By Reason of Insanity by Shane Stevens

Author:Shane Stevens [Stevens, Shane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers, Suspense, Crime, Psychological, Investigative Reporting, Serial murderers, Mentally Ill Offenders
ISBN: 9781556526626
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 1979-01-02T07:00:00+00:00

Twelve

AMOS FINCH felt guilty and he didn’t like the feeling one bit. Not at all. Guilt was a middle-class aberration that had no business being in his psychological system. It was cheap sentimentality wrapped in emotional tinsel. It was pedestrian and bourgeois and counterproductive. Even worse, it was irritating. There simply was no excuse for allowing common standards of morality to cloud his fine perceptions. None whatsoever. He was not middle class, he didn’t subscribe to its beliefs or accept its judgments. Nor did he intend to be governed by an obsolete set of values that proscribed selfish conduct. Selfishness kept the race going, and he was one of the superior breed that rose above mere moral considerations. No, he had nothing to do with guilt that came from looking out for one’s own interests regardless of the suffering of others. He had no neurotic excesses. He was coldly analytical and detached.

But in truth Amos Finch was feeling guilty.

For three days he had known how to tell if Vincent Mungo was alive or dead. Or at least, if Mungo had really escaped from Willows State Hospital some three and a half months earlier. And for three days he had said nothing to anyone. A hundred times he had found himself at the phone about to call John Spanner in Hillside, and each time he had stopped.

When he analyzed his motives it all seemed eminently reasonable. He was watching a genius at work, an artist in action. Whoever the California Creeper really was just didn’t seem to matter anymore. Identity and past life were meaningless now. Only the present meant anything. And what it meant was that he, Amos Finch, was witness to the emergence of a truly monumental mass murderer. A killer of incalculable guile, one perhaps destined to rank with Jack the Ripper and Bruno Lüdke. And perhaps even to surpass Lüdke’s record of eighty-six women victims, if only left alone.

That was the rub.

For the sake of society, such a monster had to be captured or destroyed. Species survival demanded it. A defective organ must be removed for the good of the body. A defective individual must be removed for the good of the group. Vincent Mungo was defective. He was killing his own kind. He was cancerous.

He was also a genius and an artist and the most exciting thing to come along in Finch’s lifetime of studying mass murderers. He could be, should be, must be the crowning achievement of that life! He would be the subject of a definitive study, itself a work of genius and art. Written of course by the world’s leading scholar on multiple murderers. The book’s title? The Complete …

That’s when the guilt feelings began.

Finch wasn’t going to give up his killer so easily. By now he had a vested interest in him, a proprietary interest that had become almost a mania. Each morning he listened to the news to hear if another victim had been added. Each evening he worked on his

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