'Not a clue.'
But she did and he didn't know how she did. 'Do you remember the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur?'
'Yes,' she said. 'I remember that at the center of the cave, Theseus came upon the Minotaur. But Theseus didn't lose. He killed the Minotaur.'
'And Ariadne led him out with a string.'
'You're thinking that maybe he sees himself as Theseus and that the women are the Minotaur? I don't know. It doesn't make much sense to me.'
'But you know that it makes perfect sense to him. How much of a study did you do of the legend?'
'Not all that much really,' she said.
'Do it when we get home again.'
'But even if I happen to discover more parallels between what the killer does and the Theseus legend, it won't tell us anything about the man's identity, about how to find him. Do you know that he used the same abandoned building for two of his victims in San Francisco? It was down in the China Basin. The very same building! Then the police put a watch on it, but it was too late. He was surely laughing at them, at all of us, because we were helpless.'
'It surprises me that no one saw anything. There are usually lots of homeless around those abandoned buildings. And cops do patrol. To set up all the props, he would have had to carry stuff in and out of the buildings, yet no one appeared to see anything. He would have had to transport his props. A truck? He had to make them himself or buy them somewhere.'
'Yes, but only once. He took away most of his props after he killed each woman. He left just enough so the police would know what he'd done.'
'And still no one saw anything. That boggles the mind.'
'Evidently one old man saw him, because he was found strangled near one of the abandoned buildings. It was the same kind of string used to get to the center of the maze. He wanted the cops to know it had been him.'
'What did you mean that he was laughing at us?' She had been nineteen years old at the time her sister was murdered. How was she involved? He would find out later. She was just shaking her head at him as he said, very quietly, 'You're on a cycle too, Sherlock. A seven-year cycle. He's done nothing for seven years, just gone about his business, probably stewing inside but not enough to make him snap. As for you, you've given the last seven years of your life to him.'
She was stiff, her eyes colder than the ice frozen over her windshield the previous winter. It was what Douglas had said to her, wnat her father had said: 'It's none of your business.'
'I suppose your family has told you it isn't very healthy.'
'It's none of your business.'
'I imagine you couldn't bear it, that you couldn't bear to let your sister go, not the way she was removed, like the pawn in a game that she had to lose.'
She swallowed. 'Yes, that's close enough.'
'There's more, isn't there? A whole lot more.'
She was very pale, her fingers clutched around the paper coffee cup. 'No, there's nothing more.'
'You're lying. I wish you wouldn't, but you've lied for a very long time, haven't you?'
'There's nothing more. Please, stop.'
'All right. Do you want to shoot this guy once we nab him? You want to put your gun to his head and pull the trigger? Do you want to tell him who you are before you kill him? Do you think killing him will free you?''
'Yes. But that's unlikely to happen. If I can't shoot him then I want him to go to the gas chamber, not be committed the way Russell Bent will be. At least that's what my brother-in-law, Douglas Madigan, told me.'
'No one knows yet if Russell Bent will be judged incompetent to stand trial. Don't jump the gun. Life imprisonment without parole isn't good enough?'
'No. I want him dead. I don't want to worry about him escaping and killing more women. I don't want to worry that he might be committed to an institution, then fool the shrinks and be let loose. I don't want him still breathing after he killed seven-no, eight-people. He doesn't deserve to breathe my air. He doesn't deserve to breathe any air.'
'I've heard the opinion that since killing a murderer doesn't bring back the victim, then as a society we shouldn't impose the death penalty, that it brings us down to the murderer's level, that it's nothing but institutional revenge and destructive to our values.'
'No, of course it doesn't bring the victim back. It's a ridiculous argument. It makes no sense at all. It should be very straightforward: If you take another human life, you don't deserve to go on living. It's society's punishment, it's society's revenge against a person who rips apart society's rules, who tries himself to destroy who we are and what we are. What sort of values do we have if we don't value a life enough to eradicate the one who wantonly takes it?'
'We do condemn, we do imprison, we just don't necessarily believe in killing the killer.'
'We should. It's justice for the victim and revenge as well. Both are necessary to protect a society from predators.'
'What about the argument that capital punishment isn't a deterrent at all, thus why have it?'
'It certainly wouldn't be a deterrent to me, the way the appeals process works now. The condemned murderer spends the taxpayer's money keeping himself alive for at least another thirteen years-our money, can you begin to imagine?-no, I wouldn't be deterred. That monster, Richard Alien Davis, in California who killed Polly Klaas and was sentenced to death. You can bet you and I will be spending big bucks to keep him alive for a good dozen more years while they play the appeals game. Someone could save him during any appeal in those years. Tell me, if you knew that if you were caught and convicted of killing someone you'd be put to death within say two years maximum, wouldn't it make you think about the consequences of killing? Wouldn't that be something of a deterrent?'
'Yes. And I agree that more than a decade of appeals is absurd. Our paying for all the appeals is nuts. But revenge, Sherlock, just plain old revenge. Wouldn't you have to say that the committed pursuit of it is deadening?'
That's what he'd wanted to say all along. She was very still, looking out the small window down at the scattered towns in New England. 'No,' she said finally, 'I don't think it is. Once it's over you see, once there's justice, there can be a final good-bye to the victim. Then there's life waiting, life without fear, life without guilt, life without shame. It's all those things that are deadening.' She said nothing more.
He pulled a computer magazine out of his briefcase and began reading. He wondered what else had happened to her. Something had, something bad. He wondered if the something bad had happened to her around the time her sister had been killed. It made sense. What the hell was it?
* * *
Homicide Detective Ralph Budnack was a cop's cop. He was tall, with a runner's body, a crooked nose that had seen a good half dozen fights, intelligent, a stickler for detail, and didn't ever give up. His front teeth lapped over, making him look mischievous when he smiled. He met them at the District 6 Station and took them in to see his captain, John Dougherty, a man with bags under his tired eyes, bald and overweight, a man who looked like he wanted to retire yesterday.
They reviewed all that they knew, viewed the body in the morgue, and met with the medical examiner. There had been twenty stab wounds in Hillary Ramsgate's body: seven in the chest, thirteen in the abdomen. No sexual assault. Her tongue had been cut out, really very neatly, and there was a bump on her head from the blow to render her unconscious.
'Ralph tells me the guy's on a seven-year cycle and we lucked out that he just happened to be here when the seven years were up. That kind of luck can kill a person.' Captain Dougherty chewed on his unlighted cigar. 'The mayor called just before you came. The governor is next. I sure hope you guys can catch this guy.'
'There are many meanings and contexts to the number seven,' Savich said, looking up from the autopsy report he was reviewing again. 'I don't know if we'll get much out of this, but just as soon as we've inputted all the information from Ms. Ramsgate's murder into the program, I'm going to correlate it to any instances of the number seven as working behavior in numerology.' He looked over at Lacey, who was staring blankly at him. 'Hey, it's
