Velocity

women being hurt?”
    “I like to watch, all right? But I’m ashamed.”
    “I don’t think you’re ashamed at all.”
    “I am. I am ashamed. Not always during, but always after.”
    “After what?”
    “After… watching. This isn’t… Oh, man. This isn’t what I want to be.”
    “Who would want to be what you are, Stevie?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Name me one person. One person who would want to be what you are.”
    “Maybe nobody,” Zillis said.
    “How ashamed are you?” Billy persisted.
    “I’ve thrown the videos away. Lots of times. I’ve even destroyed them. But then, you know… after a while, I buy new ones. I need help to stop.”
    “Have you ever sought help, Stevie?”
    Zillis didn’t respond.
    “Have you ever sought help?” Billy pressed.
    “No.”
    “If you really want to stop, why haven’t you sought help?”
    “I thought I could stop on my own. I thought I could.”
    Zillis began to cry. His eyes were still glazed from the Mace, but these were real tears.
    “Why have you done those things to the mannequins in the other room, Stevie?”
    “You can’t understand.”
    “Yeah, I’m just stodgy old Billy Wiles, got no zing, but give me a try anyway.”
    “That doesn’t mean anything, what I did to them.”
    “For something that doesn’t mean anything, you sure put a lot of time and energy into it.”
    “I won’t talk about this. Not this.” He wasn’t refusing as much as pleading. “I won’t.”
    “Does it make you blush? Stevie? Does it offend your tender sensibilities?”
    Zillis cried continuously now. Not wrenching sobs. The steady, scalding tears of humiliation, of abashment.
    He said, “Doing it isn’t the same as talking about it.”
    “You mean what you do to the mannequins,” Billy clarified.
    “You can… you can blow my brains out, but I won’t talk about it. I can’t.”
    “When you mutilate the mannequins, are you excited, Stevie? Are you huge with excitement?”
    Zillis shook his head, hung his head.
    “Doing it to them and talking about it are so different?” Billy asked.
    “Billy. Billy, please. I don’t want to hear myself, hear myself talking about it.”
    “Because when you’re doing it, then it’s just something you do. But if you talk about it, then it’s something you are.”
    Zillis’s expression confirmed that Billy had gotten to the quick of it.
    Not much could be gained by harping on the mannequins. They were what they were. Rubbing Steve Zillis’s face in his perversion could be counterproductive.
    Billy had not yet gotten what he needed, what he had come here to prove.
    He was simultaneously tired and wired, in need of sleep but strung out on caffeine. At times, his pierced hand ached; the Vicodin had begun to wear off.
    Because of exhaustion staved off with chemicals, he might not be conducting the interrogation cleverly enough.
    If Zillis was the freak, he was a genius of emotional fakery.
    But then that’s what sociopaths were: voracious spiders with an uncanny talent for projecting a convincing image of a complex human being that obscured the insectile reality of icy calculation and ravenous intent.
    Billy said, “When you do what you do to the mannequins, when you watch those sick videos, do you ever think of Judith Kesselman?”
    In the course of this encounter, Zillis had been surprised more than once, but this question shocked him. Bloodshot from the residual effect of the Mace, his eyes widened. His face paled and went loose, as if he had taken a blow.
     
     
     

Chapter 63
     
    Zillis shackled to the bed. Billy free on the chair but with a growing sense of being trammeled by his prisoner’s evasiveness.
    “Stevie? I asked you a question.”
    “What is this?” Zillis said with apparent earnestness and even the merest trace of righteous affront.
    “What is what?”
    “Why did you come here? Billy, I don’t understand what you’re doing here.”
    “Do you think of Judith Kesselman?” Billy persisted.
    “How do you know about her?”
    “How do you think I know?”
    “You answer questions with questions, but I’m supposed to have real answers to everything.”
    “Poor Stevie. What about Judi Kesselman?”
    “Something happened to her.”
    “What happened to her, Stevie?”
    “It was in college. Five, five and a half years ago.”
    “Do you know what happened to her, Stevie?”
    “Nobody knows.”
    “Somebody does,” Billy said.
    “She disappeared.”
    “Like in a magic show?”
    “She