The Axeman's Jazz

two attendees and verify the others.
    Out of the muck and mire had arisen several people who’d known Tom Mabus, one or two who could vaguely remember Linda Lee. And that was about it. Except for two things. One was the niggling feeling that, because of the scarf, this wasn’t an Axeman murder after all. Maybe it was a copycat. The other was Cindy Lou’s salty assessment of a few people she’d met the night before.
    “That Di’s a piece of work, man.”
    “I love it,” said Abasolo, “when you throw around those scientific terms.”
    “She’s got to have every man she can get, but my guess is she doesn’t give them much in return. She’s so far in denial about most things, she sounds like she’s crazy half the time, but I don’t think so.”
    “So she couldn’t be the Axeman?”
    “Sure she could. Good combination of organized and disorganized characteristics. But personally I like Abe, just because he’s the biggest creep of all. Don’t you love the way everything’s always everybody else’s fault?”
    O’Rourke asked, “What does that have to do with anything?”
    “Murderers justify their acts. That’s easy to do if everybody else is in the wrong. Now Alex. He’s a kind of a mirror image of Di. She’s got to have men, he’s got to have women. He’s emotionally about five years old, and anybody here who has kids knows I’m talking seriously dangerous. I’m tempted to say his attention span’s probably too short to kill three people, but you never know—I once saw the damage after a five-year-old took a whole house apart.
    “Sonny’s so screwed up he’s not even going to figure out how bad it is till he’s forty-five or fifty, and by then he’ll probably be a drunk. Killers don’t usually look quite so nicey-nice, but trust me—there’s some real turbulence under that bland facade. Skip’s told me about her interview with his brother—he had an early family life consistent with a killer’s, but so did nearly all of them.
    “Missy, for instance. History of abuse. On the surface she looks like a victim rather than a criminal, but you know how much rage you’d have if you’d been through what she has?”
    “Is that fair?” said Cappello. “The average incest survivor isn’t a killer.”
    “The average person who fits any of the profiles may not be a killer. A killer identifies with the aggressor and—oh, hell, who knows what turns them? That’s what we don’t know. Why two people can have parallel experiences and one’s a serial murderer, the other’s a psychologist.”
    “What,” said O’Rourke, “are you getting at?”
    “I’m just making a few observations, that’s all. Just noticing that everybody who shared last night looks normal, looks good if you just know them casually, meet them on the street or something. Interview them in the course of an investigation. But every one of ’em’s crazy as a bedbug.”
    “Oh, come on,” said Hodges. “I saw ’em too, you know. We all did. They’re no crazier than anybody else.”
    “I didn’t say they were.”

TWENTY-SIX
    SINCE DI LIVED near Skip, she figured she might as well have breakfast at home. And besides, she had some unfinished business with Steve.
    He was dressed and making coffee. “Hi, gorgeous. Catch him yet?”
    “Don’t gorgeous me. You’re not just a witness anymore. You’re an alibi.”
    “Whose?” He handed her a full mug.
    “Don’t pretend you don’t even know.”
    “Well, I could sure take a guess. One of your suspects did happen to say she was really enjoying talking to me and even invited me home for a cup of herb tea. And I did happen to go.”
    “You didn’t mention that last night.”
    “I just didn’t get to it, that’s all. I said I walked Di to her car. I didn’t say what I did then.”
    “How long did you stay?”
    “Twenty minutes max. I don’t even know why I went except for maybe some crazy idea about getting closer to the whole scene. Anyway, it was coltsfoot tea or some damn thing that tasted like poison, and I found I couldn’t hack more than fifty or sixty preposterous misstatements to the quarter-hour. I thought I was tough, but forget it. I’ve got a new respect for you girls in blue.
    “I would say ‘women in blue,’ but you’d say if you’ve got ‘boys in blue,’ why not ‘girls,’ and the whole thing would just get stupid and predictable.”
    But Steve was warming up to full-tilt rant and couldn’t be stopped: “What planet is