Harper had an idea about what they might do. A long shot, but he needed to talk this through with someone who understood criminal behaviour. He needed Dr Levene’s input.
Forty minutes later, Harper hurried up the corridor towards Denise Levene’s office. He needed someone to show him how to unlock the symbols. He pushed straight through the office door and looked directly at her. ‘He didn’t mean to kill Mary-Jane. She disturbed him. I want to know the implications for his behaviour.’
Denise stared up at Harper with a look of surprise. She pointed across to the chair in the middle of the room. ‘I’m with a client, Tom.’
‘Did you not hear me? We need to talk now. He’s killing every couple of days. Grace Frazer on November 14, Amy Lloyd-Gardner on November 16. He killed again last night.’
‘Yeah, I heard it on the radio this morning. Can you give me a moment, Tom? I’m with someone.’
Tom moved towards her desk. ‘How is he keeping up the pace? Psychologically? Is it possible? I’ve never known anything like it.’
Denise stood up and walked round her desk. She smiled at her client, a rookie officer who was now looking more terrified than ever, and put her hand softly on Tom’s shoulder. ‘Can you just step outside for a moment and let me wrap up here?’
Tom only then noticed the cowering figure looking lost in the big black leather chair. He apologized and retreated.
Outside her office, Tom paced. The need to move was more powerful than anything else. He needed to do something. The killer needed to be engaged or flushed out. With the profiler at the New York field office going cold on the case and refusing to take a line, the team was left with old-fashioned detective work — piecing together every piece of available information and looking for something that linked the bodies and crime scenes with the identity of the unsub. But Harper knew, just as the rest of the team knew, that that took time and it was just dawning on them that time was something the killer was using against them. He was leaving them no time to assimilate and process the details before he struck again.
Harper picked up a magazine, flicked through it absently and then threw it back down on the glass table. He looked at his watch, and then, right beside it, the thick green attitude band that Denise Levene had somehow got him to agree to wear at the end of the last session. He put it on after the fiasco at Erin Nash’s apartment. Denise was right, he got angry a lot. Now he was feeling the anger burning up inside him, so he pulled the elastic back and let it slap hard against his wrist. It twanged and stung. He did it once more. Yeah, it distracted him momentarily.
Denise appeared at the door of her office with the rookie, who made a big detour as he walked away to avoid Tom Harper’s great brooding figure. Denise was feeling excited rather than annoyed. The case had been keeping her awake since Tom had talked about it the previous morning and now he was here unprompted. She’d pieced together what she knew about the killer but she needed detailed crime scene information if she was going to be able to help. Maybe Tom Harper would fill in some of the missing pieces.
She beckoned him into her office. She saw his right hand twisting the attitude band and smiled. ‘How’s the anger management?’
‘I’m still angry,’ he said.
She shook her head with mock disapproval. ‘I know what you’re going to tell me.’
‘What?’
‘You didn’t twang.’
‘I feel stupid twanging.’
‘But if you don’t twang, there’s no psychological movement. There’s no learning. Listen…’
Tom smiled broadly. He couldn’t help it. He liked it when she was earnest, even if he didn’t buy into all the CBT shit. Still smiling, he twanged, looking directly into her eyes. Then he twanged again.
‘Yeah, yeah, I get it, you’re thinking I’m just a quack with stupid ideas.’
‘I need to talk about the case, not myself,’ he said.
‘Okay. Talk me through the victims.’
‘He disempowers them by force or fear, then he rapes them and tortures them. His preferred method of killing them is asphyxiation. Then he takes something.’ Tom paused. ‘He took Mary-Jane Samuelson’s eyes, Grace Frazer’s hair, Amy Lloyd-Gardner’s heart, Jessica Pascal’s breasts. He poses them. Mary and Grace were posed to humiliate, with their legs apart. He posed Amy and Jessica in quasi-religious poses and added a line of poetry to each. He leaves cherry blossom at every scene. Sorry. It’s not nice.’
Levene pulled her Powerbook across the glass table and clicked a couple of times. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I want to help you get back out there and catch this monster. You know my research. We were trying to detect early neurological signs in these killers, so I spent time working with these guys.’
‘What happened?’
‘If I’m honest, I couldn’t handle seeing them close up. Hey, Tom, just so you know — I’ve got baggage that would put yours to shame. I’m just better at the makeover than you are. All I’m saying is that I got to know a thing or two about profiling killers. That’s why I took this job, to find out more about them from you guys.’
‘A profile can’t work in all cases. This guy defies profiling.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. The key is, Tom, to isolate the important points from the noise.’
‘How?’
‘Look, your killer is working on all kinds of different levels. He’s taking psychological reminders, he’s hiding himself from the victims, he’s sexualizing and degrading them, he’s also romancing them and then giving them some afterlife. It’s a lot of detail.’
‘Don’t we know it.’
‘Look, we just got to work facts and deductions from facts. Deductions, you know — necessary factual conclusions, not guesses.’
‘I get you. If you can work up a profile, we can see if we can use it. But I need something else.’
‘What?’
‘I got a strong feeling that Mary-Jane wasn’t premeditated.’ He paused and looked across to her. ‘I think he’s been getting closer to these women and he broke into Mary-Jane’s apartment to be near to her stuff, maybe even take something. But she came back unexpectedly, and then I think things went bad.’
‘In many cases I’ve studied, the killer isn’t sure what he’s going to do until he interacts with the victim. It depends on the victim’s reaction. Sometimes the killer sees no way out except by silencing them, especially if they struggle. It can trigger a very aggressive reaction. It’s self-protection.’
‘But he got a taste. He liked it.’
‘Yeah, this guy really liked it.’
‘The thing I’m thinking, Denise, is this. If I’m right, then we’ve got a piece of useful information about him. You know, something that we might use to lure him in, maybe even get him to speak to us. You think that’s possible?’
‘You want to interact with him?’
‘There’s a greater chance of finding him if we can get him to talk to us. I want to know if he’s responding to what we say. Can you help with this?’
‘Yeah, but I’ve got to understand him a little better.’
‘Okay, what do you need?’
She smiled thinly. ‘You give me the case files and as a quid pro quo I will try my damnedest to resolve your aggression against women. Not, of course, your aggression against me, which is textbook defensiveness for your psychological weakness. By the look on your face, you’d say that isn’t what’s wrong with you, but I’m here to tell you that’s what you’ve done with all that sadness. Turned it to something hard and unpleasant.’
Tom stared at her. It felt like a relief to hear someone identify things he didn’t dare identify for himself. ‘Okay. We have a deal. I’ll get you the files, but based on what you’ve heard so far, how do you read him?’
‘Well, first off, your killer is focusing on the key romantic symbols from his women. Eyes, hair, heart, breasts — they all have romantic symbolism. He’s afraid of the power that women — or a particular woman — have over him. What they make him feel. He’s afraid of the effect they have on him. If he’s a stalker, then he needs to control not only the women, but the way they excite him. He can go to them or their artefacts or pictures whenever he wants. He wants to neutralize the real threat, though, because he’s been hurt and humiliated by them. You’re looking for someone with a problem relating to strong women. If he’s in a long-term relationship it’ll be with
