Bathroom Monologue: Suspect

The story makes no sense if you look at the whole picture – the land lady's perfect bill of health, the suspect holding the knife, the ex-husband everyone thought would come after her. That stuff is distraction. If you had been in the car with me on the ride to the station, you'd know. Our suspect is something unreal.

Our suspect suffers from something weakly diagnosed as high-functioning autism. That he lived alone with such an acute condition was unfortunate, a failure of the system. His father should have been there, but he died in Iraq. His mother should have been there, but two years after her husband died, she had a catastrophic psychotic meltdown, seemingly out of nowhere. The suspect's sister took care of him for a year before she had a catastrophic psychotic meltdown, also seemingly out of nowhere. This family had no history of mental illness before the last decade. He got extremely close with these two people before they lost their minds.

It was the sister's apartment where the suspect was living, occasionally looked in on by the land lady. According to another tenant, she didn't want him to go homeless.

You need to take the week of March 3^rd as Week One. That's probably when the land lady leaves a book in his apartment, or somehow he walks off with it. That is The Portable Jung. I've fingerprinted it, and he read this thing. He even tore some pages.

Week Two, he purchases four books on psychology. He can't talk or write, but apparently can read and browse for books. Tell me how that works. I'm going interview the bookseller tonight. Of these books he bought, it appears only three were ever opened. Passages were torn from their bindings, mostly relating to one subject that makes sense in Week Three.

Week Three: he purchases six books on neuroscience. He reads the first half of two of these, again tearing out sections, making the collage that covered up his bathroom mirror. It's all about brain chemistry.

Week Four: he buys eleven books on chemistry. He tears passages relating to cell structure from all of them and collages his shower walls.

Week Five: nine books on molecular physics. It's as though he read a couple of chapters out of four of them, but removes nothing. This is the same week his land lady has a psychotic episode, out of the blue, and kills herself. And he's in her apartment when she does it.

I'm not saying he stabbed her. That theory was always bunk, and the two tenants who discovered him say the knife he picked up, he was trying to turn on himself. That's what he says, too.

Driving him to the station, I heard him. I turned around at a stop light, and his lips weren't moving. The guy can't talk with his mouth, but he was crying inside my head, so loud that tears were spilling down my cheeks. He kept apologizing and begging me in this garbled nonsense, and I actually ditched the car for a few minutes just to get my bearings. I thought my head was going to burst. I had to radio another officer to take him the rest of the way, and when I call her, she hasn't answered any of my messages. I bet she had a wild ride.

Look. He started with Jung, then he went from psychology to what made up our brains and how, skimming the whole thing because none of it was new to him. He only needed missing bits/ He didn't have to read that much because he'd always intuited it. He cracked our code because he's desperate to talk to someone, but his voice is dangerous. I'm pretty sure what he kept asking was for help.

So either this is some kind of horrible telepathy case, or I've gone crazy. And given the history, if I've gone crazy being around him, that's just more evidence that he's the real deal, and he definitely needs someone's help.