Postcard killers

Chapter 2

The postcard showed the basilica di San Miniato al Monte, and on the back was the now familiar quote. He read the lines and drank more wine, then let the card fal and picked up the next one, and the next, and the next.

Athens: a picture of the Olympic Stadium from 2004.

Salzburg: an anonymous street scene.

Madrid: Las Ventas.

And then Rome, Rome, Rome…

Jacob put his hands over his face for a few seconds before getting up and going over to the rickety desk by the wal.

He sat down on the Windsor chair and rested his arms on his notes, the notes he had made about the various victims, his interpretations, the tentative connections he had made.

He knew very little about the Berlin couple yet, just their names and ages:

Karen and Bil y Cowley, both twenty-three, from Canberra in Australia.

Drugged and murdered in their rented apartment close to Charite University Hospital, for which they had paid two weeks in advance but which they hadn't had the chance to ful y enjoy. Instead, they had their throats cut and were mutilated on their second or possibly third day in the apartment.

It was four days, maybe five or six, before they were even found. Stupid, arrogant German police! Acting like they knew everything, when they knew so little.

Jacob got up, went over to the bed again, and picked up the Polaroid picture of the couple that had been posted to the journalist at the Berliner Zeitung. This was the point where his brain had reached the limit for what it could absorb.

Why did the kil ers send first postcards and then grisly photographs of the slaughter to the media in the cities where they carried out their murders?

To shock?

To get fame and acclaim?

Or did they have some other intention? Were the pictures and postcards a smoke screen to conceal their real motive? And if so, what the hel might that be?

What the hel, what the hel, what the hel?

He examined the photograph, its macabre composition. There had to be a meaning, but he couldn't see what it was.

Instead, he picked up the picture of the couple from Paris.

Emily and Clive Spencer, just married, propped up next to each other against a pale-colored headboard in a Montparnasse hotel room. They were both naked. The streams of blood that covered their torsos had gathered in congealed little pools around their genitals.

Why?