"YOU NEED TO MAKE a phone call, Chandonne?" the voice belonging to the eyes asks. "Your lawyers dead, committed suicide. They found his body in a hotel room in some Polish city I can't pronounce. Looks like he'd been dead a while. Killed himself because he was a fugitive. Figures that you'd be represented by a criminal. That's all I know."
Jean-Baptiste sits on his bunk, tracing over words on white paper. "Who are you?"
"Officer Duck."
"Monsieur Canard? Coin-coin. That is French for quack-quack, Monsieur Duck."
"You want to make a phone call or not?" "No, merci.
Officer Duck is never sure how to describe or define the subtleties that ignite his temper every time Jean-Baptiste speaks, but the result is belittlement and powerlessness, as if the mutant murderer is superior and indifferent to death row and those who have complete control of him. The Wolfman manages to make Officer Duck feel as though he is nothing but a shadow in a uniform. He looks forward to Jean-Baptiste's execution and wishes it could be painful.
"Got that right. No mercy's what your ass is gonna get in ten short days," Officer Duck mouths off. "Sorry about your lawyer's blowing his brains out and rotting inside a hotel room. I can tell you feel real bad about it."
"Lies," Jean-Baptiste replies as he gets up from his bunk and moves to the door, wrapping fingers with their swirls of pale, downy hair around the iron bars in the tiny window.
His Halloween face fills the space and startles Officer Duck, who almost panics at the close proximity of his inch-long filthy thumbnail- the only nail that, for some reason, Jean-Baptiste never cuts.
"Lies," Jean-Baptiste repeats.
It is never easy to know where his asymmetrical eyes are directed or how much they see, and the hair covering his forehead and neck and protruding in tufts from his ears overwhelms Officer Duck with fright.
"Move back. Goddamn, you stink worse than a dog that's been rolling around in the juice of something dead. We're gonna cut that fucking thumbnail of yours."
"It's my legal right to grow my nails and my hair," Jean-Baptiste replies softly, with a gaping smile that reminds the officer of a widemouthed fish.
He imagines those widely spaced, pointed baby teeth ripping into female flesh, biting breasts like a frenzied shark while hairy fists pound beautiful faces to pulp. Chandonne targeted only gorgeous, successful women with sexy bodies. He has a fetish for large breasts and nipples that, according to a forensic psychologist who is in and out of the pod, denotes an obsession with a body part that compels Jean-Baptiste to annihilate it.
"For some offenders, it's shoes and feet," the forensic psychologist explained over coffee, perhaps a month ago.
"Yeah, I know about the shoe thing. These wackos break into houses and steal some lady's shoes."
"It happens more than you might expect. The shoe itself is sexually arousing to the offender. Frequently, he then feels the need to kill the woman wearing the fetish or whose body part is the fetish. Many serial killers got their starts as fetish burglars, going into homes, stealing shoes, underwear, other objects that mean something to them sexually."
"So Wolfman was probably stealing bras when he was a hairy little kid."
"Could very well have been. He certainly enters homes with ease, and that is consistent with a serial burglar who has progressed to a serial murderer. The problem with fetish burglary is often the victim has no clue that her home has been entered and that anything was taken. How many women who can't find a shoe or even several shoes, or lingerie, would assume a burglar has been inside her home?"
Officer Duck shrugged. "Hell, my wife can't find nothing half the time she looks. You ought to see her closet. If anybody's got a shoe fetish, Sally does. But it's not like some guy can break in to a lady's home and walk off with a breast. Well, I guess some of them are into the dismemberment thing."
"It's like hair color, eye color or anything else. An offender has a fetish about whatever triggers sexual arousal that in some cases gives rise to a sadistic need to destroy that fetish. Which, in this instance, is the woman with the size and shape of breasts that are a fetish to Jean-Baptiste Chandonne."
Officer Duck understands in a limited way. He likes breasts, too. He is perversely, shamefully aroused by images, even violent ones.