Death Match

In many ways, the scene was like the others: the room in disarray, the mirrors broken, the bedroom curtains swept back as if inviting the night to witness the outrage. And yet in others it was very, very different. The woman lay in an embarrassment of blood, flowing from the ruined body in a terrible corona. And in the merciless glare of the crime lights the walls shone white, naked, devoid of any scrawled messages.

Captain Masterton glanced up from the corpse. His face had the pinched look of a cop under pressure from all directions.

“I was wondering when you’d get here, Lash. Say hello to victim number three. Helen Martin, aged thirty-two.”

Masterton kept staring at him. He seemed about to make another biting comment on the thinness of Lash’s profile. But he merely shook his head in disgust.

“Christ, Lash, you’re like a zombie. Every time I see you, you look a little worse.”

“We’ll go into that some other time. How long has she been dead?”

“Less than an hour.”

“Any indication of rape? Vaginal penetration?”

“The ME’s on his way, but there doesn’t appear to be any. No signs of a burglary gone wrong, either. Just like the others. But we caught a bit of a break this time. A neighbor called in the commotion. No description of a vehicle, but we’ve already got cars stationed at major intersections, freeway on-ramps. Maybe we’ll catch a break.”

The crime scene was still so fresh the local cops were just beginning to work it: snapping photos, dusting for prints, chalking the body. He stood there, staring down at the body. There it was again: that maddening sense that everything was out of place. It was like a jigsaw puzzle with the wrong pictures pasted onto the pieces. It didn’t fit, and even when it did it didn’t look right. He knew, because he’d been putting it together and taking it apart in his mind, over and over and over, for days. It was like a fire burning in his head, consuming all his thoughts, devouring his sleep.

The body was brutalized in what was clearly a blitz attack. That was the hallmark of a socially defective killer. And yet the house was secluded, backing up on woods, private: this was no crime of opportunity, no blitz attack. And then there were the broken mirrors, which normally indicated a killer’s discomfort with creating such a scene. But such killers also covered their victims, hid their faces: this woman was naked, her limbs arranged with a ghastly provocativeness. And yet again this crime was not about sex. It was not about robbery. And this time, there was not even the ritual halo of severed toes and fingertips to lend a compulsive taint to the murder.

To build a profile, you had to get into the head of the murderer, ask questions. What had happened in this room? Why did it happen this particular way? Even mass-murderers had their twisted logic. But there was no logic here, no foundation on which to build an understanding.

His eyes traveled over the walls of the bedroom. In the previous two murders, they had been covered with rambling, half-coherent rants: a bloody mélange of contradiction.

This time, the walls were blank.

Why?

His eyes stopped on the big picture window facing the woods behind the house. As before, the blinds were thrown wide, revealing a pane of black that reflected the sodium lights back at him. It was hard to be sure in the painful glare, but he thought he could make out faint smudges on the glass, black upon black.

“Masterton. Can you direct those lights away from the window?”

The ME had just arrived, and the captain had moved across the room to confer with him. He looked over.

“What was that, Lash?”

“Those lights there, by the window. Turn them this way.”

Masterton shrugged, spoke to Ahearn, his second in command.

As the glare of the light hit him, the window fell into shadow. He stepped forward, Masterton following now. High up on the glass, a few large words were scrawled in bloody finger-paint:

I’ve got what I need now. Thank you.

“Oh, shit,” he murmured.

“He’s done,” Masterton said, coming up, Detective Ahearn at his shoulder. “Thank God, Lash. It’s finished.”

“No,” he replied. “No, it’s not. It’s just beginning…”