Bateman- Killing like the Novel

  Kimball cleared his throat. He skimmed a page in his notebook and then turned it over to inspect the next page. “A Mr. Robert Rabin was killed on June first on Commonwealth Avenue at approximately nine-thirty in the evening. He’d taken his dog out for a walk and was attacked on the street, and stabbed randomly in his upper body area and his throat was cut—”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “There was no motive for the crime. It was not a robbery. Mr. Rabin had no enemies as far as we could ascertain. It was just a random killing. He was—we thought—simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He paused. “But there was something strange about the crime besides the viciousness of the attack and its apparent lack of motive.” Kimball paused again. “The dog he was walking was also killed.”
...

  “In the Vintage edition of American Psycho,” he said, “on pages one sixty-four through one sixty-six a man is murdered in much the same way that Robert Rabin was.”

  A pause in which I was supposed to locate something and make a connection.

  Kimball continued. “The man in your book was also walking a dog.”
...

  “Mr. Lawrence also had a history of mental illness and had been institutionalized various times, and since Midland County doesn’t have a large black community, the theory that this crime was racially motivated didn’t really play out. And the case remains unsolved.” Kimball paused. “But, again, there was something about it that kept bothering me. It seemed like I had read about this case before. And”—Kimball opened the copy of my book that sat in his lap—“on pages one thirty-one and one thirty-two in American Psycho—”

  “A black homeless man was blinded.” I murmured this to myself.

  Kimball nodded. “And he had a dog that Patrick Bateman broke the legs of.” He glanced again at his notebook and continued. “In July, a Sandy Wu, a delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant in Brigham, was murdered. Like Mr. Rabin, his throat was slashed.”
...

  “On pages one eighty and one eighty-one a delivery boy is killed in the same manner as Mr. Wu and, as in the book, the assailant wrote the identical message that Patrick Bateman does on the back of the receipt.”

Lunar Park, chapter 11