“So the killer thought both Dominic Chuol and Chris Arnold were possessed by some evil entity? And that’s why they were chosen?”
“It’s just a theory. If so, Shay also said that our suspect probably believes he’s doing vital or holy work by saving the rest of us from them. The viciousness of last night’s attack on an agent of the forces trying to stop him certainly backs that theory up. He thinks our guy is strictly heterosexual too, that he picked a female officer because he had no interest in sexually assaulting a man, not because he thought she’d be an easier target.”
No, everyone was an easy target if they were hit by a taser.
“Shay thinks the killer has a very low opinion of our intelligence. Those messages carved into the first two victims weren’t meant for us, they were part of whatever the crazy bastard thinks he’s doing. This one definitely was for us, as was the phone threat.”
I had to agree. ‘You Tried To Fuck Me First!’ was not a hard message to interpret, and nor was ‘Show that face again and I’ll kill another of you.’ Conall drove in silence for a couple of minutes before speaking again.
“What you heard back there, before he left? Shay asked us to wait before releasing that sketch to the media. He thought it would be better to just get it out to consumer outlets and circulate it internally before doing that. He was worried it might provoke a reaction, and he was right.”
I’d already figured most of that from their conversation.
“It sounded to me like he also believed there was an argument for doing so too. It’s easy enough to say now that it would have been better not to, but what if it had turned out differently and someone had called in on Thursday night and led us straight to him?”
I meant it as I said it but I was really glad that it hadn’t been my decision to make. One thing seemed almost certain. Jackie would not have been attacked and killed like that last night if her killer hadn’t seen that composite on the evening news.
Twenty-Three
McKinnon’s meeting was brief and to the point. We were no longer dealing with what we’d already known was a psychotic murderer picking seemingly random victims. The man who had killed Detective Sergeant Jackie Gibson last night was now also targeting the people who were hunting for him. That he was also suffering from some form and degree of psychopathy was no longer in any doubt whatsoever.
This being the case, extra security precautions needed to be taken. Nobody travelled anywhere alone. Nobody slept alone. He’d expect to receive email confirmation of everyone’s chosen arrangements within the next few hours.
Only the staff who’d been working on the ‘Black Wood’ and ‘Arnold’ cases were in that room that Saturday morning, but McKinnon wasn’t taking any chances. Every officer working under him had been sent the same instructions. As for those of us who were involved in those investigations, an updated profile of our killer would be sent to us within the hour.
Anyone who felt unable or unfit to keep working on this operation as a consequence of the savagely violent, utterly despicable murder of Detective Sergeant Jackie Gibson last night should see him privately. At this time, he had no intention of insisting on any involuntary recusals but did expect those most personally affected by her death to book counselling appointments as soon as possible. Failure to do so would result in reassignment to other cases.
I didn’t hang around to offer James any comfortless words of consolation after he’d dismissed us. McKinnon was a professional of the highest calibre. He’d assessed the possible benefits and the dangers of airing that picture and found the balance to be heavily weighted in favour of doing so. Our job was to protect the general public as best we could, whatever the risk to ourselves. We’d had no way of knowing that our killer would respond so quickly, or with such brazen, uncharacteristic incautiousness. It just didn’t match the profile we’d already built of him.
Back at Old Perth Road, I gathered my shaken team in the break room so we could all sit down and discuss the new situation. Caitlin had pulled herself together very quickly once the initial shock of the news of Jackie’s death had passed earlier. It hadn’t been easy for me to walk out of that bedroom and tell her what had been done to her friend, but it had been much harder for her to hear it. Grieving or not, all I could see in her face now was determination and burning rage.
None of them wanted to come and stay in Dores. I wasn’t surprised. Why would anyone want to spend their off-duty hours in the boss’s house? How could they possibly relax? I got that, I really did, but I can’t pretend that I was happy about it. Bryce would stay with Collins and his girlfriend. Darren would bunk in with Caitlin and Walker at Caitlin’s house. Good enough.
“What about you, Sir?” Mills asked once that was settled. “You shouldn’t be alone either.”
“My place is fully secured, and I won’t be alone. My cousin’s there. Believe me, that house is probably the safest place in Inverness for anyone to be.” My tone did not invite any further comment on the subject.
