Chapter 12 #4
Wren looks away for a moment, trying to calm her racing thoughts.
She examines the office around them, noting that almost everything in the room is an antique.
There is a distinct World War II–era feel, with the heavy oak desk and vintage maps on the walls.
She spots a typewriter and silently wonders if it’s the IBM Electromatic, the typewriter that really blew Winston Churchill’s skirt up.
Richard loved history, and he had excitedly shown her a picture of it once.
He often ran on about things like that, but Wren hadn’t thought she’d absorbed enough of his diatribes to be able to identify anything from them in the wild.
But here she is trying to remember the markings of wartime typewriters.
“Did this kind of behavior continue?” she finally asks Dr. Price, now ready to hear the answer.
Dr. Price nods. “As Philip approached adolescence, the behavior got quieter, but even darker somehow. He wasn’t screaming and yelling anymore, but that rage was still there.
He would tell me the thoughts he had about girls at school, how he wanted to tape their mouths shut and how most of them disgusted him.
His parents found drawings he had done of these girls.
He depicted them with their throats cut open or their limbs missing.
In his drawings he would scratch their eyes out with a sharp pencil, always ripping through the paper with anger. ”
Suddenly Wren feels like she’s in a loud, overcrowded room. Anxiety seeps in, clouding any organized thought. She thinks of the haunted house scene: Melissa in a pose of repentance, her mouth sealed shut.
Could it really be him?
The entire time they were interrogating Jeremy, she couldn’t help but wonder if he was lying, manipulating the circumstances and making them question things out of boredom.
After all, nothing he ever says can be taken at face value.
There’s always a reason to question his words.
She never once believed he would help them.
And yet, if there is one thing Jeremy doesn’t waver on, it’s his intolerance of betrayal.
He felt betrayed by his mother his entire life, and he took care of that; he felt like Emily betrayed him by refusing to die, so he took everything from her.
Now he’s in prison, and it’s Philip who put him there, so he’s ready to throw Philip to the wolves, and with good reason.
She wonders if Jeremy knew all this about Philip when they were young. They were close friends; it feels like he had to have known. Maybe they felt the connection there, the connection of anger, of disconnection from humanity. Maybe that’s what kept them a team, until they weren’t.
“I informed his parents that I was required to report when I felt like there was a potential of someone being hurt, but they threatened to sue me.” Dr. Price shakes his head, clearly still disturbed.
“So they knew he was drawing these disturbing things, knew he had harmed animals before, and they still wanted it kept quiet?” Wren asks in disbelief.
“Reputation mattered more than anything to the late Sebastian Trudeau, and I imagine he passed down that notion to his only son,” Dr. Price says, looking at his desk. Something in his face tells Wren that he has more information locked away.
Leroux finishes scribbling furiously in his notepad, punctuating it by jabbing the pen onto the paper. “Man, I knew that asshole had some dark shit in his closet. Remember how smarmy he was?”
How could she forget? There was something about Philip that immediately set her nerves on edge.
It was chilling, the way the people, especially the young women, in his Bible study group that day seemed enamored by him, the way he squeezed the arm of the girl he called Stephanie.
He’d gone from an overly attentive holy man to a combative interviewee in seconds.
They talk more about Philip and learn that Dr. Price had tried to check in on him for years only to be rebuffed with each attempted connection.
He gave up a while ago and says he just hopes that Philip found a way to cope with his violent urges.
When Leroux and Wren inform him that Philip followed his calling to lead a life of religious devotion, Dr. Price turns white.
“A man like Philip shouldn’t be shepherding a flock,” he says gravely. “Being idolized by so many will only feed his incomparable god complex.”
Wren agrees.
The more they discuss Philip’s traits and behaviors, the more she’s reminded of Jeremy.
They have the same elite ability to charm and manipulate, but they chose different ways to accomplish their ends.
It’s really no wonder they connected in such a deep way when they were younger.
Even if they didn’t know it, they likely sensed the same rot in each other, reveled in finding a grotesquely kindred spirit.
Wren and Leroux leave Dr. Price’s home with a wealth of new information, yet as they sit in Leroux’s car attempting to debrief, it feels like there is very little they can do with it.
They have confirmation that Philip Trudeau is violent and sick, but they still have no hard evidence tying him to any of the crimes, especially Melissa’s, or to Beth’s disappearance.
Wren has to get back to the morgue. The bodies will tell her what she needs to know.