Spider

26

West Village, SoHo, New York The first strokes of a watercolour dawn were being painted across New York as Howie settled down at the desk by a window in his den. Sometimes he worked better in the early hours, when his mind was clear of the clutter that came cascading in as soon as he set foot in the office.

The Bigwigs back in Virginia had now officially asked him to reopen the BRK case and he needed every waking second of the day to start ramping up the enquiry. They'd tasked him with putting together a small team (nothing over budget) to re-examine evidence and work with the cops in Georgetown to see whether the desecration of Sarah Kearney's grave gave them anything new.

Howie nursed a mug of black coffee and began to wade through a forest of background paperwork he'd hauled home from the office. He started with the computerized statistical and psychological profiles that had been produced by PROFILER and VICAP, the FBI's two main serial-killer computer systems. BRK took up a zillion gigs of data, and the depth of the study was making things tougher not easier. The stats were hard to stomach at any time of day, but pre-breakfast, they were totally unpalatable. More than thirty thousand witness statements spread across forty cities, spanning twenty years. More than eighty thousand vehicle-check entries, more than two thousand previous offender study cases. Howie felt his will to live draining from him. Man, the fingerprint checking alone was enough to reduce you to tears. IAFIS, the FBI's own Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, had run more than seven thousand sets of prints through its database, making comparisons with more than forty million cases on its Criminal Master File, and had generated more than ten thousand latent fingerprint reports. On top of that, they'd used cutting-edge science to lift dozens of DNA traces out of the prints themselves. The boffins behind CODIS, the Bureau's Combined DNA Index System, had pumped their databases but the genetic profiles that they extracted hadn't matched any known offenders. In the old days, the problem had been that science hadn't been good enough to retrieve vital evidence; these days the difficulty was reversed. There was so much evidence; it was exhausting to work out what had come from the victim, the attacker or just innocent people whose paths had crossed a criminal crossroads. So how much closer had all the technology and science brought them to finding their man?

Not an inch.

Sure, there were prints, genetic profiles, statistical profiles, suggested car sightings, and suchlike. But nothing that could lead them to a prime suspect. And without a suspect, they had jack shit. Data was great if your perp was already a convicted felon, but if he'd never been written up, then it wasn't worth a dime.

With all that in mind, Howie decided to go back to basics. He was determined to take a helicopter view, to try to avoid the forest of information and concentrate on the big chunky black trees that stood out like storm-blasted oaks at the centre of it all. To do that, he knew he had to start all over again, look at the mass of evidence as though it was the first time he'd seen it.

Some things were obvious. The twenty-year time span between the first accredited murder and his last killing meant the guy was at least middle-aged by now. More interestingly, that span meant that he'd killed throughout his most sexually active years and had carried on. A sure sign that he was more than a sexually motivated murderer and that he would never stop. There would be an end to it only when he was caught, or when he died.

All the murder victims were white women, and statistics showed that this meant he was probably also white. The spread of bodies was vast and covered more areas of the United States than the press had ever been told. BRK got his tag from the cluster of killings around the Black River in South Carolina, but the truth was that this guy had been killing all along the Atlantic coastline. Body parts had washed up in Jacksonville, Swan Quarter, Hertford and even Hampton. There had been discoveries as far north as the Canadian border, down to the Miami coast, and even out towards Mexico. There had been such a spread of abduction and disposal sites that detectives reasoned that BRK was the sole master of his own life, a single man, either unemployed or wealthy, who was able to go freely wherever and whenever he wanted, without being accountable to anyone. Howie put down the basics:

White

Middle-aged

No criminal record

Driver's licence

Good geographic knowledge

Unemployed/Self-sufficient

Free to travel around

Single

No dependants

'Great!' he said, throwing his arms open with mock enthusiasm. 'Guess that narrows things down to a mere sixty million white American males.'

Howie knew the crime stats backwards, and remembering them never made him feel better. About seventeen thousand people are murdered each year in America, fewer than six killings per hundred thousand of the population. But most murders are easy-solves, domestics that go wrong, drug grudges, gang warfare fought out in the streets with more spectators than a ball game. Most homicides were the work of 'amateurs', first-timers who panicked after the kill and ran for cover, desperate to dump the victim and get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible. They weren't like BRK.

