Killing the Shadows

THIRTEEN

On a professional note, I heard last night that Blake has done a deal with one of the Sunday tabloids. You know the kind of thing my life of hell as the falsely accused Hampstead Heath killer. And on the strength of that, he’s gone off to Spain, allegedly to get away from all the pressure. Of course, we’ve been keeping tabs on him, albeit at arms’ length, and according to the travel agent, Blake has rented a villa outside Fuengirola for the next month. At least you’re far enough away in Toledo not to stand any chance of walking into a neighbourhood café and finding him propping up the bar. Let me know when you’re coming back and we’ll get together for dinner.

Love Steve

Fiona cleared Steve’s e — mail from the screen. She’d get round to replying later. It was thoughtful of him to pass on the news about Drew, but she didn’t want to be distracted from the task in hand by thinking about Francis Blake right now. While she waited for Berrocal to arrive, she double-checked that she had plotted her crime scenes correctly on the map. Just as she finished, Berrocal strode through the door, full of apologies for keeping her waiting. “So, what do you have to show me?”

The map of Toledo was monochrome on the screen, the streets and alleys black lines over the off-grey background. “This is how it works,” Fiona explained. “I started off with the street grid. Last night I entered the locations of the events that interest me.” She omitted to mention the news from England that had stirred memories, turning her sleep into exhausting restlessness. She wasn’t looking for Berrocal’s sympathy, nor, more importantly, did she want to give ammunition to anyone who might suggest her work failed to come up to the required standard. So she mainlined the cartons of industrial-strength coffee that the junior detectives had deposited on her desk and tried to keep the weariness out of her voice. “First of all, the vandalism cluster.”

She tapped a couple of keys and the screen came alive in an irregular spread of radiant neon colours, from sea-green, grading through blues and purples to red. There were only two small blocks of red, both to the west of the cathedral and the Plaza Mayor. “The program assigns different colours to different degrees of probability. The perpetrator of the acts of vandalism I’ve identified as a cluster is most likely to live within the boundaries of those red blocks,” she told him, pointing to them with her pencil.

“Very interesting,” Berrocal said softly.

“Don’t ask me how it works. The maths is way beyond me. I leave that to the techies. All I know is that it does have a frighteningly high degree of accuracy.” She cleared the colours from the screen. “Now, this is the picture we get from the muggings.” Again, the screen pulsed with vibrant colours. This time, there were three red blocks. One of them appeared almost identical to the larger of the two on the previous display, while the other two were more northerly.

“I think the reason for these two is that the location of the crimes was circumscribed by where our mugger knew there were likely to be late-night victims,” she continued, pointing to the aberrant blocks of crimson. “But look what happens when I amalgamate both sets of results and we look at the vandalism and the mugging together.”

Fiona clicked the mouse a couple of times. Now the larger of the original two red blocks was the only bright-scarlet patch on the screen, the others fading to deep purple. “If I were a Toledo police officer looking to clear up these instances of vandalism and mugging, I’d focus my attention on people who live right there, around the bottom end of Calle Alfonso the Tenth.”

“Fascinating,” Berrocal acknowledged. “But what happens when you consider the murders too?”

“It’s far from clear cut,” she admitted. “We’re looking at two instances, which is a very small base to work with. And, as I said to you before, because these crime scenes have historical rather than specifically personal significance, that could distort our results.” Again she cleared the screen. “On their own, they don’t provide us with anything like pinpoint accuracy.” This time, there was no small red block, just a jagged purple mass that go covered most of the west of the old city and spread like a port-wine birthmark out towards the suburbs.

“However, I’m working on the principle that my theories of crime linkage and the escalation of violence are correct. Now, if I’ve got it right and these three groups of crimes have all been committed by the same person, then when I add the murder sites to the other two series, I should still have my red block in more or less the same place. But if I’m wrong, then the resulting picture will show a significant distortion.” She looked up at Berrocal and gave a wicked grin. “Ready?”

