Page 57 of So Normal

“Can’t wait,” she said.

The three of them followed the officers and their despondent killer out of the platform and through the tunnel back to the terminal.All in all, not a bad day’s work,Faith thought.

She looked down at Turk and grinned. “Guess I oweyoua steak dinner, huh, buddy?”

Turk cast her a look that said Faith owed her alotof steak dinners. She laughed and reached down to ruffle his fur. “Good dog.”

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

“Think he’ll get the death penalty?” Michael asked.

Rameses shook his head. “DOJ might try to claim this is a Federal case because the first victim was a juror on the Hornfeldt case, but it’s pretty clear that the case wasn’t a motive for Gaston. The state might agree to let Gaston be tried in Federal court, but even if they do, he’s clearly insane. I doubt he’ll ever even stand trial.”

Michael frowned. “Lovely. So, he gets to spend his days in a nice padded room.”

“Between you and me,” Rameses said, “I’d rather be in jail than a mental hospital. I’ve seen those places before working other cases. It’s bad news.”

Faith listened idly while Michael and Rameses discussed the fate of Charles Gaston, forty-one, the killer who would go down in history as the Subway Vampire. Gaston, alternating between fits of laughter and bouts of moodiness, had offered little in the way of coherent explanation for his crimes. One moment, he would rant about how horrible people were and how they deserved to die. The next, he would claim to be an agent of God sent to Earth to rid the world of rudeness.

At the moment, the three of them watched as a negotiator attempted to calm Gaston and elicit some form of intelligible answer from him. Gaston was in the middle of one of his manic episodes, laughing and jerking at the chains that bound his hands to the table.

“Are we sure this isn’t an act?” Michael asked. “He managed to remain calm and collected when he was at the terminal. Now suddenly he’s batshit insane?”

“Happens all the time,” Rameses said. “I’m not a psychologist, but I’ve seen plenty of killers lose their shit after they’re caught. Sometimes it’s an act, and they’re playing a part, hoping that no one will figure them out before they can get a not-guilty play. A lot of times, it’s real. People like him—” he lifted his chin toward Gaston “—create this fantasy world where everything plays by whatever twisted rules they’ve made in their heads. When that world collapses around them, they have nothing left to tether them to reality.”

“So, is Gaston the former or the latter?”

“The latter, definitely,” Rameses said. “You can tell by his eyes. They never seem to focus on anything.”

They focused well enough when he killed people and staged their bodies,Faith thought to herself.

She didn’t say it out loud. She believed Gaston really was insane. She didn’t believe that excused him from his actions. There was a distance between believing that people were demons out to kill you and believing that the proper response for someone brushing past you at work was to poison them and leave their bodies so you could watch people pass them without knowing they were dead.

“What’s next for you two?” Rameses asked.

“Oh, you know,” Michael said, “back home and back to the drawing board. First, I owe my partner here a good steak dinner for once more being right.”

“You taking her to Nellie’s?” Rameses asked.

“You know it,” Michael replied with a grin.

Rameses laughed. “So, is this meal for her or for you?”

“Does it matter?” Michael asked.

The two men shared another laugh as the negotiator left the interrogation room, shaking her head. “This one’s done,” she said, twisting her finger in a circle next to her temple. “Completely gone. In my professional opinion.”

“Yeah, I thought as much,” Rameses said. “Well, we’ll keep him in the Special cell for now until they pack him up and ship him to the cuckoo’s nest. At least there he won’t be able to poison anyone.”

“I don’t know,” the negotiator said. “Did you ever see that movie about that inmate who impersonated a doctor at a mental hospital and went on a killing spree?”

“Yeah, but that guy wasn’t a patient. He actually thought he was a doctor until he went back and started remembering who he really was.”

Rameses and the negotiator left the room, continuing to trade stories. Faith and Michael watched them go, then turned to each other.

“Well,” Michael said, “I guess I owe you a dinner.”

Faith smiled. “You owe me a lot of dinners.”

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