something a lot more evolved than lemon chicken, and that if I could just get my hands on his shoulders I could rub that tension away in five minutes flat. Going undercover was starting to seem like the easy part here.
I sat next to Sam, as close as I could get without touching. “How’s it going?” I asked.
He gave my hand a quick squeeze and reached round to his coat, draped over the back of the futon, to find his notebook. “Ah, sure, all right, I suppose. Just eliminating, mostly. Richard Doyle, your man who found the body, his alibi’s solid. We’ve ruled out all the DV files you flagged; we’re working on the rest and on your murder cases, but nothing yet.” The thought of the Murder squad combing through my files, with the rumors sizzling in their heads and my face for victim, sent a nasty little twitch down between my shoulder blades. “It doesn’t look like she used the internet at all-no internet activity under her log-in on the college computers, no MySpace page or anything like that, the e-mail address Trinity assigned her hasn’t even been used-so no leads there. And not even a sniff of any arguments in college-and the English department is mad for the old rumors. If she’d had problems with anyone, we’d have heard.”
“I hate to say I told you so,” Frank said sweetly, gathering up mugs, “but sometimes, in life, we have to do things we hate.”
“Yeah,” Sam said absently. Frank bent to hand him his coffee with a servile little flourish, and winked at me behind Sam’s back. I ignored him. One of Sam’s rules is that he doesn’t fight with anyone working the same case, but there are always people like Frank who figure he’s just too thick to notice when he’s being messed with. “So I wondered, Cassie… The thing is, eliminating could take forever, but as long as I’ve no motive and no leads, I’ve no other choice; there’s nothing to tell me where to start. I thought, if I just had some idea what I was looking for… Could you profile this for me?”
For a second I felt like the air in the room had gone dark with pure sadness, bitter and ineradicable as smoke. Every murder case I ever pulled, I had done my best to profile right here in my flat: late nights, whiskey, Rob stretched out on the sofa cat’s-cradling an elastic band and testing everything I came up with for holes. On Operation Vestal we’d brought Sam along, Sam smiling shyly at me while music and moths swirled at the windowpane, and all I could think was how happy the three of us had been, in spite of everything, and how fatally, devastatingly innocent. This prickly, crowded place-greasy smell of cold Chinese, my shin hurting like hell, Frank watching with those sidelong amused eyes-this wasn’t the same thing, it was like a mocking reflection in some creepy distorting mirror, and all I could think was, ludicrously, I want to go home.
Sam moved a sheaf of maps to one side-gingerly, glancing up at us to make sure he wasn’t messing anything up-and put down his mug. Frank scooted his arse to the very edge of the sofa, leaned his chin on his interlaced fingers and did enthralled. I kept my eyes down so they wouldn’t see the look on my face. There was a photo of Lexie on the table, half hidden under a carton of rice; Lexie up a ladder in the kitchen of Whitethorn House, wearing dungarees and a man’s shirt and an awful lot of white paint. For the first time ever, the sight of her felt good: that handcuff bite on my wrist jerking me down to earth, that cold-water slap in the face slamming everything else out of my mind. I almost reached out and pressed my hand onto the picture.
“Yeah, sure, I’ll profile,” I said. “You know I can’t give you a lot, though, right? Not on one crime.” Most of profiling is built on patterns. With a stand-alone crime, you have no way of knowing what’s pure chance and what’s a clue, stenciled in by the boundaries of your guy’s life or by the secret jagged outlines of his mind. One murder on a Wednesday evening tells you nothing very much; three more matching ones say that your guy has a window that night, and you might want to look twice when you find a suspect whose wife plays Bingo on Wednesdays. A phrase used in one rape could mean nothing; used in four, it becomes a signature that some girlfriend or wife or ex, somewhere, is going to recognize.
“Anything,” Sam said. He flipped his notebook open, pulled out his pen and leaned forwards, eyes fixed on me, ready. “Anything at all.”
“OK,” I said. I didn’t even need the file. I had spent more than enough time thinking about this, while Frank snored like a water buffalo on the sofa and my window went from black to gray to gold. “The first thing is that it’s probably a man. We can’t rule out a woman for definite-if you get a good female suspect, don’t ignore her-but statistically, stabbing’s usually a male crime. For now, we’ll go with a guy.”
