She swallowed audibly before reaching for her water bottle and taking a few swigs. “What do you do with them?” she finally asked.
It was only fair she’d be curious. A middle-aged doctor essentially stealing children in the dead of night was the stuff of nightmares. He was a fairy tale villain. Given the type of people these doctors were forced to endure, it was only fair they were suspicious of him. They should be. But he wasn’t the problem, he was the solution. “I mold them.”
Her brows knitted together, her gaze sharp behind her large glasses. “Into what?”
Into killers. Thomas smiled. “Into exactly what God intended.”
She recoiled, her hand flailing at her side. “I can’t imagine God had much to do with what happened to Adam.”
Thomas shook his head. “Have you ever heard the idiom, ‘psychopaths are born, but sociopaths are made’? Research shows it's true, but what if they aren’t a design flaw? What if they’re here to do what others cannot?”
“What does that even mean?”
“All you need to know is that I run a home for boys just like Adam. He will be well cared for, far better than anything anybody here could offer. He will have access to the best medical care, the finest education, and I will show him exactly what he’s capable of.”
“Which is what?” Dr. Arbor said, looking at him like he was the sociopath.
Thomas made a sweeping gesture. “Using his gifts for good instead of evil.”
Dr. Arbor snorted. “Gifts? I’d hardly call this level of disease a gift.”
He was already shaking his head. “But that’s where you’re wrong, Dr. Arbor. You can’t fix a psychopath. You can’t fix a sociopath. But you can guide them, hone their focus. Teach them how to direct their rage towards those who deserve it.”
“Deserve it?” she echoed. “You’re teaching them to be monsters?”
“Of course not. They’re already monsters. I’m teaching them to kill the ones who made them that way.”
She was silent for a long while before finally asking, “Does it work?”
“That’s what I aim to find out. These boys are my first test subjects. Over the course of their lives I’ll document their progress, teach them how to identify and vet their targets. Teach them to be invisible.”
Once more, her gaze dragged to Adam, still blinking at the blank wall. “How many boys do you have?”
“Including Adam? Seven.”
It was truly a small sample size, but any more than seven and he wouldn’t be able to give them his individual time and attention. It was important that they learned to rely on him and each other. While there was no capacity for love, that didn’t mean they couldn’t grow to trust each other. They would need that trust. They would need to blend in with society on some level.
“How do you raise a house full of psychopaths, Dr. Mulvaney?” she asked, looking back through the glass at the small boy.
“Very carefully, Dr. Arbor. Very carefully.”
After a moment, she walked to the door and opened it, gesturing for Thomas to enter first. Once inside, Adam’s shrewd blue eyes tracked him, though the rest of him remained perfectly still. It was clear he unnerved Dr. Arbor, but Thomas thought he was perfect. A perfect specimen. His final boy.
He crouched down beside the boy and held out his hand. “Hello, Adam, my name is Thomas Mulvaney and I’m here to take you to your new home.”
The mask of indifference shattered, replaced by a slow, almost sinister smile. The boy took Thomas’s hand and shook it. He could see why he unnerved the other physician. Adam had no baseline for normal. He could only watch and mimic what he saw. He wasn’t a six-year-old boy. He was a six-year-old robot currently downloading the software that made a six-year-old boy.
Adam was a gift, Thomas could already tell. “Shall we go?”
Adam tucked his head deeper into his red hoodie, his hand curling around the hilt of the knife buried within the sweatshirt’s through and through pocket. It was easy to blend in the middle of the night, swirling from shadow to shadow, avoiding the anemic yellow street lights of the dark, dingy street, but that didn’t mean this was a safe neighborhood. Not by any means.
This was the forgotten part of town. Every building had bars on the windows, the roads were pockmarked with potholes, which became oil-slicked pools each time it rained. The prevalence of gun stores, bail bondsmen, and lawyers sat in stark contrast to Adam’s neighborhood on the other side of the tracks. But he wasn’t trying to ‘slum it’ with the poor. These were Adam’s people. He’d spent the first six years of his life in a dilapidated trailer behind the mini-mart.
Police cars prowled the streets, sometimes shining their flashlights out the window to harass a cluster of people until they dispersed. But they never noticed Adam. Nobody ever noticed him, really. That was why he was still free to roam, to hunt, to kill. But, tonight, the only thing on his to-do list was an early bedtime.
It was strange how seamlessly one could blend if they just pretended they belonged. Even somebody who spent much of his time in the public eye. Somebody famous in certain circles. He supposed it was almost easier to blend in when the alternative seemed preposterous. And the youngest son of billionaire Thomas Mulvaney walking around alone in the worst part of town in the wee hours of the morning seemed pretty preposterous.
But that wasn’t who Adam was either. In truth, Adam was nobody. A carefully crafted lie, raised specifically to right the wrongs of others. A lie he had executed so well that, sometimes, even he believed it. But it wasn’t real. Any of it. Maybe that was what truly made his walks the best thing about his nights. Nobody gave a shit about him on this side of town. They didn’t know the Mulvaney name or who the world thought he was. They didn’t care.