Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set) by Blake Banner (best ereader for academics .txt) 📕

She sat on the arm of the chair facing me, with a strand of burgundy tinsel in her hands. “It’s hard to imagine what that must be like.”

“And I get the feeling that he was actually, potentially, an intelligent, motivated, able person. A fact which only added to the rage he was suppressing inside. By the time he got to New York, he was so badly damaged he didn’t know who he was or how to get out of the crippling, paralyzing state he was in. He needed a therapist or a friend, somebody to guide him. But his personality was so awful that he couldn’t make friends.”

Dehan shook her head. “Along came Fernando.”

“Yup, and he and Giorgio thought it was great sport to see him writhing in emotional agony as they dangled Sue in front of him. They could not have known that Sue was so similar to his mother. At first he adored her. But the more she flirted, however harmlessly, with Fernando and Giorgio, the more he relived the nightmare of his mother’s betrayal and her death.

“I had a talk with his psychiatrist the other day and he confirmed what I had suspected. In the end, Cyril’s need for his mother, his obsession with her, became so all-consuming that he actually became her, both psychically and, as far as he could, physically. But he never quite stopped being himself, either. On the one hand he had his own rage against his mother, like his father’s rage, for betraying him, for abandoning him, for leaving him at the mercy of his sister.

“But on the other hand there was the rage against Jose Rodriguez too, the journalist his mother had her affair with. Jose Rodriguez was the ultimate symbol of his own inadequacy and weakness. Jose Rodriguez was this big, neon sign that said, Cyril Browne is not a man.

“It’s not hard to see how he projected that onto Fernando and Giorgio. Sue, Fernando and Giorgio represented his darkest daemons, and he raged against all three of them.”

She had hung a large, acid-yellow ball and now stood staring at her warped reflection in it. “OK,” she said, “I get that. But first of all, why, after killing Sue, did he A, come back and B, wait twelve years to kill Giorgio and Fernando?”

“That is something his psychiatrist is trying to find out now, but my guess is this. As you suspected, Sue started befriending him, not realizing that this act of kindness would actually trigger his rage against her. Because one minute she was being sweet and nice to him, and the next moment she would be flirting with Giorgio and Fernando. They would be coming on to her in an overtly sexual way, and she would laugh. This is like his deepest, darkest nightmares coming to life in front of him. It’s his mother’s betrayal all over again. This is where his neurosis starts to turn into a full blown psychosis and his mother starts to come to life inside his own psyche. He loves her and needs her so badly, the only way to escape her betrayal is to become her. And this is where he decides that what he wants is to have a sex change operation, and he books a clinic in Geneva.

“I don’t know if he planned to kill her that Halloween. We’ll probably never know for sure, but Dr. Petersen speculates that the unconscious motivation was probably there, and that was what drove him to be at the party that night. It wasn’t part of a conscious plan, but it was an unconscious motivation that would strike given the opportunity.”

“Hence the apparent discrepancy between handing in notice and the opportunistic nature of the murder.”

“Exactly. So when she left, and he saw that Fernando had not stayed with her, he called on her, ostensibly to see if she was OK. She let him in. They were in the bedroom. Did she invite him in? Did he come on to her? The thing is, at some point that sexual charge was ignited, and he killed her. Ironically, exactly contrary to your theory, the only cure for his erectile dysfunction was to release his repressed rage.”

Dehan rolled her eyes. “Go Carmen. So he went home. His bags were probably already packed, and he went back to his sister’s place in a state of turmoil. He had satisfied his drive to kill Sue, but was now tortured by remorse.”

“Something like that, but his psychosis was driving him by now. Remorse was something that was fading in him. His psychosis drove him to fake his own death in Reno, and then fly to Geneva for his surgery. It was the fact that he left his jacket so conveniently to be found on the rubble, and so helpfully registered as having no next of kin, that made me suspect that he had not really committed suicide at all. I was convinced Joe White didn’t see him jump. He assumed he jumped, and then imagined that’s what he’d seen. At that distance, running in the dark, in a panic, trying not to trip and talking on the phone, he had no idea what he’d seen. Cyril threw something heavy into the cement, and jumped over the fence. That simple. He was very cold-blooded.

“I suspect that, at that stage, his fantasy was to return as Sandy Beach, and kill Giorgio and Fernando in the same place where he had killed Sue, back in her apartment in the Bronx. His hatred for Giorgio must have been very intense at that time, and these symbolic elements must have been very important to him. These were the psychotic, ritualistic elements to his killing which I mentioned in the beginning, which suggested a serial killer. But, curiously, by the time he’d