Carl Martinek was in custody and would be interrogated next, though not by Elizabeth and Katherine for the time being, as both were too close to the case. They would visit him in his jail cell afterward.
Outside, darker and darker storm clouds moved across the sky, finally - hopefully - bringing relief to this muggy day.
Elizabeth and Katherine sat in Katherine's office, reviewing the trial documents again. Elizabeth's gaze lingered on the autopsy report of Carl's mother. Katherine had just placed a pot of Earl Grey on the table and let the tea steep for a while.
"Since it's easier to get divorced in the U.S., there have been fewer murders of husbands," the doctor said. "Some women would have killed their spouse fifty years ago, and today, it happens less often."
"You mean Chantal Hebert could have gotten a divorce? Or left Burns?" asked Elizabeth with furrowed brows. "I'm afraid she was too weak to do that."
"Yes, she was weak. And Michael Hebert is Carl Martinek," the psychiatrist replied. "He was my intern - a serial killer." She shook her head, still unable to believe it. "His childhood was horrible. Of above-average intelligence, but raised in an unstable environment." She looked at her sister in depth. "Kind of like Danny from Stephen King's The Shining. Unlike the Torrance family, Carl's parents were actually on edge."
"Where the father behaves so horribly that his death is a redemption for the son. Even though Carl's father made his exit in a most unsavory way because he had drunk so much that he was spitting up blood." Elizabeth shuddered. "The autopsy report says the blood splattered on the ceiling."
Katherine pursed her lips and nodded. "And yet, as his father's coffin disappears into the ground, Carl's hour of redemption has come."
Elizabeth scrolled onto the picture of his father lying dead in his blood in the bathroom. Another photo showed Carl - then still Michael - as a child, with a happy face. Still.
"But then came Kevin Burns," Katherine said, pressing her lips together, "which we found poisoned, breaded, with his vomit, his skull crushed, and his neck broken in a well shaft. Carl's mother's new boyfriend is even more brutal than his biological father. Not only does he beat Carl up, but he also, it says here, forces him to appease his constantly yapping dog so he'll stop barking."
Elizabeth shook inwardly at this notion.
Katherine took a long look at her sister and frowned. "In the end, he's also just a child who has felt helpless, at the mercy of others, and inferior. Many children learn very quickly that their environment is dangerous. But they're not a bit surprised by it; after all, they don't know any different. And just as Carl came from a terrifying world, he could adapt to the real world just as well, not letting anyone see or feel his goal. Including us." She took the tea net from the pot and poured them Earl Grey.
Elizabeth followed her sister's movements with her eyes. "He hid his paranoia well, didn't he?"
The psychiatrist gritted her teeth and nodded slowly. "Yes. He had learned, on the one hand, to read the gestures you need to know to survive. He had grown up with violence. When his father and later Burns came home drunk, little Carl could pick up on the subtlest signals. What's he like today? How do I have to walk and move? Where do I have to stay to keep him from freaking out? Is he hitting mommy again? Or me? Does he come into my room? And what do I have to do so that he doesn't come into my room? He had to ask himself all these questions repeatedly and always found the right answers. So he could adapt perfectly to the new world he entered. And so he could finally work here with us in the BPD as an exemplary intern. Everything was just a facade, a mask. Psychopaths can disguise themselves perfectly. The same is true for Carl."
Elizabeth took a deep breath and nodded. "Yes. As far as that goes, he's like an antelope watching the lion. And later, the lion has to realize that everything can be quite different. In the adoptive family, I mean."
"Right. But before that, what happens may have traumatized him the first time," Katherine added.
Elizabeth's eyebrows drew together in surprise. "Why the first time?"
"The first time after Burns pushes Carl's mother off the stairs, breaking her neck. The boy drags his dying mother up and the apartment and stays with her all night. He not only sees his mother die, but he also stays with her when she is dead. He witnessed firsthand as a young boy how a living person dies, a loved one. That wake at his mother's body shapes him for the rest of his life." Katherine looked into her teacup for a moment, then continued speaking. "There will be a trial of Burns. But he is found not guilty, but insane. On that day, Carl's world collapses. He's severely traumatized. Because the bad guy, Kevin Burns, is not punished. And Carl is under the impression that everyone is against him."
Elizabeth skimmed a copy of the court's ruling. She couldn't believe it, even though it wasn't the first time she'd seen something like this.