None of them said anything about it being a day off. That didn’t surprise me either. I’d have to find something to keep them all usefully occupied, but we were running low on things to chase up on again by then. Eric McAndrew hadn’t called in yet, and I didn’t like that at all. Maybe he’d slept elsewhere last night, but I wanted him checked on. If the killer had been watching us, had he seen us visit the old man? Thinking back, I couldn’t remember seeing anyone lurking around down there, not even sitting in any nearby cars. Would our killer even remember Eric?
He would, I decided.
Back when our man had been stalking Dominic, he’d have had far more reason to notice anyone keeping company with his target than Eric had to notice him. I hadn’t heard anything from Captain Thorne yet but there were other people I wanted our composite shown to too. Debbie and Sharon, Dominic’s housemates, and the people who’d been working on that construction project he’d been employed by. Technically, the Black Wood case belonged to Philips now, but as the Arnold case was related, there was no reason for my team not to follow up with those two.
I sent Mills and Bryce to check on Eric.
“If he doesn’t answer the door, give the niece a call. Her number’s in the case folder. See if he was with her yesterday or if she knows of any friends he may have been with. Chase those up too, if you need to. Alright?”
They got it. I wanted him found, and quickly. Shay’s work with that composite was currently our strongest chance of identifying our killer. His first nine ‘possibles’ had all turned out to be dead ends. He’d been able to tell me that much yesterday evening.
“None of them have moved. They’re all exactly where they’re supposed to be, still living at the addresses on their driving licences. No unexplained disappearances last month or this month either. I can’t put any of them anywhere near here at the right times.”
We urgently needed Eric to look at those nine faces and give us some indication of which were the closest matches. Once Shay knew that, he could make some better directed alterations and see what his next tries turned up for us.
Walker and Collins, I sent off to Merkinch to show our composite to Debbie and Sharon.
“Try the building site afterwards too. The boss there said that Dominic didn’t work weekends, but that doesn’t mean a lot of the others won’t be there today.”
I didn’t want to leave Caitlin sitting alone in the main office, so once my DCs had all left, I logged in at Collins’ desk to keep working through the transcripts from there. There was a growing backlog of those piling up for our attention but the most promising ones had been coming in at the top of the queue, in bold type, so they didn’t get overlooked. Those were already becoming a little scarce.
We hadn’t been doing that for long when the updated profile that McKinnon had mentioned came in, and we both stopped to read it.
The physical description in there was detailed but not new. We already knew what our suspect looked like. Nor was the opinion that he almost
certainly lived alone, did not work elsewhere and did not socialise. It was the psychological profile that had been updated.
The psychotic, delusional, ‘Visionary’ category of serial killers committed their crimes because they believed they were being instructed to, by God or by some other entity. This was the category which, up until today, we had thought it most likely that our man belonged to, perhaps with some overlap into the ‘Hedonistic’ category. The semen stains on those jeans the killer had left behind had indicated a strong possibility that they were stimulated by the act of causing suffering and by killing, which certainly fitted the Hedonistic type.
The ‘Thrill Killers’ subcategory of the Hedonistic class killed purely for their own pleasure, feeding off the terror and suffering of their victims. They liked to both mentally and physically torture their prey, taunt them verbally to heighten their fear, sometimes even let them go just so they could chase them and create a whole new cycle of terror. They might sometimes choose to use the act of rape to degrade their victims and to inflict further physical pain on them but their primary motivator was not sexual. The ‘Lust Killers’ had a different subcategory all of their own. Post mortem mutilations were rare with ‘Thrill Killers’ because a dead body could not feed their desire to evoke fear and it could not feel pain. A corpse held no further interest for them at all. It was incapable of exciting them. The murder of Jackie Gibson held all the indicators of a ‘Thrill Killer.’
Because of this, Shay now speculated that our psychotic subject was also suffering from some form of DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder. The difference in methodology, he argued, was too great to attribute to the same personality as the earlier murders.
