The Man Behind the Cop

“It is bleak. Especially since I doubt he’s ever done child care for more than a few hours at a time.” He hadn’t thought to ask anyone. “Is Enrico still in diapers?”

She shook her head. “Lenora was really happy to get him potty trained just…I don’t know, six weeks or so ago. Although that isn’t very long. Under stress, kids tend to regress.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. Under enough stress, they regressed by years sometimes. He’d seen a twelve-year-old curling up tightly and sucking her thumb. Having your mother brutally bludgeoned right in front of you…Yeah, that would be cause to lose bladder control.

“He’d be mad,” Bruce noted.

“Oh, he’d be mad at them no matter what. Enrico is two. You know what two-year-olds are like.”

He didn’t, except by reputation.

“And Anna is only four. Well, almost five. They need routine, they need naps, they’ll want their favorite toys—” She stopped. “Did he take the time to collect any of their stuff from their aunt and uncle’s?”

“After killing Aunt Julia, you mean?” he said dryly. “We assume they had a bag packed for the night, and if so, yes. It’s not there. But the ragged, stuffed bunny Uncle Mateo says Anna is passionately attached to was left on the sofa, along with Enrico’s blankie. Uncle Mateo predicts major tears.”

“Stupid,” she pronounced.

“He panicked. Wouldn’t you, under the circumstances?”

“Yes, but he’ll be sorry.” Then she shook her head, visibly going into psychologist mode. “No, sorry isn’t in his vocabulary. Not if it means, Gee, I screwed up. Everything is someone else’s fault. The more he gets frustrated with the children, the more enraged he’ll be at Lenora. This is all her fault. What’s frightening is that without her to deflect him, he’ll start turning that rage on Anna and Enrico. That he would anyway is worrying. That’s what finally precipitated her decision to leave him. She knew that sooner or later he’d lose his temper with them, not just with her.”

The sandwich was settling heavily in Bruce’s stomach. He was hearing a professional opinion, professionally delivered. “How soon will that happen?”

“Soon. It probably already has. If he’d attacked just Lenora, I’d think there was a chance that he’d have a period of being…chilled. Justifying it in his own mind, but shaken by what he’d done, too. The fact that he attacked two women, with—what, fifteen minutes, half an hour in between?—suggests that he’s even more cold-blooded than I would have guessed. No, he’ll have very little patience. His own children are just…possessions to him. Evidence of his virility. Not living, breathing, squalling, traumatized kids. He literally has no ability to empathize.”

Bruce swore. He supposed he had hoped Escobar was a man made momentarily insane by what he perceived as his wife’s betrayal.

Ah, here we go again. Hamster wheel squeaking. What was true insanity—what was cultural and what was in the blood, a legacy from father to son?

Give me a straightforward murder for profit any day.

In this case, at least, Karin was telling him that Roberto Escobar wasn’t momentarily nuts. He was the real thing: a genuine sociopath. One who, unfortunately, was on the run with two preschoolers. Now, that was scary.

He mined Karin for every tidbit she could dredge from her memory about her client’s husband. His favorite color was red; Lenora had once mentioned looking for a shirt for his birthday. Did it say that the guy loved the color of blood?

“He’s five foot eight, not five-ten as it says on his driver’s license. Lenora said he lied.”

Bruce made a note.

“He snores. But he didn’t like it when she slipped out of bed to sleep on the couch or got in bed with one of the kids. So usually she didn’t, even if she couldn’t sleep.”

Snores, he wrote, for no good reason. Unless someone in a cheap motel complained to the manager about a guy who sawed wood on the other side of the wall?

He noted food likes and dislikes, Roberto’s opinion about people he worked with, his anger at what in his view was his mother’s betrayal.

“Guy wasn’t doing well where the women in his family were concerned,” Bruce commented.

“No, and Lenora admitted to being inspired by the way his mother just let his words wash over her—like rain running over a boulder, I think is what she said—and kept on with her plans to go home to Mexico. Possibly for the first time, she realized he could be defied.”

“I wonder if that was a good part of why he was so angry. Afraid his wife would see a chink in his supremacy?”

“Um…” She pursed her lips and thought about it. “No, I doubt he reasoned it out that well. Or believed Lenora had it in her to defy him in turn. Mostly, he’d have been angry that his mother chose her other son. Although since he’s continued to call her, he may be channeling that anger onto his brother, who somehow lured their mother from her duty to her older son.”

“In other words, he has a massively egocentric view of the world.”

“Oh, entirely,” Karin assured him.

They quibbled over the bill, with Bruce winning. He couldn’t help noticing how little she’d actually eaten. He suspected she’d picked up her fork from time to time more to be unobtrusive about not eating than out of actual hunger.

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