasn’t what he needed. It’s not an expression of himself. Tiffany Ochoa’s killing is the purest expression we have of his unconscious. That’s how we’re going to find him.”
    “An expression of his unconscious? You think he’s some sort of artist?”
    I nodded. “In some ways it’s the same thing. It’s the same mechanism in the brain. A painter leaves things in his art that he doesn’t want there. That he doesn’t want to show the world. But he can’t help it because, at least with good painters, it’s the unconscious that’s doing the work and it chooses what it wants and doesn’t want. It’s the same thing with the man we’re after. He’s left something of himself behind that he didn’t want to. We just need to find what it is.”
    She was quiet a moment. I let the eggs run over the hash browns and dipped a forkful in ketch up before taking another bite.
    “The FBI guys have a room set up at my office. You should probably see it.”

7
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    I stood in the little storeroom at the back of the Wasatch County Sheriff’s Office and stared at the photographs on the wall. They lined the room in a circle and hung above two desks that were cluttered with papers. I saw the autopsy reports for both victims and David, and several supplemental narrative reports that I hadn’t received. They were laid out on desks the way I used to lay out flashcards to study in college.
    The sheriff left the door open behind me and I closed it. I pulled out a chair and sat in the middle of the room and stared at the photos. Glossy and large, full of vivid color with black blood and choppy, red organs.
    The girl would have been pretty, extraordinarily so, except for the thick black ooze stuck to her chin, seepage from the wound in her mouth where her tongue had been cut out. She was nude, her legs were spread, and a branch, about three feet in length with sharp edges and leaves, was thrust into her vagina. It had gone in so far it ruptured her birth canal. It was sticking out like some macabre ornament and the ground underneath it was caked in blood.
    I saw him standing there, raping her with it. The more she screamed the harder he thrusted. That’s what it was about. That’s why he didn’t kill her quickly, why he used a branch. The screams. They made him laugh several times but he couldn’t tell if the laughs were from joy or pain or pleasure. He was sexually excited, but he didn’t rape her. No semen was found anywhere in