Defendant Kevin Burns has a penchant for consuming alcoholic beverages and other intoxicating substances in excess. The crime against Chantal Hebert was also committed while intoxicated. Therefore, the court cannot rule out a waived culpability and sentences the defendant, Kevin Burns, to be placed in a rehab facility because there is a risk that the defendant will commit further unlawful acts as a result of his propensity to abuse alcohol. The admission to the acute rehab must take place immediately and will have a duration of twelve weeks.
Elizabeth furrowed her brows and shook her head, partly because she knew such sentences were still being handed down daily.
Katherine took a deep breath and licked her head, shaking. "All were against Carl. Maybe even then, he was vowing revenge on everyone involved in the trial - the judge, the defense attorney, the cop, the psychiatrist."
"Why even then?"
"Because it may be that the construction of revenge, as he carried it out on the victims of the first and second order, is too complex even for a boy like Carl. And that he didn't come up with this plan until later."
"Whatever," Elizabeth replied, gritting her teeth. "First, something else came up. The acute placement in a group home."
Katherine nodded slowly. "Right. Two caregivers and three kids. Little scuffles, but no father vomiting blood or boyfriend beating mother to death. Here, he didn't have to duck away when someone raised their arm for fear of a punch coming." She thought for a second. "Carl once said to me, For some, the normal, the quiet world is like a computer game. A computer war game to someone who has just returned from a real war." She looked closely at her sister. "Now I understand what he meant by that."
The detective took a deep breath and looked at the files again. "Then he's adopted," she said, "by the Martinek family."
"Martinek," Katherine repeated, shaking her head. "The old man from intelligence. I met him once. Well, he's been dead for five years, too."
"Will Carl manage to forget all that in that time? What do you mean?"
Katherine raised her brows briefly. "It looks like it. Thanks to his new family, he's putting his horrible past behind him. Likewise, he forgets his vow of revenge - if he even had it - to kill all the people from the Burns trial."
"Up to a certain point, anyway."
"Yes, until his girlfriend is raped. It goes to trial again, but since Carl's girlfriend didn't have herself examined until eighty hours after the crime, there's no evidence of rape. Tom, who raped the girl, leaves the courtroom as an innocent man. Carl's girlfriend, however, feels tarnished and violated."
"So terribly hurt that she kills herself out of desperation," the detective added bitterly. "Carl is the first to see the dead one dangling from the ceiling."
"And at that very moment, retraumatization occurs. Everything in Carl breaks open. He changes his name in an attempt to get rid of the past. And so Michael Hebert becomes Carl Martinek. But he can't get rid of the past."
"And the images in his head?"
"Neither can they. The image of his mother and the one of his girlfriend, and that's why there's only one solution for him: vigilante justice."
Outside, thunderclouds passed by, towering into massive masses on the horizon. Thunder cracked like the fisticuffs of an angry god.
Katherine leaned back in her desk chair and continued. "Carl decides to mercilessly carry out his plan of revenge, which he may have conceived even then. But it's not the guilty who should die - at least not immediately. They should be present at the death of someone dear to them and later hold a wake at the corpse just as he held a wake after the death of his mother - with the person he loved above all else. And then the little boy of that time took bitter revenge. He killed those involved in the case and punished the murderer too leniently. And before that, they had to experience what it's like when a loved one dies before their eyes."
"And then the murders proceed accordingly," Elizabeth added with furrowed brows. "So must Jason Walton, the cop who didn't help Carl as a child, watch his wife Barbara suffocate. Defense attorney Joseph Hurts sees his mother hanged. And psychiatrist Samantha Conway sees her son as someone slits his carotid arteries. All had to see what Carl had also seen. Not just the murder but the way into the other world. The wake." So did he." The detective paused and took a deep breath. "With two exceptions."
Katherine looked at her sister for a moment, confused. Then her features brightened. "Right. He went after the two who harmed his loved ones directly without ritual, without wake, without what we still interpreted as undoing at the time. This Tom, whom he", she contorted her face, "poured boiling lead into his mouth. I've never had a case like that, even in my consulting work with the FBI."
"Is that bad?" asked Elizabeth. This kind of killing seemed downright brutal to her. But Katherine shook her head.
"Not really. Lead becomes liquid at a temperature of about six hundred and twenty-six Fahrenheit. Such heat instantly destroys nerve cells, so you don't notice anything." Shaking her head, she looked into room for a moment and drank from her tea. "And then Burns, the sadistic drunk. Carl's concentrated vengeance was on him, too, so there was no wake with him, no rituals. Now it was Carl who wielded power. A clear causality. The more superior and powerful he is, the further away he gets from his childhood memories. It also explains why he can do things like this at his age.'" She pointed to the case file. "He was much more developed, mentally. Much more paranoid. Much more dangerous. And on constant alert - a childhood experience of watching every second to see how his father was moving, his expression, his posture, and what he would tit next. Little Carl had to act like an animal sleeping with his eyes open. The stress is unbearable and can't be dialed down. The brain only resorts to the oldest emergency programs from the evolution of humankind and permanently vacillates between fight, flight, or fear. Then it calms down. At least for a while. Because eventually, the terror came back with force."
