CHAPTER 17
PROFILE
Gunda never looked for long.
A prolonged gaze creates a bond.
A bond creates mistakes.
She worked with distance — not as a wall, but as an instrument.
People were never “wholes” to her.
They were layers:
what they show,
what they hide,
and what they themselves cannot formulate.
Behind the glass he sat calmly.
Too calmly.
Not tense.
Not boastful.
Not defensive.
Regulated.
“He doesn’t even breathe more deeply,” the colleague beside her remarked quietly.
“He regulates himself,” Gunda replied. “That is what people do who have trained to be watched.”
She did not write down sentences.
She wrote down:
pauses,
eye movements,
a micro-delay before an answer,
the voice in moments when it should not change.
“He doesn’t answer the questions,” the man said.
“He answers the structure,” Gunda corrected. “The playing field.”
She zoomed the image.
Hands on the table.
Palms visible.
Shoulders relaxed.
“I’m hiding nothing.”
A universal signal.
“It is deliberate,” she said. “This is not a posture. It is a language.”
She opened the folder.
Not with the word “Antra”.
With the word “pattern”.
“Women aged twenty to thirty-five,” she said. “Insecure within the social structure. Without a stable support network. With an inner need for external validation.”
“Victims?”
“No,” Gunda objected calmly. “Candidates.”
She did not speak about victims.
She spoke about selections.
“He doesn’t force,” she continued. “He never goes first.”
“So he isn’t an aggressor?”
“That is precisely why he is dangerous.”
She closed the folder.
“An aggressor takes space. He intrudes.
This…” she paused, “withdraws.”
“How does that help?”
“It transfers responsibility onto the other person.”
She looked through the glass again.
“The woman takes a step.
She thinks she chose herself.
And that is exactly when he becomes the centre.”
“So manipulation?”
“No,” Gunda shook her head. “More precisely: instrumental empathy.”
“Pretence?”
“No. The ability to read an emotion without needing to feel it.”
She wrote:
emotion recognition ≠ emotional participation
“He feels structure, not pain.
Need, not a person.”
“Sociopath?”
Gunda fell silent.
“Terms are meant for courts, not for reality.
But… he functions without a mechanism of guilt.”
“How do you see that?”
“Watch.”
She slowed the video.
The question about Antra.
Micro-pause.
0.6 seconds.
“There,” she indicated. “Not fear. Not sadness.”
“Then what?”
“Calculation.”
“Calculation of what?”
“Of what they expect from him right now.”
She added another sheet.
Quotations:
“You’re clever.”
“You have potential.”
“You decide.”
“He never takes.
He allows them to give.”
“And the women?”
“They feel seen.”
Gunda closed the folder.
“He does not build relationships.
He builds mirrors.”
“And Antra?”
Gunda thought for a moment.
“Antra is not like the others.”
“Why?”
“She sees the game. But she likes it.”
“So she is an accomplice?”
“No. She is… an unstable variable.”
She looked at the glass again.
“He isn’t the one who disappears.”
“You mean…?”
“He is the one around whom others disappear.”
In the evening, alone in her office, Gunda reread her notes.
Not facts.
Patterns.
The words repeated:
help
opportunity
conversation
potential
time
silence
She wrote:
The subject does not use violence.
The subject creates a space in which others destroy themselves.
She closed the folder.
And on a separate page, which she did not attach to the case, she wrote:
“He does not look guilty.
He looks empty.
And emptiness that can imitate humanity is the most dangerous form.”
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© 2026 Vito Vilks