'The third of June was when'
'Yeah, it was, wasn't it? That was when Gerry Grove flipped his lid. Same day, Nick. The same goddamned day. Quite a coincidence, right?'
Later, when Mrs Simons had tottered off to her room, Nick closed the bar, locked the doors and turned out all the lights. Upstairs, the hotel was silent. He let himself into the bedroom.
Amy was still awake, sitting up in bed and reading a magazine. Her mood had changed; yelling at him seemed to have vented some of the pressure.
CHAPTER 12
At the time of his death Andy Simons was fortytwo years old and working, as he had worked for the previous eighteen years, as a Special Agent with the FBI. He specialized in offender psychology, with particular reference to outburst events, spree killings and relocatory serial killers.
Andy saw himself as a good Bureau man, believing in its methods and dedicated to its causes.
He knew how to relax when away from the Bureau, but while he W as on duty he kept his mind closed to anything but the immediate demands his work made upon him. Although he was still an active enforcement agent, in recent years his work had to a large extent moved off the streets and into the laboratory.
In the Offender Psychology Division attached to the Fredericksburg field office he and thirteen other federal agents were slowly and painstakingly constructing computer models of the psychoneural maps of the known or suspected mentality of disturbed spree killers. Their data had been drawn from the Bureau's own National Crime Information Center, police and ranger records of every state in the country, as well as from many countries in Europe, Latin America and Australasia. The psychopathological profiles they mapped the basis of the computer models extended not only to those of the killers, but also to those of their victims.
The theory under investigation was that in cases of crime traditionally considered to be motiveless in which people became victims apparently only through the mischance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time there was in reality a psychoneural connection between Perpetrator and victim.
A psychological trigger appeared to be involved. lt was not yet entirely clear what that might be, but in effect it was the last straw, the last step, which converted the socially maladjusted or psychopathically unstable from misfit to murderer. The apparently innocent victim was increasingly thought to make a contribution to the release of the trigger.
There were also the more conventional links of cause and effect, which were known and had been studied for most of the century. Resentment at long jail sentences was often cited by captured serial killers as the last straw, turning them on release into murderous soclopaths.
However, the reliability of this was never absolute. It was obviously not the whole story, otherwise every released longterm prisoner would become a serial killer. Other more local or personal factors were thought relevant: a growing grievance against some institution, person or event, an increasing pattern of offending, which frequently included sexual offending, a reduction in socioeconomic status due to unemployment, relocation or domestic upheaval, and so on.
Andy Simons took a special interest in one case, which had become the starting point for the Division's research.
In 1968 an unemployed car worker in Detroit called Mack Stunner had shot and killed three of his former workmates during their lunch break. Stunner hid been sacked by the Ford Motor Company management two days before the incident, the reason being that he had for the last six weeks been persistently late or nonattending at work. On the day of the shooting he had managed to gain entry to the Ford plant during the lunch hour, where it was likely he knew offduty workers would be, even though, as the trial established, the actual victims were not known to him.
Stunner was not a native of Detroit, having been born on the opposite side of Lake Erie in Lorain, Ohio, moving
1
to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1962, or not long afterwards. After a series of increasingly violent crimes, including several of sexual harassment or abuse, Stunner moved to Detroit, where he found employment. Although by this time he had a long police record, and had served several terms in the state penitentiary, Stunner was given a job by Ford and for the first few months at least was an acceptable worker. He lived alone in a rooming house in the Melvindale area of the city, and did not mix socially wit any of his workmates. At weekends he was a frequent visitor to bars and drinking clubs, where he sometimes bought favours from hostesses.
He was a collector of firearms, and at the time of his arrest was found to possess thirteen different pieces of varying sizes and power. The most formidable weapon he owned was the Iver Johnson M1 carbine he used on his victims, but he also possessed several handguns, one of which he also carried on the day of the crime.
lt was relevant to Stunner's case that the only thing he knew about his victims was that they too worked for Ford, because in this sense his victims were randomly selected. He shot seven of them; three died from their wounds, while the others eventually recovered after stays of different lengths in hospital. After the shooting Stunner was overpowered by Ford security staff, and handed over to the police. Under interrogation, he said that one of the men had repeatedly made a sniffing noise whenever they were on the same shift, this being done deliberately to aggravate him. lt was the only clue he ever gave about his motives.
Stunner's case history was the first one Andy Simons post-investigated in detail when he began working for the Division. Because at the time he first looked at the records most of the people involved were still alive, he was able to re-interview them with modern hindsight, and use the experimental techniques then being developed to map the psychoneural connections between all the participants in the shooting.
For example, the wife of one of the victims had made a deposition that she had frequently seen Stunner in a particular bar, where she happened to work as a waitress. This evidence was not admitted during the trial, because the District Attorney's office had not considered it relevant to the murders. There was no suggestion that Stunner knew the woman or had even noticed her, or, if he had, that he would have been able to identify her as the wife of someone on the same Ford shift as his. However, from the hindsight view taken by the Offender Psychology Division it provided a mappable link between Stunner and one of the men he had murdered.
From the same unfortunate woman, second and third links could be mapped to Stunner: she also happened to be known to the woman who owned the lodging house in Melvindale where Stunner lived.
