Face of Fear by Dean Koontz Page A

work. As I understand it, there are two basic ways a psychopath will act when he’s finished with his victim. Number one, there’s Mr. Meek. The killing is everything for him, his whole reason for living, the only color and desire in his life. When he’s done killing, there’s nothing, he’s nothing. He goes home and watches television. Sleeps a lot. He sinks into a deep pit of boredom until the pressures build up and he kills again. Number two, there’s the man who gets psyched up by the murder. His real excitement comes not during the killing but after it. He’ll go straight from the scene of the crime to a bar and drink everyone under the table. His adrenaline is up. His heartbeat is up. He eats like a lumberjack and sometimes picks up whores by the six-pack. Apparently, our man is number two. Except...”
    “Except what?” Graham asked.
    Turning away from the window, Preduski said, “Seven times he’s eaten a big meal in the dead women’s own homes. But the other three times, he’s taken the food out of the refrigerator and faked a big meal.”
    “Faked it? What do you mean?”
    “The fifth murder, the Liedstrom woman,” Preduski said. He closed his eyes and grimaced as if he could still see her body and blood.“We were aware of his style by then. We checked the kitchen right away. There was an empty pear can on the table, an empty cottage cheese container, the remains of an apple and several other items. But there wasn’t a mess. The first four times, he’d been sloppy—like he was tonight. But in the Liedstrom kitchen, he hadn’t left a lot of crumbs.
    No smears of butter or mustard or mayonnaise or ketchup. No bloodstains on the beer cans.”
    He opened his eyes and walked to the table. “We’d found well-gnawed apple cores in two of the first four kitchens.” He pointed at an apple core on the table in front of him. “Like that one. The lab had even studied the teeth marks on them. But in the Liedstrom kitchen he peeled the apple and removed the center with a corer. The skins and the core were piled neatly on one corner of his dinner plate. That was a change from what we’d seen previously, and it got me thinking. Why had he eaten like a Neanderthal the first four times—and like a gentleman the fifth? I had the forensic boys open the plumbing under the sink and take out the garbage disposal unit. They ran tests on it and found that each of the eight kinds of food on the table had been put through the disposal within the past few hours. In short, the Butcher hadn’t taken a bite of anything in the Liedstrom kitchen. He got the food from the refrigerator and tossed it down the drain. Then he set the table so it would look as if he’d had a big meal. He did the same thing at the scene of murders seven and eight.”
    That sort of behavior struck Graham as particularly eerie. The air in the room seemed suddenly more moist and oppressive than before. “You said his eating after a murder was part of a psychotic compulsion.”
    “Yes.”
    “If for some reason he didn’t feel that compulsion at the Liedstrom house, why would he bother to fake it?”
    “I don’t know,” Preduski said. He wiped one slender hand across his face as if he were trying to pull off his weariness. “It’s too much for me. It really is. Much too much. If he’s crazy, why isn’t he crazy in the same way all of the time?”
    Graham hesitated. Then: “I don’t think any court-appointed psychiatrist would find him insane.”
    “Say again?”
    “In fact, I think even the best psychiatrist, if not informed of the murders, would find this man saner and more reasonable than he would most of us.”
    Preduski blinked his watery eyes in surprise. “Well, hell. He carves up ten women and leaves them for garbage, and you don’t think he’s crazy?”
    “That’s the same reaction I got from a lady friend when I told her.”
    “I don’t wonder.”
    “But I’ll stick by it. Maybe he is crazy. But not in any