CHAPTER EIGHT

At the same time, in the suburb of Tonawanda, a thirty-minute drive from Lockport, James B. Hansen—aka Robert Millworth aka Howard G. Lane aka Stanley Steiner aka half a dozen other names, none of which shared the same initials—was celebrating his fiftieth birthday.

Hansen—his current name was Robert Gaines Millworth—was surrounded by friends and loving family, including his wife of three years, Donna, his stepson Jason, and his eight-year-old Irish setter, Dickson. The long driveway to his modernist home facing Elicott Creek was filled with moderately expensive sedans and SUVs belonging to his friends and colleagues, who had braved yet another snowstorm to join him at his well-planned surprise party.

Hansen was relaxed and jovial. He'd returned from an extended business trip to Miami only a week and a half earlier and his tan was the envy of everyone. Hansen had indeed put on almost thirty pounds since his University of Chicago psychologist days, but he was six-feet-four, much of the extra weight was muscle, and even the fat was toned up and useful when push came to shove.

Now Hansen moved among his guests, stopping to chat with clusters of friends, grinning at the inevitable fiftieth-birthday-over-the-hill jokes, and generally patting everyone on the shoulder or shaking their hands. Occasionally Hansen would think about that hand of his, where it had been, about what he'd buried in an Everglades hummock twelve days earlier, and what that hand had touched, and he had to smile. Stepping out onto the modern concrete-and-industrial-wire terrace above the front door, James Hansen breathed in the cold night air, blinked snowflakes off his eyelashes, and sniffed his hand. After two weeks, he knew the smell of lime and blood could not still be there, but the memory of it made something hard stir in him.

When James B. Hansen had been twelve years old—living under his real name, which he had all but forgotten by now—and growing up in Kearney, Nebraska, he had seen the Tony Curtis movie The Great Imposter. Based on a true story, the film was about a man who went from job to job and identity to identity—at one point impersonating a doctor and actually carrying out lifesaving surgery. Since then, almost forty years ago, the idea had been used countless times in films and television and so-called "reality programming," but to young James B. Hansen, the movie was an epiphany comparable to Saul's being-knocked-off-his-ass revelation on the road to Damascus.

Hansen had immediately begun re-creating himself, first by lying to friends, teachers, and his mother—his father had died in a car accident when Hansen was six. Hansen's mother then died when he was a freshman at the University of Nebraska; within days he dropped out of the university, moved to Indianapolis, and changed his name and history. It was so easy. Identity in the United States was essentially a matter of choice and acquiring the proper birth certificates, driver's licenses, credit cards, college and graduate-school transcripts, and so forth was child's play.

Child's play for James B. Hansen as a child had been pulling the wings off flies and vivisecting kittens. Hansen knew that this was a sure early sign of a sociopathic and dangerous psychotic personality—he had earned his living for two years as a professor of psychology and taught these things in his abnormal-psych courses—but this did not bother him. What the conformity-strait-jacketed mediocrities labeled as sociopathology, he knew to be liberation—liberation from social constraints that the weak millions never thought to challenge. And Hansen had unsentimentally known of his own superiority for decades: the only good thing his Nebraska high school had ever done for him was to administer a full battery of intelligence tests to him—he was being staffed for possible emotional and learning problems at the time—and the amazed school psychologist had told his mother that Jimmy (not his name at the time) had an IQ of 168, effectively in the genius category and as high as that battery of tests could measure intelligence. This was no news to Jimmy, who had always known that he was far more intelligent than his classmates and teachers (he had no real friends or playmates). This was not arrogance, merely astute observation. The school psychologist had said that a gifted/talented program or special school for the gifted would have been appropriate for young Hansen, but of course no such thing existed in 1960s Kearney, Nebraska. Besides, by that time, Hansen's teacher had become aware—through Jimmy's creative-writing essays—of the sixteen-year-old student's penchant for torturing dogs and cats, and Jimmy came close to being expelled. Only his ailing mother's intervention and his own stonewalling had kept him in school.

Those creative-writing papers had been the last time Hansen had told the truth about anything important.

At an early age, James B. Hansen had learned a profound truth: namely, that almost all experts and specialists and professionals are absolutely full of shit. The great bulk of each of their so-called professions is language, jargon, specialized babble. Given that, and some deep reading in the field, and the proper attire, anyone smart enough could do damned near anything. In his last thirty-two years of liberation from truth and imposed identity, Hansen had never impersonated an airline pilot or a neurosurgeon, but he suspected that he could if he put his mind to it. During those years, however, he had made his living as an English professor, a senior editor at a major publishing house, a handler of heavy construction equipment, a NASCAR driver, a Park Avenue psychiatrist, a professor of psychology, a herpetologist specializing in extracting venom, an MRI specialist, a computer designer, an award-winning realtor, a political consultant, an air traffic controller, a firefighter, and half a dozen other specialties. He had never studied for any of these fields beyond visits to the library.

Money did not run the world, James B. Hansen knew. Bullshit and gullibility did.

Hansen had lived in more than two dozen major American cities and spent two years in France. He did not like Europe. The adults were arrogant and the little girls there were too worldly. Handguns were too hard to find. But the fliks were as stupid there as cops were in America, and God knows, the food was better.

His career as serial killer did not begin until he was twenty-three years old, although he had murdered before that. Hansen's father had left no insurance, no savings, nothing but debts and his illegally obtained, Korean-era M1 carbine and three clips of ammunition. The day after his ninth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Berkstrom, ran to the principal with Hansen's animal-torturing essays, Hansen had loaded the carbine, put it in his father's old golf bag with the clubs, and dragged the whole thing to school. There were no metal detectors in those days. Hansen's plan had been elegant—to kill Mrs. Berkstrom, the principal, the school psychologist who had turned traitor—going from recommending him for a gifted school to recommending intensive counseling—and then every classmate he could track down until he ran out of ammunition. James B. Hansen could have started the Columbine mass-murder fad thirty-five years before it finally caught on. But Hansen would never have committed suicide during or after the act. His plan had been to kill as many people as possible—including his coughing, wheezing, useless mother—and then, like Huck Finn, light out for the territory.

But a combination of his genius-level IQ and the fact that first period had been gym—Hansen did not want to go on his killing rampage wearing silly gym trunks—made him think twice. He hauled the stowed golf bag home during his lunch break and put the M1 back in its basement storage spot. He would have time to settle scores later, he knew, when it would not require going on the run for the rest of his life, with the cops chasing what he already thought of as his "larval identity."