Wrath's Storm: A Masters' Admiralty Novel by Mari Carr (desktop ebook reader .txt) 📕

“Dr. Fischer. It’s good to see you again.” Walt reached out to shake her hand and watched as Jakob shifted closer. The man took his responsibility as Annalise’s bodyguard very seriously.

“Please, call me Annalise.”

Walt nodded, smiling.

Eric gestured at the other chairs at the table. “Join us.”

Annalise took the seat next to Walt. Jakob hesitated for a moment, glancing around the restaurant.

“Sit, Bauer,” Eric growled. “I’ve already checked the place out.”

Walt thought it spoke to Jakob’s level of professionalism that he didn’t take a seat until he finished his quick survey of their surroundings.

“Fleet Admiral,” Jakob said as he sat. “Dr. Hayden.”

The waiter stopped by to see if Annalise and Jakob wanted to place an order. Well, that’s what he assumed, since the server was speaking German.

Jakob’s and Annalise’s accents were crisp and sort of hip, the “s” sounds becoming “z’s”, yet also intimate in the way the words flowed and paused. Walt’s knowledge of German accents was mostly from American-made movies. Neither Jakob nor Annalise had the harsh, guttural Indiana-Jones-Nazi accent he’d always associated with German. He was going to go ahead and never admit any of that out loud, since it was cultural racism. He’d just do better.

Eric was clearly pissed off by the interruption, impatient to discover what Annalise had found.

“We ordered coffee,” Walt said, gesturing to their cups, hoping he was adding that comment at an appropriate point.

“That sounds good,” Annalise said, then looked to the waiter and repeated her words in German.

The server replied in somewhat more heavily accented English. “Coffee, for you, very good.”

Jakob raised two fingers. “And cream for her, please.”

Annalise smiled at the Ritter, obviously pleased with Jakob’s order. Walt wondered if there was something going on between the pretty psychologist and Jakob. The sexual tension between the two was unmistakable.

Once the server was gone, Eric sat forward, seeming both eager and grim as he looked at Annalise. “You have something.”

She nodded. “Very preliminary. I only had time to go through the files you’d grouped under dismemberment.”

Eric frowned. “But we don’t know if Josephine was dismembered.”

“Precisely. You don’t know.” Annalise pulled out file folders. “From the dismembered victim group, I’ve identified two potential victims.” The top folder was labeled “Dr. Hayden.” She passed it to Walt, then handed Eric and Jakob equally innocuous folders. She set her own stack of papers, which was a bit thicker, on the table in front of her.

Walt opened his, blinked, and muttered, “Jesus.” The first page was a full-color autopsy photo.

“You’re a doctor.” Eric glanced at him.

“Yes, I like alive, breathing people.”

“Dr. Hayden, I think the place we should start is with you.”

“Me?” Walt raised his eyebrows comically high and was rewarded with a smile from Annalise.

“I’d like your assessment of the skill of the person who did the dismembering.”

“Okay, give me a minute…” He glanced down at the papers and grimaced. “Actually, do you have higher-resolution versions of the photos?”

“Jakob had suggested you might ask for that.” She reached into her bag, pulled out a tablet, and passed it over. “I loaded the images on this.”

“Wow. It’s exactly as bad as you think it would be in high def.” Walt was inwardly horrified, but he was perfectly capable of viewing the images with a clinical eye. “I’ll need a few minutes.”

Eric craned his neck to look at the tablet, then turned his attention back to Annalise. “Start talking. I don’t want to wait.”

That was, undeniably, a command. Walt shook his head and sighed, but if Eric saw him, he ignored it.

“I always begin my first lecture on the first day of abnormal psychology with a single question.” Annalise had a lovely speaking voice, calm, authoritative, and with that smart-sounding crisp accent. Walt could listen to her all day. “Do you know the definition of a serial killer?”

She paused, and Walt took a moment to appreciate the dramatic effect.

“My students’ answers usually range from ‘someone crazy’ to ‘someone who likes to kill people’ or, for students who’ve already taken a psych class or two, the response is usually ‘someone with a compulsive need.’ Do you know the definition of a serial killer, Fleet Admiral?”

“Someone who needs killing,” Eric replied instantly.

Annalise blinked, nonplussed, and beside her, Jakob stiffened a little.

“Fleet Admiral, if you’d ever like to talk to someone…” Annalise began hesitantly.

“Nope. I did plenty of therapy after my wives died, and I think I damn near broke the poor guy.”

“I was sorry to hear about your wives,” Walt said softly, recalling Eric mentioning to Juliette and Devon that his wives had died. “Was it an accident?”

Eric glanced in his direction, his jaw tight. “Assassinated.”

Assassinated was an interesting word. Different from murdered. Obviously, Eric’s wives, like him, held positions of power.

Walt wasn’t sure how to respond to the fact that both of Eric’s wives had been killed, but he didn’t have an opportunity to when Eric looked at Annalise and said, “Just keep going.”

“Right. Of course.” Annalise took a breath.

Walt imagined she was putting the fleet admiral’s mental health on a back burner, but only for now.

“A serial killer is someone for whom the murder of another person fills an abnormal psychological gratification.” Annalise spoke quietly, though there was no one sitting near them. “Sometimes this is coupled with a mental disorder, other times rooted in trauma, but either way, the impetus for the killing is to satisfy a need, the same needs you or I might have, but which we satisfy in socially acceptable ways.”

“He needs to kill people and cut their heads off,” Eric said.

“Actually, the killing might be secondary. The fact that the people die may or may not be part of this person’s motivation.”

“You can’t cut someone’s head off and keep them alive,” Walt pointed out.

“Precisely. But if what you need is to remove a head from a body, the fact that they have to die for it to happen is a consequence, not the focus.”

Beside Walt, Eric flipped open his folder, spreading out the papers. Walt turned his