"The moment he found his girlfriend hanging dead from a rope," Elizabeth interjected.
Katherine sighed and nodded. "That's when the switch was flipped again. Anything that even resembles the traumatic experiences of childhood instantly sets off alarms and an old emergency response. The stress hormones cortisol, dopamine, and the catecholamines are activated, and the internal alarm system in his head, the amygdala, tells him he's facing danger."
Elizabeth looked at her sister long and hard. "How did you put it once? No one is so crazy that they can't find someone even crazier who understands them."
"That's not from me; it's from Heinrich Heine." The doctor took a deep breath and looked out the window, where a long, hot day would end in a thunderous storm.
"But Carl wasn't crazy at heart," she then continued. "He was a poor young fellow who had been victimized far too early and often. And who never wanted to be victimized again. By becoming a perpetrator himself."
There was a knock at the door. Nick poked his head into the room, an envelope in his hand. "We found these pictures," he said with a deep frown. "They were already in the lab. We made copies of them, too." He handed the envelope to his sister-in-law. "Take a look at it."
The detective glanced at the pictures.
The first was an old Polaroid.
It appeared to be Christmas.
She winced as there was a crash outside. The rumble of thunder was now directly overhead, and lightning twitched in the sky like crime scene footage.
There was a little boy in the picture. Maybe it was Carl.
The boy was asleep on his mother's lap while his mother sat quietly and introspectively on a worn couch. She looked thoughtfully and a little worriedly at the ceiling while the boy slept on her lap as if in God's hands. It was an image of peace and security as if the mother carried a precious treasure.
Keep forever was written in a scrawly script on the back of the picture, and it was the writing of a little boy.
Then another picture.
From a crime scene.
It showed the same boy, maybe a year or two older.
A dark hallway.
In the hallway, a woman with blood running from her nose.
There was nothing on the back of this picture.
Something told Elizabeth that this woman was Carl's mother, who had lain dead for hours in the cold hallway of the apartment at that time while her young son kept vigil at her side.
Elizabeth made a decision. She would take the first picture of Carl in the cell. The image of Christmas. He would surely keep it until the end of his life as he had done before. Can I be angry with him? the detective asked herself. Even if he wanted to keep her in a room with the bodies forever? Even though she might never have been freed without Nick's acumen? Even if, in the end, he had been no better than the culprits he wanted to punish? Because he had accepted that innocent people would die cruelly? Barbara Walton, Martha Hurts, and Frank Conway couldn't help that their relatives had made terrible mistakes.
Yet Elizabeth still couldn't hate him. She couldn't even really be angry with him. Nor could she condemn his behavior wholesale, even if he more than deserved the punishment he would receive.
Katherine had talked about psychopaths, and they can adapt perfectly, and Carl was like that. Did that make him a psychopath too?
No. He was just a hurt boy who had always remained broken. And at some point, he had been strong enough and far enough ahead of his age to ensure he never got hurt again.
He was a killer. But he was not a psychopath, not a typical serial killer.
The realization hit Elizabeth with brutal clarity.
Anyone can become a killer, given the right circumstances.
The detective had no sympathy for violent criminals who turned people into physical and mental cripples and for whom the judge then had compassion because, after all, they had to go through such a difficult childhood. She had no pity for serial killers, no matter how disturbed and plagued by nightmares they were, because, after all, it was they who killed bestially, not their victims or the state or society. The longer the detective practiced this profession, the more confident she believed that the first thing one was responsible for was one's actions. If you wanted to exercise your rights and maturity as a citizen, you had to answer for your actions.
But here, it was different. Here someone had become a monster because almost all instances had failed.
"Are you coming?" asked Katherine.
Elizabeth had been so absorbed in the picture that she hadn't even noticed her sister get up from her chair. "Carl is through with the first interrogation now. I suppose we can see him. He's in the maximum security prison on remand. Come on, let's take a look at him."
Elizabeth realized that her sister still couldn't believe that her intern, of all people, was a serial killer.
The detective didn't know why she wanted to go along. But she wanted to go along. It wasn't a triumph she tried to hold out to Carl. Now, look, I'm free, and you're in jail.
Maybe it was a form of sympathy. And a desire to somehow understand this person.