When Lien-hua and I returned to the conference room to meet with Margaret and debrief Melice’s interrogation, we found her sitting at the head of the expansive table waiting for us. Even before we could pull out our chairs, Margaret said, “Agent Jiang, talk to me about this man.” Her voice was unusually cool and reserved. After what had just happened in the interrogation room, her even tone surprised me. “From a profiler’s perspective, what are we looking at?”
“It’s the perfect storm,” Lien-hua replied as we took our seats.
“A psychopath with CIPA. He feels no pain in his body and he feels no pain in his heart. Here is a man who has never felt discomfort or guilt or shame or suffering of any kind-either mental or physical.” As she spoke, I thought of the astronomical odds against a psychopath also having CIPA, but then I remembered Tessa’s comments about the way Dupin approached his case: as impossible as it seems, it did occur, so it must be possible.
Lien-hua went on, “Psychopaths don’t feel either empathy or compassion and never develop close enough relationships to feel heartache. Instead, they just look at other people as objects to be used and then discarded when they no longer enjoy them. Often they become addicted to controlling people, and when they get obsessed with something, their obsession can go on for decades.”
I took Lien-hua’s words to heart and wondered what it would be like to live, as Melice put it, in a “painless hell.” How different would that be from a “joyless heaven”? Maybe no different at all. “What about the interrogation?” asked Margaret. “The things he told you?”
“A classic example of ‘semantic aphasia,’” Lien-hua said. “That is, using the words that your listeners want to hear. It’s a way of manipulating people. Career criminals are experts at it. They only care about getting their way, exerting power. So it’s tough to say how much of what he said could be taken as a confession. I’d need to talk with him more. But I can say this much-he knows the mind of a killer. And he likes fantasizing about death.”
“Or maybe,” I said, “he just likes watching people do the one thing he can’t do-suffer at the hands of others.”
Then Margaret folded her arms and looked back and forth from Lien-hua to me. “Now,” she said coolly. “Tell me what you two know about Project Rukh.”