The Axeman's Jazz

efforts to look fierce that for the first time Skip realized she probably wasn’t even twenty yet.
    Feeling silly and not a little intrigued, she asked Guillory to recommend a couple of books, and bought them.
    Then she went home and called Cindy Lou.
    “Hey, girl. You caught this creep yet?”
    “You mind being called on Saturday?”
    “Hell, no. It’s good to hear from you. I could feel left out if I let myself.”
    “That’s how I spend my life. There’s a lot of good guys in that department, but somehow I always end up working with O’Rourke.”
    “Hodges is kind of crotchety too. But Adam Abasolo—now, there’s a fox.”
    Thinking of Steve Steinman, she said, “I kind of like teddy bears.”
    “Honey, I know what you mean. And they’re so good for the inner child. But you didn’t call me up for girl talk, I bet.”
    “I need professional help.”
    “My meter’s running.”
    “How can I find out if somebody who says she’s a therapist really is?”
    “Look in the phone book, maybe?”
    “Oh, shit.” She hadn’t looked, somehow assuming that wasn’t Di’s style. “Hold on a minute.” As she checked, she filled Cindy Lou in on Di and her two peculiar last-minute statements of the night before. “Anyway,” she finished, “the voodoo folks don’t know her. And now I’ve checked the phone book. She’s not under ‘psychotherapists.’ Are there organizations she ought to belong to? She says she does hypnotism—does she have to have some kind of certificate for that?”
    “So far as I know, in Louisiana anybody can hang out their shingle and say they’re a hypnotherapist. But most of them know each other—you could see if they know her. And yes, there are organizations she might join. If she’s a therapist who happens to know hypnotism, she’d have to be licensed to be in private practice.”
    Skip asked who did the licensing and made a note to follow up first thing Monday morning.
    Cindy Lou said, “Listen, you get into anything interesting, call me up. You know what? I like working with you. There’s not that many people appreciate my sense of humor. You always laugh in meetings.”
    Skip couldn’t stifle a smile, though no one could see it. Cindy Lou liked working with her. Cindy Lou had specifically asked to work with her. Her hero had spoken kindly.
    “Hey, girl, I’ve got an idea. I guess I can’t do it, but you can. Or maybe it’s routine—I don’t know. I was thinking about not just asking people’s neighbors about them or whatever you do, but visiting their families. Seeing where they come from.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “You could use some kind of ruse. Just kind of check out the scene.”
    “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
    “Well, if you run into something really ugly, you could concentrate on that person. A serial killer doesn’t just come out of nowhere—he comes out of hatred and meanness. You know that FBI study? They put together a chart of family background characteristics based on their interviews. The stuff they found the killers had in common varied from thirty-three percent to seventy-four percent. Guess what was seventy-four? History of psychological abuse. Next was seventy-two percent—’negative relationship with male caretaker figures.’ You could look for that kind of stuff. You might get a feeling about someone.”
    “Police work—” She stopped. She’d almost said, “Police work isn’t about feelings,” but she knew better than to speak that way to a psychologist; she’d probably be told it ought to be. There was something else as well—intuition did play a part in police work; a big part. If you had a feeling somebody with a gun was behind you, you’d better duck first and then turn around. She said, “I’ll think about it, Cindy Lou.”
    She sat by the cradled phone awhile and tried to get the idea out of her mind. It was preposterous. It could very well be a waste of time….
    That one didn’t fly. What else was she going to do with her time?
    … And it wasn’t sound police work. That was the important one. You didn’t go around questioning a suspect’s intimates unless they were mad at him; if they were on speaking terms, word would get back. But in this case, what if word did get back? Did that mean he’d stop killing? Would that be so bad?
    Somehow it didn’t strike her that forebearing to talk to people’s relatives at this point was going to make or break the case. And she liked the idea.