Page 3 of PSYCHOlogical

Chapter Two

Doctor Rhoades

Vincent Briggs was the most fascinating man I’d ever met.

His profession was killing.

When he entered a room, people within eyeshot either feared him, were fascinated by him, or a little of both. His walk was precise and sure-footed. Confidence radiated from his being. His alluring honey-colored eyes commanded the attention of anyone fortunate enough to look into them.

If he chose to speak, he did so in as few words as possible. He was methodical, extremely neat, and had no living parents or siblings, making him a perfect choice for the government’s clandestine New Dawn program.

The program used specially-trained Marines that were detached from the military. They dressed as civilians, wore their hair much longer than standard regulations allowed, and didn’t carry military credentials. In the eyes of the military, they didn’t exist.

Yet, one of them sat on the other side of my desk, gazing blankly through my window and into the parking lot.

My relationship with Vincent was professional. I wondered if I’d simply met him in passing if things would be different between us. My list of clients that shared his profession included five others with comparable qualifications. The similarities between them stopped there.

Vincent differed from his colleagues. His counterparts all shared the same diagnosis—antisocial personality disorder. The disorder allowed them to kill without feeling remorse.

Simply stated, they were psychopaths.

To them, killing was no different than walking to the mailbox to retrieve the mail. There was no mental, psychological, or emotional repercussion associated with murder. Drinking a can of soda evoked the same range of emotion as taking a human life.

I’d learned in the three years that I’d known Vincent that grandiose sense of self, superficial charm, sexual promiscuity, and pathological lying were things he knew nothing of. He was humble, sexually inactive, valued women, and accepted responsibility for his actions.

Despite my desire to categorize him as completely off-limits, I often thought of him in my idle time. I was fascinated that he accepted humanity’s greatest crime as a necessary part of his duty to protect the nation from harm. The fact that he did so without outwardly wallowing in guilt was contrary to every textbook I’d studied.

“Did it bother you that someone believed you’d done something wrong?” I asked.

He gave me a puzzled look. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking, Doc.”

“You indicated you suffered from insomnia following your assignment in west Texas. After completing the mission, you were arrested. It was the first time you’ve been questioned for suspicion of a crime. Did having someone suspect you of wrongdoing bother you?”

“No.”

I crossed my legs. “Why not?”

“Should it?”

“There’s no right or wrong answer,” I explained. “We’re just talking. I’m trying to find a way to get you back on track with your sleeping.”

“It frustrates me that I was arrested.” He shifted his eyes from me to the window. “But that’s not the problem with my sleeping. The target was a woman. I think that’s what’s troubling me.”

Discussing his true feelings made our sessions rewarding. The manipulative behavior, half-truths, and canned responses expressed by my other clients provided little satisfaction that I was being of any assistance to them. Vincent’s willful offering of the truth was a nice change of pace.

It didn’t surprise me that having a woman target troubled him. Having never received a woman’s approval as a child, he yearned for it as an adult. Subsequently, harming a woman was completely out of character for him.

Vincent was often left for days—and sometimes weeks—by his mother, who was a prostitute and drug addict. His only known address as a child was the strip club where she worked. He slept on the streets, considered her coworkers his family, and looked at her “clients” as fatherly figures.

His upbringing, when combined with the fact that the normal human mind needs to feel threatened to justify murder, left Vincent feeling uneasy about his last mission. Killing a woman who wasn’t perceived as a threat went against the grain of his very being.

“Would you like to explain what frustrates you about being arrested?” I asked. “We’ll discuss that portion first.”

“The same thing that would frustrate a professional basketball player if he missed the game-winning free throw.”

I uncrossed my legs and quickly crossed them again. “Feelings of incompetence?”

He winked playfully.