Free The Basement by Stephen Leather

telling me a secret.
    “Why do you ask?” I say. “If you know, you know.”
    “Okay. I'm telling you. Sam Waller was your father. And when he died, he left you more than half a million dollars.”
    “Maybe he's spent it already,” says Turner. I ignore him.
    “So, a man with half a million dollars doesn't have to live in a rabbit hutch, does he, Marvin?”
    “Not unless he wants to,” I say.
    She nods slowly. “That's what we thought. In fact, we thought that maybe you had another home somewhere. Somewhere bigger.”
    “Somewhere where I might be able to keep a woman prisoner?”
    “You see, Marvin. I knew you'd understand.”
    “No.”
    “No? No you don't understand?”
    “I mean no, this is my only home.”
    “Yes, but you see our problem, Marvin. You'd have to say that, wouldn't you? If you did have another home, and if you were holding Sarah Hall there, you wouldn't tell us, would you?”
    “I suppose not. Can I get you guys anything to drink?”
    “No thank you.”
    I turn to look at Turner. “What about you, Ed?”
    “We know you're the one, Waller,” he says.
    "The one? What, the special person in your life, Ed? Is that what you mean? I hardly think so.
    We've only just met." He glares at me and I can see that I've got to him. I look back at Marcinko.
    “Look, this is crazy. You start off by telling me I mustn't bother people at their homes, now you're accusing me of being a serial killer.”
    “No one's accusing you of anything,” she says.
    “Yet,” says Turner. The yet hangs there like a bad smell.
    “If we were accusing you, we'd tell you your rights,” she says.
    “I know my rights,” I say.
    “I know you do.” She takes a deep breath and her breasts seem to push up against her shirt.
    “Marvin, we have a problem.”
    “We?”
    “We've been doing some digging, and what we've found is a little worrying.”
    “Worrying?” I don't like the way the conversation is going, but I've lost the initiative. The ball is in her court.
    “It's starting to look as if you fit the profile of the person we're looking for. You know what a profile is?”
    “Yeah. I know.”
    “So you can see how that concerns us. We have to check. Follow it through. Satisfy ourselves that you're not the killer.”
    “This is crazy.”
    “No, it's not crazy. It's police work. It's our job. How much do you know about serial killers?”
    I shake my head, confused. “I don't know. Only what I've read. For research.”
    “Okay.” She waits for me to continue, leaving a silence and hoping that I'll fill it.
    “They're usually white. Very few are black. They're usually male, and they're usually in their early to mid twenties. That's it, is it? That's your profile? There must be hundreds of thousands of people who fit that description in New York alone.”
    “Our profile is a bit more detailed than that, Marvin.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. We had some help from the FBI profilers at Quantico. Our profile runs to almost a dozen pages. And the more we look into your background, the more it seems to describe you.”
    “I don't believe you. You're just trying to scare me.”
    She smiles like she wants to be my friend, like I can trust her. “Marvin, why would we want to scare you?”
    “So tell me how I fit this profile.”
    “Okay. You're a good looking young man. According to the profile, the perpetrator is handsome. Attractive to women.”
    I laugh out loud. “Come on, Officer Marcinko. I told you not to flatter me.”
    “This isn't flattery. I'm telling you the truth.”
    “So why does your FBI profiler think the killer is good looking?”
    "Because there have never been any signs of a struggle when the victims have disappeared. He must be able to get close to the women without frightening them. We believe he drugs them before taking them away, so he must be fairly strong. But if he's strong, he'd be threatening - unless he's a good-looking guy and the women are attracted to him. You're a member of a gym on