Tonight’s patient goes by an identification number, but he has a name. Basil Jenrette. He is a mildly anxious and intelligent thirty-three-year-old compulsive murderer.Bentonavoids the term serial killer. It has been so overused, it means nothing helpful and never did except to loosely imply that a perpetrator has murdered three or more people over a certain period of time. The word serial suggests something that occurs in succession. It suggests nothing about a violent offender’s motives or state of mind, and when Basil Jenrette was busy killing, he was compulsive. He couldn’t stop.

The reason he is getting his brain scanned in a 3-Tesla MRI machine that has a magnetic field sixty thousand times more powerful than the earth’s is to see if there is anything about his gray and white matter and how it functions that might hint at why.Bentonhas asked him why numerous times during their clinical interviews.

I would see her and that was it. I had to do it.

Had to do it right that minute?

Not right there on the street. I might follow her until I figured it out, came up with a plan. To be honest, the more I calculated, the better it felt.

And how long would this take? The following, the calculating. Can you approximate? Days, hours, minutes?

Minutes. Maybe hours. Sometimes days. Depends. Stupid bitches. I mean, if it was you and you realized you were being abducted, would you just sit there in the car and not even try to get away?

Is that what they did, Basil? They sat in the car and didn’t try to get away?

Except for the last two. You know about them because that’s why I’m here. They wouldn’t have resisted, but my car broke down. Stupid. If it was you, would you rather be killed right there in the car or wait to see what I’m going to do to you when I get you to my special spot?

Where was your special spot? Always the same place?