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of violence like that.”
    “I don’t know.” He paused. “I can’t really remember a time I didn’t think this way.”
    “Because of your sister?”
    Just the word sister brought up memories Stanton wanted buried. He’d seen victims bury everything from rape to the death of a loved one. But he couldn’t do it. His fifteen-year-old sister had disappeared from a movie theater in Seattle, where he grew up. No leads, no body—nothing. It had nearly destroyed his parents. For a long time, he’d thought his sister’s disappearance hadn’t affected him. But looking back on his life, his inability to form close relationships, his line of work… everything seemed to point to that single event.
    “Probably,” he said. “My father was distant , and my mother was passive. I didn’t interact much with them. My sister was who basically raised me. When she disappeared, I had no one. I’d see her places for years afterward. At a grocery store or the airport… I thought I was going crazy. It wasn’t until I turned eighteen that it stopped.”
    “What happened at eighteen?”
    “I don’t know. I guess you’d call it a walkabout or something. I was reading a lot of Conrad and Hemingway at the time. That idea of finding yourself and becoming a man. I left my parents and lived in a shack on the beach with twenty other lost kids. I bummed around Mexico for a while, parts of Central America. I thought about going to war, but it was one of the rare times in American history where we happened not to be at war.”
    She grinned. “I don’t see you in combat.”
    “No, I don’t think taking orders would have sat well with me. Neither would killing someone just because I was told to do it. In Vietnam, only about thirty percent of the soldiers actually fired their weapons with the intent to kill the enemy. Most were missing on purpose or closing their eyes. They didn’t want to be there and didn’t believe in the cause.”
    “Jon, I have never really mentioned anything about your doctorate in psychology, but one thing I have seen is a keen insight into everything and everyone, except yourself. You look at a mur der scene and see things other people don’t. Events in history, which we’ve spoken about before, are the same way. I learn something just listening to you speak about them. But when it comes to you, Jon Stanton, and your own life, that perception seems to shut down. Why is that?”
    Stanton rubbed the edge of his finger. A bit of eczema, which he’d never had in his life, had appeared there. The dermatologist told him that either an irritant or stress had caused the inflammation.
    “Do you see a psychiatrist, Dr. Vaquer?”
    “This isn’t about me.”
    “I know, but my point is that I bet you do. Almost all mental health professionals do. Have you ever asked why that is?”
    She nodded. “We all lack perception into ourselves.”
    “And that’s why we go into the mental health professions. To see if we can find that perception.”
    She shifted in her seat and wrote something on her iPad. “Have you thought any more about our conversation about leaving police work?”
    He shook his head. “I can’t do anything else. I was a mediocre professor , and I’d be an even worse therapist. Police work is the only thing I’m good at.”
    “Police work or blood work?”
    He didn’t say anything. Instead, he laid his head back on the couch and stared at the ceiling.
     
     
    When the session was over , Stanton was exhausted. He always was, even though he did nothing more than sit on a couch and answer questions. Stanton believed in different forms of energy, and mental energy was certainly one of the most powerful. The mental energy he expended every time he sat in Dr. Vaquer’s office was enormous. But it came with a reward. After most sessions, he hit the ocean.
    Oahu had some of the best surfing in the world, one of the main selling points for Stanton. Not half an hour from his house was the North Shore,