Sam nodded. “That’s what I figured, too. Any ideas on what age he is?”
“This isn’t a teenager; he’s too organized and too controlled. We’re not talking about an old man, either, though. This didn’t take an athlete, but it did take a basic level of fitness-running around lanes, climbing over walls, dragging a body. I’d go with twenty-five to forty, give or take.”
“And I’m thinking,” Sam said, scribbling, “there’s local knowledge there.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Either he’s local or he’s spent an awful lot of time around Glenskehy, one way or another. He’s very comfortable in the area. He hung around for ages after the stabbing; killers who’re off their turf tend to get uneasy and split as fast as they can. And going by the maps, the place is a maze, but he managed to find her- in the dead of night, with no street lamps-after she got away from him.”
For some reason this was harder than usual. I had analyzed the living bejasus out of every fact we had, gone back over every textbook, but I couldn’t make the killer materialize. Every time I reached out for him, he streamed between my fingers like smoke and slid away over the horizon, left me staring at no silhouette except Lexie’s. I tried to tell myself profiling is like any other skill, doing a backflip, riding a bike: get out of practice and your instinct goes rusty; that doesn’t have to mean it’s gone for good.
I found my cigarettes-I think better if I have something to do with my hands. “He knows Glenskehy, all right, and he almost definitely knew our girl. For one thing, we’ve got the positioning of the body: her face was turned away, towards the wall. Any kind of focus on the victim’s face-covering it, disfiguring it, turning it away-usually means it’s personal; the killer and the victim knew each other.”
“Or,” Frank said, swinging his legs up onto the sofa and balancing his mug on his stomach, “it’s pure coincidence: that’s just the way she landed when he put her down.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But we’ve also got the fact that he found her. That cottage is well off the lane; in the dark, you wouldn’t even know it was there unless you were looking for it specifically. The time lag says he wasn’t exactly hot on her trail, so I doubt he actually saw her go in there, and once she was sitting down the wall would hide her from the road. Unless she had her torch on and our guy spotted the light-and why would you switch on a torch if you were trying to hide from a homicidal maniac?-then he had to have a reason for checking there. I think he knew she liked the cottage.”
“None of that says she knew him,” Frank said. “Just that he knew her. If he’d been stalking her for a while, say, he could feel like there was a personal connection, and he’d have a good handle on her habits.”
I shook my head. “I’m not completely ruling out a stalker, but if that’s what we’re dealing with, he was at least an acquaintance of hers. She was stabbed from the front, remember. She wasn’t running away, and she wasn’t jumped from behind; they were face to face, she knew he was there, they could well have been talking for a while. And she didn’t have any defensive wounds. To me, that says she wasn’t on guard. This guy was up close and she was at ease with him, right up until the second he stabbed her. Me, I wouldn’t be all that relaxed with a complete stranger who showed up at that hour in the middle of nowhere.”
“All of which will be a lot more use,” Frank said, “just as soon as we have a clue who this girl knew, exactly.”
“Anything else I can look for?” Sam asked, ignoring him-I could see the effort. “Would you say he’s got a record?”
“He probably has some kind of criminal experience,” I said. “He did a damn good job of cleaning up after himself. There’s a good chance he’s never got caught, if he’s this careful, but maybe he learned the hard way. If you’re going through files, you could try looking for stuff like car theft, burglary, arson-something that would take cleanup skills but wouldn’t involve any direct contact with victims. No assault, including sexual assault. Judging by how crap he is at killing people, he’d had no practice being violent, or practically none.”
“He’s not that crap,” Sam said quietly. “He got the job done.”
“Barely,” I said. “Through dumb luck, more than anything. And I don’t think that’s the job he went there to do. There are elements of this crime that just don’t match up. Like I said on Sunday, the stabbing reads as unplanned, spontaneous; but everything around that moment is a whole lot more organized. Your guy knew where to find her-I don’t buy the idea that he just happened to wander into her, at midnight on some back lane in the middle of nowhere. Either he knew her routine, or they’d arranged to meet. And after the stabbing, he kept his head and he took his time: tracked her down, searched her, erased his footprints and wiped her stuff clean-and that says he wasn’t wearing gloves. Again, he wasn’t planning on a murder.”