This perp, or 'this fucking weird sicko fruitcake' as Howie called him, wanted to hold on to the bodies as long as he could. There could be several reasons why. Profilers believed BRK was highly intelligent and knew that by moving the body away from the abduction scene he made things doubly difficult for any investigation. First off, no enquiry really starts until the body is found. A missing person's hunt attracts only a fraction of the police resources and press coverage of a murder hunt. When the corpse is removed from the abduction site, this critical crime scene gets rained on, trampled on by people and pissed on by dogs. In short, crucial evidence is destroyed. The next complication is jurisdiction. A well-placed body can have the FBI, the city cops and the sheriff's office rolling up their sleeves to slug it out for the right to run the investigation (or, in some cases that Howie's known, to avoid running it). Finally, the big humdinger. If a serial killer can lure his prey away, and kill in a closed and controlled environment in which he won't make evidential mistakes and can clean up after himself, then the CSI teams don't even have a death scene to investigate.

Most of the profilers reckoned this last factor was the real reason BRK kept his bodies. But not Jack. Jack had often gone against the wisdom of the crowd. He reckoned there were other, much simpler reasons. As Howie picked up his coffee again, his old buddy's words came rolling back to him: 'He just can't bear to let his victims go. He wants to keep them for ever. Dead bodies can't run out on you. He's killing for companionship.'

Howie swallowed the bitter black coffee and considered how much better it would taste with another doughnut, especially a chocolate one. Right now he could do with food to aid his troubled thoughts.

The only real clue this guy gives us is how he disposes of the bodies.

He chops them up and spreads them all over the place.

He drives to rivers, swamps, estuaries, wherever there's deep water, and tosses the body parts in.

What does all that tell us?

Jack had asked the question many times and they'd come up with dozens of theories. He was drawn to water; he was a fisherman; he was brought up by a river; or maybe he saw his father use the river as a garbage chute. Maybe he was a sailor, perhaps he knew the local ports and used them to come and go, before and after the killings. The FBI had checked it all out, even double-checked some of it. Perhaps Jack's simple explanation had been right all along.

'I'll tell you what it is, Howie; next to fire, water is the best way to get rid of a corpse. Three-quarters of our planet is covered in water; that's a big place to hide bodies. Bury a corpse and you can almost always see the soil's been disturbed; people walk by, animals dig it up, before you know it there's a 911 being rung in. But weigh down body parts, then drop them in deep water and for a long time no one but Davy Jones will find out what you've done. When something eventually does come to the surface, it's stripped barer than a KFC drumstick during a Superbowl. Trust me, Howie, the only fixation this guy has with water is that it's a tool to help him. If he can find a better tool, then he'll switch from water in a shot.'

Howie went back to his profile and added:

Organized

Careful

Intelligent

Ruthless

Meticulous

He almost also wrote down 'pancakes, ham and fresh coffee'; because they were on his mind as he fought back another pre-breakfast grumble around his bulging belt-line.

If he had to describe the killer right now, he'd say he was looking at a white male, of above average intelligence, aged about forty-five, with no previous criminal record, who was financially independent, drove an unexceptional vehicle and probably didn't even have a parking ticket to his name. He wasn't a risk-taker; he was a grey type of fella who blended in with whatever was going on and never stood out from the crowd. He was single, most likely never married and was – was what? Howie paused as he considered his sexuality. Was he homosexual? Were they homosexual attacks on pretty heterosexual women? He didn't think so. Why should they be? Howie crossed it off his mental list. Were they heterosexual lust murders? Maybe. Perhaps the dismemberment was disguising something that he did to the corpse, something so depraved that he didn't want another living soul to discover what he'd done. It was a possibility. But there was no real trace evidence to support it. No semen on the bodies, or in body wounds, no sign of anything being rammed, jammed or slammed into any orifice. There had been some markings on the wrist and shin bones, possibly fetishist restraints, but more likely just the work of a methodical jailer making sure his prisoner didn't escape. He wished again that Jack was there to help him. Serial sex crimes had been his buddy's speciality. There had been no one better in the business.

'Remember, Howie, the primary sexual organ of the male and the female is not the genitals, it's the brain. Fantasy and planning happen in your head, not in your pants. Whatever these goons physically act out is merely a manifestation of what they mentally crave.'

Howie still didn't know whether to write homosexual or heterosexual. He just couldn't figure out what turned this weirdo on. And then he found the word he was searching for. Underneath Intelligent, Ruthless and Meticulous, he wrote a word he'd never written before:

Necrophile

Death was just the start of the killer's turn-on.