his face.
They were shouting their message, but Jacob couldn’t hear what they were saying, couldn’t make out their words, couldn’t understand what they meant, and until he could work out their language, he wouldn’t be able to stop them. He drank the rest of the wine in his mug and poured some more. Then he sat down on the bed, messing up the order he had just arranged for the postcards.
“Let’s look at it this way, then. Let me see who you are!”
Jacob Kanon, a homicide detective from the NYPD’s 32nd Precinct, was a long way from home. He was in Berlin because the killers had brought him here. He had been following their progress for six months, always two steps behind, maybe even three or four.
Only now had the magnitude of their depravity started to sink in with the police authorities around Europe. Because the killers carried out only one or two murders in each country, it had taken time for the pattern to emerge, for everyone except him to see it plainly.
Some of the stupid bastards still didn’t see it, and wouldn’t take help from an American, even a fucking smart one who had everything riding on this case. He picked up the copies of the postcard from Florence. The first one.
Chapter 2
THE POSTCARD SHOWED THE BASILICA di San Miniato al Monte, and on the back was the now familiar quote. He read the lines and drank more wine, then let the card fall and picked up the next one, and the next, and the next.
And then
Jacob put his hands over his face for a few seconds before getting up and going over to the rickety desk by the wall.
He sat down on the Windsor chair and rested his arms on his notes, the notes he had made about the various victims, his interpretations, the tentative connections he had made.
He knew very little about the Berlin couple yet, just their names and ages: Karen and Billy Cowley, both twenty-three, from Canberra in Australia. Drugged and murdered in their rented apartment close to Charitй University Hospital, for which they had paid two weeks in advance but which they hadn’t had the chance to fully enjoy. Instead, they had their throats cut and were mutilated on their second or possibly third day in the apartment. It was four days, maybe five or six, before they were even found.
Jacob got up, went over to the bed again, and picked up the Polaroid picture of the couple that had been posted to the journalist at the
Why did the killers send first postcards and then grisly photographs of the slaughter to the media in the cities where they carried out their murders?
To shock?
To get fame and acclaim?
Or did they have some other intention? Were the pictures and postcards a smoke screen to conceal their real motive? And if so, what the hell might that be?
He examined the photograph, its macabre composition. There had to be a meaning, but he couldn’t see what it was.
Instead, he picked up the picture of the couple from Paris. Emily and Clive Spencer, just married, propped up next to each other against a pale-colored headboard in a Montparnasse hotel room. They were both naked. The streams of blood that covered their torsos had gathered in congealed little pools around their genitals.
Chapter 3
JACOB REACHED FOR THE WEDDING photograph he had asked Emily’s mother to send him.
Emily was only twenty-one years old. Clive had just turned twenty-six. They were a stunningly beautiful couple, and the wedding photo radiated so much happiness and romance. Clive was dressed in tails, tall and handsome. Maybe a touch overweight, but that suited his status as a stockbroker in the London markets.
Emily looked like a fairy-tale princess, her hair in big ringlets framing her head. Slim and fragile, she looked quite enchanting in her ivory dress. Her eyes shone at the camera.
They had met at a mutual friend’s New Year’s party in Notting Hill, in one of those narrow trendy houses where the film with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts had been shot.
Emily’s mother hadn’t been able to stop crying when Jacob talked to her on the phone.
He could neither comfort nor help her. He wasn’t even formally involved in the case, after all. As an American police officer, he had to be careful not to get involved in the work done by the authorities in other countries. That could have diplomatic consequences and, even worse, could lead to his expulsion from the country.
A wave of despondency washed over Jacob with a force that took his breath away and made the mug of wine in his hand shake. He quickly emptied it of its contents and went and poured some more.
He sat down at the desk once again, his back to all the photographs and postcards so that he didn’t have to look at them.
Maybe he should go and shower. Head down to the communal bathroom at the end of the corridor in the hope that there was some hot water left.
He drank some more wine.
When the bottle was empty, he picked up the pictures of the dead couple from Rome. He placed them in front of him on the desk and put his 9millimeter Glock 26 beside them, just as he always did. The killers had sent two pictures of the murder in Rome: one image of the two naked victims and a close-up of two of their hands. The woman’s left and the man’s right.
He picked up the picture of the hands and traced the shape of the woman’s graceful hand with his finger, smiling as it reached the birthmark at the base of her thumb.
She played the piano, was an expert on Franz Liszt.
He breathed out deeply, let go of the picture, and picked up his gun. He ran the palm of his hand over the dull plastic of the grip and put the muzzle in his mouth. It tasted of powder and metal.
He closed his eyes and the room slid gently to the left, the result of far too much Riesling.
Chapter 4
THE POSTCARD LAY NEXT TO a harmless invitation to a boules tournament - the newsroom against a rival newsroom - and another invitation to a wine-tasting evening with the culture crowd. Dessie Larsson groaned out loud and tossed the cards for the pointless social events into the recycling bin. If people paid more attention to their work instead of playing with balls and scratching one another’s back, maybe this newspaper would have a
