LITMIR.BIZ

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do. He hasn’t committed any crime—having sex with these girls was unethical, but it wasn’t illegal. They were both over eighteen. I did call the administration at Fordham, and they’re going to deal with him on the ethics charges.” He turned to Lee. “What do you think? Does he fit your profile so far?”

      Lee looked at the priest, who sat staring at the empty space in front of him, hands still in his lap. “My instinct tells me no, but he is the right age and race. And the religious angle fits—almost. But something’s not right…I don’t think the killer is going to be someone in a religious profession. This is more the work of an outsider, someone who longs for religious absolution, but doesn’t quite believe he’s worthy of it.”

      “So if the priest isn’t the Slasher, we’re back to square one,” Butts said.

      Butts had nicknamed the killer the Slasher. Lee didn’t like the word much, but he and Butts were just beginning to get comfortable with each other, and he didn’t want to rock that boat, so he went along with it.

      “We’ve got a search warrant for his rooms, so if the missing necklace is there, we’ll find it,” Chuck said.

      “I don’t think you’ll find the necklace,” Lee answered and turned to Butts. “Remember the boyfriend thought Marie was seeing someone? It must have been Father Michael he was talking about.”

      “Son of a bitch. Taking advantage of those girls. And you know what really gets me? The families knew about it, and they didn’t say anything.”

      “Well, there are different levels of knowing, and we can’t say exactly what they knew—maybe they just suspected,” Lee pointed out.

      “But why cover up a thing like that?”

      “Because they were ‘good Catholics,’” Chuck said.

      Butts scratched his head. “I don’t follow.”

      “How could they allow themselves to believe their daughter’s priest is capable of that?” Lee said. “It throws their whole belief system into chaos.”

      “Oh, man,” said Butts. “That really burns me.”

      “It’s bad, I agree,” Lee replied. “But what the killer is doing is worse—much worse.”

      Chapter Twelve

      Lee sat off to the side in the drafty lecture hall at John Jay College, watching his old mentor in action. It was after 3 P.M., but the heat wasn’t on in the cavernous room, and the students sat bundled in their down jackets, rubbing their hands and blowing on them. In spite of the chill, though, attendance was good. Nelson’s lectures always drew a crowd. This was a new course, something a bit daring for the typical John Jay curriculum: The Psychology and Philosophy of the Serial Offender.

      Up on the stage, Nelson paced in front of the podium, hands jammed into his pants pockets. He lectured without notes, and the machine-gun delivery of his lectures had often been parodied by his students. When Lee was a senior at John Jay, the class sketch show included a satire of Nelson, played by a student in a red fright wig, chain-smoking several cigarettes at once and barking out his lectures so fast that they were unintelligible. To his credit, Nelson laughed himself silly over it. He later said it was the most flattering portrayal he had ever seen of himself.

      “I want to continue today with a quote from the renowned FBI profiler John Douglas,” Nelson said, stopping his pacing to pull down a large projection screen at the front of the room. “In his book, Mindhunter, he writes, ‘To understand the artist, look at his work.’”

      Nelson perched on the edge of his desk and rubbed the back of his neck. “Now, what exactly does this mean?”

      He looked out over the sea of eager faces. “It’s been said that there is a fine line between genius and madness. If you carry that idea far enough, you might even surmise that beneath every genius lurks a potential madman. And certainly in cases like van Gogh or Lord Byron, you had both. Trying to separate a genius from his ‘madness’ is like trying to pull dye out of a fabric after it has set. It’s a chicken-and-egg question. Who’s to say which feeds which? Would van Gogh have painted sunflowers or the garden at Arles if he didn’t suffer from bipolar disorder? My guess is probably not. He may have painted—he may even have painted well—but he would not have been van Gogh.”

      He paused to adjust the slide projector on the desk next to him. The students sat, captured by his intellect and charisma. Lee remembered that when he was a student, there were girls who had crushes on Nelson, following him around between classes, soaking in the heat of his forceful personality.

      “So that takes us back to John Douglas,” Nelson said, rising from his perch on the desk and picking up a remote control for the slide projector. “‘To understand the artist, look at his work.’ And if you view a serial offender the same way you would look at an artist, then we can begin to understand what Mr. Douglas is saying. After all, the root for both is the same: obsession. It’s only the form and content that differs, the degree of sublimation, of social acceptability.”

      “Now this,” he said, clicking his remote control so that a picture of the garden at Arles appeared on the screen, “is socially acceptable. But this”—another click and it was replaced by a photograph of a young woman with dark red strangulation marks around her neck—” is not.”

      There were murmurs from his audience. Nelson’s lips twitched, and one side of his mouth curved upward in a smile. He liked shocking his students. Without this dark side, Lee thought, Nelson would not be Nelson.

      A girl in the third row raised her hand. She was a thin blonde, with a pale, waifish face.

      “Are you implying that there’s no difference between a serial predator and a great artist?” Her voice quavered, though Lee couldn’t tell if it was from nerves or anger.

      “Not at all,” Nelson replied. “I merely suggest that what drives them springs from the same source. The form of expression couldn’t be more different.”

      The girl’s pale face reddened, and her voice shook even more. “So it’s just a question of form?”

      “But form is content, on some very profound level. Consider the irreducibility of a poem, for example. It’s like the artificial separation between mind and body, something eastern medicine has recognized for centuries. Is a migraine headache a product of too much red wine, a genetic predisposition, or a fight with one’s husband? Who’s to say? The doctor says it’s the result of an expanded blood vessel in the forehead, the allergist claims it’s an aversion to tannins and nitrate, the reiki healer claims it’s an imbalance of the energies—and maybe they’re all right.”

      He settled himself on the front of the desk again, his arms crossed.

      “As to the difference between an artist and a criminal, I would maintain that van Gogh, who was actually psychotic, was lucky to have found an expression for his spirit, for his demons, that was socially acceptable. Or take Beethoven, for example, who was a famously eccentric and tortured soul. They were better adapters than your average criminal. On the other hand, there are people who are both criminals and talented creative artists—like the playwright Jean Genet, for example.”

      A boy in the second row raised his hand. “You said they spring from the same source—what’s the source?”

      “Libido—the life force. Passion. Without passion, there is no creativity—or destruction. Passion in Greek means ‘to suffer,’ as in the passion of Christ. But in our culture it has come to mean the force that drives sex, not creativity. I might remind you,” he continued, “that Adolf Hitler was an aspiring artist before he became a dictator.

      “In fact, it’s been argued that had the art critics of Vienna been kinder to young Adolf, World War II might have been avoided. It was partly his frustration as an artist that turned him toward politics. As R. D. Laing points out, it is necessary for a person to feel they have made a difference—that they are being ‘received’ by others. So the

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