Finally, she and her husband had, significantly, moved to Detroit within twelve months of the time that Stunner had also arrived in the city. Again, in traditional forensic investigations such a snippet of information would have no relevance to the eventual crime, but in psychoneural mapping terms it was of considerable importance. Relocation, by the perpetrator, the victims, or all of them, was a common circumstance in many spree killings.
In commonsense terms, a perpetrator would of course have dozens of links with people who did not ultimately become his victims. At first glance, these nonsignificant connections seemed to provide no clearer insight than any other forensic work. But Stunner's case was paradigmatic, in
the Division's terms: he had a past record of escalating
1
seriousness, he had made a significant area relocation prior to the incident, he lived and worked in proximity to his victims and there had been a culminating spree event.
Several years of work ensued, in parallel with Andy Simons' regular duties with the Bureau.
The Division's purpose was no less than to produce an integrated database of violent crime in the USA, the emphasis being on what appeared to most civilians to be unpremeditated outbreaks, 'random' attacks on harmless victims, driiveby shootings, chance encounters with serial killers, outbursts of spree attacks in which passersby were wounded or killed.
If patterns of violence emerged they did so unreliably, a fact that seemed constantly to undermine the Division's credibility within some other parts of the Bureau.
While no one involved with the work would ever accept that they were trying to predict such attacks, that was inevitably how it came to be seen. lt became a tiresome habit that agents from other field offices around the country would think it funny to call in to Fredenicksburg, with the news they had just cleared up one case and could they have directions to the next one? As with all predictable workplace jokes, the amusement content declined rapidly.
Agent Simons, part of whose job was to give briefings to authorized visitors to the Fredericksburg field office, described the ultimate purpose of the computer models as area anticipation'.
The Division would eventually be able to show trends, he said, based on geographical, economic and sociological data, in which the likelihood of an outbreak could be measured statistically. Many such results could already be determined from routine police and Bureau intelligence, which again tended to undermine the unique quality of their work, but the principal claim the Division made, using Bureauspeak, was that as data accreted so their anticipatory functions would be more sharply honed.
The reality, Andy had often admitted to Teresa, was that maybe within ten or fifteen years they would have a more accurate picture of the social and other conditions which gave rise to the phenomenon, but that no amount of computer modelling would ever be able to take into account the sheer unpredictability of human nature.
Events on a worldwide basis were also closely monitored by the Division, and where circumstances seemed relevant they made careful assessment of the evidence, followed by a first adumbration of psychoneural mapping. However, it was in the US, crime capital of the world, that most of their data was found.
lt was this kind of work, unexciting, detailed, technical, with no immediate end in view, that Andy Simons was engaged in when an area of Texas to the west of Fort Worth and to the north of Abilene slowly grew into what the Division called psychoneural significance.
This part of the Texas panhandle had traditionally been a farming and ranching area, with high incomes for some and low incomes for most. In the 1950s it had been designated ILI Industrial Low Intensity with no state or federal incentives available for corporations. There were few exploitable oil resources. At the beginning of the 1980s, though, a number of computer and microchip manufacturers moved into the region, attracted by low land prices and taxes. An influx of middleclass population soon followed, which swelled through the middle of the decade, while the oilpnice rise brought a new economic boom to what had always been a prosperous state.
From the Division's perspective, area relocation, the first step in creating the environment for outburst crime, had begun. Towards the end of the decade, when there was a slump in oil prices and the whole taxation and land macroeconomy shifted in emphasis, the newly prosperous silicon industries entered a phase of downsizing and restructuring, with a consequent creation of a large new underclass. The second stage in the process had been reached.
Soon this region of north Texas was suffering a crime wave: aggravated assaults, rapes, armed robberies and homicides. By the beginning of the 1990s, the area had moved in the Division's terms from statistically negligible to statistically acute.
Andy Simons and his team started making trips to the Abilene area, liaising with the Bureau field office and the police department there. Andy kept himself and the rest of his team updated with information about policing numbers, crime statistics and patterns, gun ownership, court sentencing practices, state parole policies.
lt was therefore not entirely a coincidence that Andy Simons should be in Abilene on June 3, a day when a man called john Luther Aronwitz decided to drive his pickup truck to church, with his collection of firearms stashed in the back, ready for use.
CHAPTER 13
Did you ever use a gun, Nick?'
'He had been balancing a spirit bottle on the glass server, the thing that dished out those incredibly small British servings, but when she asked the question she saw him freeze momentarily. Then he finished, and turned towards her. She was on the bar stool again, her arms stretched out across the surface of the counter, her hands surrounding the highball glass without touching it.
'No,' he said. 'Why do you ask?'
'Did you ever want to?'
'No.'
'What about now?'
'It's an academic question. Guns have been outlawed in this country.'
'They've tried banning them in some places in the US. Never worked. People go across the county line,