“The suspense is killing me,” he said.

Fiona hit a couple of keys and the screen reconfigured itself. The red block was still there, though not in quite such a strong shade. But the purple areas had spread and become noticeably more blue. Fiona circled the red block with the end of her pencil. “It doesn’t significantly distort the key area. Which indicates that the person who committed the murders could well be the same person as the vandal and the mugger. But you see this purple zone?”

Berrocal nodded. “That’s the fallback zone, is it? If he’s not in the red zone, he might be in the purple?”

“That’s right. Now, the way that has changed with the murder input may not mean much in itself, given how specific he is about the body dumps and given that the places where he displays his victims are central to the nature of his crimes. But I’m tempted to go out on a limb here and suggest that he might possibly have moved house in between the muggings and the first murder.”

Berrocal frowned. “Why do you say that?”

“It doesn’t matter how high-tech a system is, there’s still room for gut instinct when it comes to interpretation. I’d defend myself by saying that I’ve used this geographic profiler a lot now, and I’ve developed a sense of what the pictures mean that goes beyond what’s in the manual. And there’s something about the shape of this that makes me wonder if we’re looking at a change of address. I’m sorry, I can’t be more scientific than that.”

“So what we have learned is useless.”

“No, far from it. If he has moved, it’s been relatively recent. Between the last of the muggings and the first of the murders. There must be civic records that would reveal who lives there and if anybody’s gone in the last couple of months. I could be wrong, he could still be living there. But if I was the investigating officer here, I’d make it my first priority to look at residents inside the red block who have moved out.”

“You think he moved to make it harder for us to find him?” Berrocal asked.

“No, I don’t think he was planning that far ahead. And he may not have left his home from choice. He may have been forced out because the building was being developed for some tourist-related business. He’ll have seen this as a terrible provocation. If that’s what happened, it could have been the factor that tipped him over the edge into murder. He’s been nursing his hatred for a while now, judging by the length of time these earlier offences cover. Perhaps this tourist development has been on the cards for a long time and he’d been fighting it. Then finally, he lost. And he decided to take revenge on the people he thought were to blame.” Fiona leaned back in her seat. “I know it might sound far-fetched, but as psychopathic motives for murder go, it’s as coherent as any. And it makes sense of these events in a way that conventional theories of sexual homicide don’t.”

“The way you explain it is certainly logical,” Berrocal acknowledged. “Can you print these maps out for us? I’d like to get started on this line of inquiry as soon as possible.”

Fiona nodded. “No problem. I’m also in the process of writing a full report for you that incorporates all my reasoning. I’ll include a basic behavioural profile of the perpetrator.”

Berrocal frowned. “I thought you didn’t approve of behavioural analysis?”

“Taken on its own, I think it has limited value. But when you incorporate it with crime linkage and geographical profiling, it can be helpful.”

Berrocal looked dubious. “So, when will your report be ready?”

“I should finish it today.”

“Good. Then I can distribute it among the investigation team. First thing tomorrow, I’d like you to attend a briefing with them to answer any questions and deal with any objections?”

Fiona nodded. “I’d be happy to.”

Berrocal got to his feet. “And then I presume you will want to return to England?”

Fiona smiled. “You presume correctly. There’s nothing more I can usefully do for you right now, so I may as well go home.”

He nodded. “I’ll let you get on with your report,” he said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said absently, her mind already on the next task. The sooner she finished this, the sooner she could start to think seriously about going home.

He never knew how long it would last. That was why he had to savor every moment of it, like a kid opening Christmas presents, unsure which garishly wrapped parcel held the gift that really mattered. The trick was to arrange it so that everything built to a climax. But sometimes it didn’t, and he hated that loss of absolute control, hated the rage that boiled through him when those sluts let him down, when they failed to hold out long enough for him to extract each single possible drop of pleasure from their pain. Death should be the final moment in the crescendo, not a sad diminuendo leaving the spirit dissatisfied.

