Читать книгу The Killer Across the Table - Mark Olshaker - Страница 7

IN A SMALL ROOM IN THE BIG HOUSE

Here, it is not so much Who done it?, but Why?

And in the end, if we have discovered the Why? and add in How?, we will also come to understand the Who? Because Why? + How? = Who.

The aim is not to be a friend. The aim is not to be a foe. The aim is to get to the truth.

It is a verbal and mental chess match without any game pieces; a sparring session without body contact; an endurance contest in which each side will seek out and exploit the other’s weaknesses and insecurities.

We sit across a small table from each other in a dimly lit room whose cinder-block walls are painted a pale bluish gray. The only window is in the locked steel door, and it is small and reinforced with wire mesh. A uniformed guard peers through from the other side, making sure everything remains in order.

In a maximum security prison, nothing is considered more important.

We have been at this for two hours already and finally the moment is ripe. “I want to know in your own words what it was like twenty-five years ago,” I say. “How did this all happen to get you here? That girl—Joan—did you know her?”

“Well, I’d seen her in the neighborhood,” he replies. His affect is calm and his tone is even.

“Let’s go back to the moment she came to the door. Tell me what happened, step by step, from that point on.”

It is almost like hypnosis. The room is silent, and I watch him transform in front of me. Even his physical appearance seems to change before my eyes. His eyes are unfocused and he looks beyond me to stare at the vacant wall. He is moving back to another time and another place; to the one story of himself that has never left his mind.

The room is very cold, and even though I wear a suit, I struggle to keep myself from shivering. But as he recounts the story I have asked for, he has begun to perspire. His breathing grows heavier and more audible. Soon his shirt is drenched with sweat, and underneath, the muscles of his chest tremble.

He relates the entire story in this manner, not looking at me; almost talking to himself. He is in the zone, in that time and that place, thinking now what he was thinking then.

For a moment, he turns back to face me. He looks me square in the eyes as he says, “John, when I heard the knock and looked up through the screen door and saw who was there, I knew I was going to kill her.”