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 personalityhe had earned his living for two years as a professor of psychology and taught these things in his abnormal-psych coursesbut this did not bother him. What the conformity-strait-jacketed mediocrities labeled as sociopathology, he knew to be liberationliberation 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 himhe was being staffed for possible emotional and learning problems at the timeand 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 awarethrough Jimmy's creative-writing essaysof 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 elegantto kill Mrs. Berkstrom, the principal, the school psychologist who had turned traitorgoing from recommending him for a gifted school to recommending intensive counselingand 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 possibleincluding his coughing, wheezing, useless motherand 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 gymHansen did not want to go on his killing rampage wearing silly gym trunksmade 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."
So two months after his mother's funeral and the sale of their Kearney house, and one month after he had dropped out of the university with no forwarding address, Hansen had returned to his hometown in the middle of the night, waited for Mrs. Berkstrom to come out to her station wagon in the dim light of the Nebraska winter morning, and shot her twice in the head with the M1, dumping the carbine in the Platte River on his way east.