That was why he worked with such dedication towards perfection. Experience had taught him that every stage released its own particular flavor, from the first moment he chose her to the final moment when he abandoned her. The secret was to plan. The taste of anticipation was almost as good as the spectrum of sensuality supplied by the execution of his perfect scheme. So too was the satisfaction of watching the small minds pitted against him as they struggled through their skirmishes with his handiwork into ultimate failure.

At first, his opponents had been as insignificant as the crickets that chirped the night away outside this safest of safe houses. Dumb sheriffs officers who’d never investigated anything more complicated than a fucked-up raid on the local Seven Eleven had no chance of coming anywhere near him. He knew the chances of them even managing to complete a VICAP report and file it with the FBI were remote. All that paperwork, interfering with the consumption of Dairy Queen hamburgers and brew skis no chance.

So puny a challenge couldn’t last forever. He’d known that. He’d bargained on that. He’d set himself up right from the start to beat the finest, so there was no real satisfaction in running rings round the morons who’d gone into small-town law enforcement because they didn’t have the stones to make something of their lives. They thought they knew their turf so well, but that hadn’t stopped him moving into their territory and stealing a woman from under their noses. His greatest triumph this far had come with number five. La Quinta was the daughter of the local sheriff in a small Nebraska town.

As usual, he’d removed her from her own home. Saturday night, and her parents had gone out to a benefit dinner for the local Republican candidate for the Senate race. The girl had opened the front door without a second thought as soon as she saw the Highway Patrol uniform. It had been laughably easy to knock her to the floor with a single blow to the face. Hog-tied, she’d spent the night in the trunk while he drove the interstate, fueled by adrenaline and nicotine.

By mid-morning, he’d been home. Surrounded by dense woodland, away from the possibility of prying eyes, he’d carried her indoors and gotten down to making her his slave. Shackled to a bench in his workroom, La Quinta had learned that pain takes many shapes and forms. The delayed sting of the razor cut. The blossoming of a burn from a smart to a roar of pain that spread inwards as the smell of barbecued flesh drifted outwards. The searing agony of flesh forced to accommodate more than it has room for. The sickening pain of a broken bone never allowed time to knit. The dull distress of a blow strategically aimed at the organs nestling beneath the skin. It took her days to die.

He’d enjoyed every waking moment.

Then he’d taken her back home. Not all the way home, of course. That would have been reckless. He drove her as far as the first bend over the county line on a quiet back road, then left her body sprawled across the blacktop for the next passing driver to crush beneath his unsuspecting wheels.

La Quinta had made them sit up and pay attention at last. He’d read enough to know what would have happened next. An urgent request to the Feebies, then a computerized search of the country to find matches. As soon as they realized he meant business, the machine would have kicked in. True to his prediction, the suits had arrived. And then, finally, she had flown in to face a flurry of cameras at the airport.

Now at last, the game was on.

Jay Schumann was in town. Dr. Jay Schumann, the forensic psychologist who had turned her back on a lucrative private practice to become the FBI’s celebrity mind hunter Jay Schumann, who had single-handedly restored the tarnished image of psychological profiling with a string of spectacular successes. Jay Schumann with those intense dark eyes that contrasted so sharply with her bright blonde hair, a photo opportunity who gave the suits a human face. Jay Schumann, whose glamor had persuaded her bosses that they should use her skills on the media as well as on the criminals.

In the twenty years since she’d so heedlessly and needlessly humiliated him on the night of the senior prom, they’d both traveled a long way from the small New England town. But he had never forgotten nor forgiven the whiplash of her scorn that had branded him and distorted his life forever.

The first five had been his apprenticeship. The next fifteen would perfect his art. One for every wasted year. And then, only then, would he allow Jay Schumann to come face to face with her personal and professional nemesis.

There was a long way to go before then. But now Jay Schumann was on the case. At last the revenge proper could begin.