“We need to do a database check on this. Run it through ViCASnl to see if any links crop up.” He referred to the Netherlands’ new police software system, which was a powerful search engine that scoured every police crime report for similarities, whether it be weapons, types of injuries or victims, DNA and fingerprints, messages, vehicle matches, geographical links and a whole gamut of other stuff that the crime eggheads could come up with. ViCASnl stood for Violent Crime Analysis System (Netherlands) and was based on the FBI model, and was a relatively new concept on this side of the Atlantic. Pieter tapped the screen, thinking aloud. “This must mean something to someone,” he said, indicating the strange symbol. “And this here,” he pointed at the word werewolf in the message, “this suggests one person, the way it’s worded – Beware, Werewolf is watching – see if anything gets flagged up.”
“How wide a search do you want?” Beumers asked.
“European-wide. Ask our friends at Interpol to run a similar search on their system.” He sat back in his chair. “And bring her pimp in. Squeeze his balls and see if he reacts, at the very least he’s looking at five years for sex-trafficking and pimping out an underage girl, so see if you can use that as leverage. Also get those CCTV guys over here. It seems just too much of a coincidence that those security cameras were down at the exact time our guy was killing Mila. Either that, or he just had the luckiest break ever.”
“You know, I just don’t get that,” Beumers told him, rubbing the back of his neck to ease the tenseness in his muscles. “Whoever did that to that girl, the stuff we saw, they’d have to be covered head-to-foot in blood. Literally dripping in it. Cameras or no cameras, somebody would have to spot a guy looking all messed like that, running through the streets. The place was packed with people. They’d be a trail of blood leading us right the way to the bastard’s front door.”
“Yeah. We could put out an appeal for any members of the public to check their mobile phone or camcorder footage, see if anybody caught anything or anyone suspicious. But I don’t want to go down that route yet.” Pieter hit the print key on the computer to start printing out the crime scene pics. As the printer over on the long table whirred to life he asked: “Was there much on the news today? I wasn’t really paying much attention on the way over.”
“A brief mention on the local TV channel, but no real details, just that the police are dealing with a suspicious death in De Wallen. Fucking suspicious? More like mysterious.”
“Well let’s keep things low-key for now. I want to keep that message and symbol as hold-back evidence. Let’s just prey no members of the public noticed it amongst all of the graffiti, otherwise all of the crackpot copycats will be busy.”
Pieter walked over to the printer and took out the sheaf of papers, and glanced through them with a grimace.
“You know, what you said a moment ago? About the killer been drenched in blood and what he did to her? That to me didn’t feel like a first-kill. Most first time murders are fairly mundane, sometimes even accidental. Maybe an argument that went too far, or a crime of passion, perhaps just a single stab wound, before the murderer flees in a panic. But last night, that took time. You’d have to be very cool to spend maybe an hour or two butchering a person like that, knowing there are throngs of people walking past just a few feet away. It certainly doesn’t feel like the behaviour of someone taking a human life for the very first time.”
Beumers took a moment for the implications of that to sink in. Then he remarked, “yeah, but if that was his first victim, what the hell is coming next?”
CHAPTER 4
MR SNAKEHIPS
Oliver Monroe was jiving and jitterbugging his way down Warmoesstraat, feeling like the man, and out looking for some pussy to grind.
Earlier at his hotel, which was conveniently positioned right beside Centraal Station, he had snorted some charlie to help stimulate his libido, and then on the walk over here he had scored a bit of angel dust from one of the tsk tsk drug dealers, sprinkling it on his spliff to inhale the rocket fuel directly into his system. The combination helped to mellow his mind but also to leave him highly sexed up almost to bursting point, and this floaty and disconnected sensation just on the edge of feeling trippy made the night around him dazzle and shine, so that the lights from the bars and the music and chatter pinged around inside his mind, and the paving stones glowed like in the Michael Jackson Billie Jean music video.
Oliver was from London, and every two months his work called for a quick flight across to Amsterdam for face-to-face round-table conferences with the execs who paid his wages as a broker. The meetings usually lasted about a couple of hours, short enough for him to catch the evening flight back to Gatwick. However, Oliver always ensued that these trips involved a one-night stopover, which his very generous expenses paid for. And so, after a short call home to the wife in their Maida Vale apartment to assure her how much he loved her and their ten month old baby girl, the evenings inevitably found him out enjoying everything that Amsterdam’s infamous nightlife had to offer.
What happened in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam.
Oliver had visited quite a few of the world’s sex capitals. In Bangkok on holiday with his then fiancé, he’d managed to blag an evening by himself once when Jessica had been feeling unwell, and he’d headed straight for the Soi Cowboy district with its notorious girly bars. Naturally he had indulged himself fully (except the pre-teen kiddies,