Roughly ninety per cent of cases of DID, he explained, were a result of childhood abuse and trauma. The splitting off a second personality was a psychological defence mechanism, the new alter ego usually containing all the pain, rage and hatred caused by whatever deep trauma the original personality had suffered and shielding it from any memory of the event. The original ANP, or apparently normal part of the personality, could then continue to function unburdened by the emotional overload. People with DID often suffered from dissociative amnesia, periods of time of which they could recall absolutely nothing, with no sense of self or consciousness.
Shay now hypothesised that our original psychotic subject, the ANP, had committed the first two murders and that a second, different personality had been in control last night. He also speculated on the possibility of the second personality actually feeding the ANP the delusions they were suffering under and coercing it into committing the abductions and murders. Like many mental disorders, there was much yet to be discovered about DID but, he claimed, there was enough accumulated evidence to satisfy him that ‘Alters’ could and did sometimes communicate with each other.
Caitlin finished reading through it and looked over at me. “So let me get this straight. Your cousin now thinks that a sadistic ‘Thrill Killer’ type alter-ego has been feeding a psychotic ego instructions on who to kill and how to do it. Then, when their picture was shown on the news, it got so angry that it took over the body and went looking for one of us to kill.”
“That’s exactly what he seems to be saying, yes.”
“How would all that affect a plea Insanity in court?”
“I’m not sure. There’s still a lot of controversy surrounding the authenticity of patients presenting as DID. It’s certainly one of the most disputed areas of mental illness when it comes to criminal cases. Even if Shay’s right, I doubt it will make any difference. The Defence will most likely base their argument on the fact that their client is psychotic, rather than risk muddying the waters with something less provable. No, the point of most interest in this document is that whole ‘apparently normal’ ANP bit. It doesn’t matter how many egos are in that body. As long as the ANP is in control of it, he probably never does or says anything strange enough in front of other people to give them any suspicion that he’s mentally ill.”
“With the invisible monster hiding within, secretly pulling the strings.” She nodded. “Shay might be right, but I don’t see how any of it helps us. And I’m sorry, but I honestly can’t make myself care about what may have happened to our killer when he was a child. I’m only interested in stopping the thing they became. We put mad, vicious dogs down for a reason, Conall. They rip one person apart and that’s it, game over.”
“We do,” I agreed, staring calmly back at her. I’d meant what I’d said to her earlier, but I wasn’t about to expand on the subject.
Where we saw monsters, doctors saw sick people in need of treatment. Sometimes they decided that they had cured such patients, and even eventually arranged for their release. Sometimes, when they did that, other people paid the price for their mistakes. A recent example of this had occurred in 2017, in Russia. A paranoid schizophrenic adult male was released from a high security psychiatric hospital in Astrakhan, six years after being committed for murder. After his release, he stabbed his niece in the abdomen and decapitated her daughter, a toddler of only eighteen months. Worse, the child’s mother had pleaded for the culprit to be kept in custody because she believed he posed a very real danger.
Here in the UK, murderers sectioned under the Mental Health Act 1983 and held in secure institutions such as Broadmoor and Rampton Hospitals were sometimes conditionally released too, with psychiatric treatment continuing afterwards. When that happened, their anonymity was protected. If one was living next door to you, you wouldn’t be informed. They were also sometimes transferred to less secure institutions instead. Did that make any kind of sense to people like me and Caitlin? No, it really didn’t. As officers of the law, it was our duty to respect and uphold such decisions. As ordinary citizens, we could only deplore them.
People died in custody all the time, over three hundred every year, recently, in the UK. Some of those deaths were tragic, avoidable and undeserved. Others were not.
My phone buzzed, and I checked the caller ID. Darren Mills.
“Yes, Mills?” I said as I answered it, “Have you located Mr McAndrew?”
“We have, Sir. He was at his niece’s house yesterday. She dropped him off at nine thirty last night. She’s here with us now. Once we told her he wasn’t answering his door, she came round with a spare key to let us in.” His tone was enough to tell me what was coming next. “I’m afraid he’s dead, Sir. There’s an empty pill bottle by the bed, and it looks like an overdose, only there’s a small puncture wound to a vein in his neck. Possibly from a needle.”
“Have you called for a SOCO team?”
“We have, Sir, and we’re being careful not to disturb anything.”
“Any sign of forced entry?”
“No, but the living room window isn’t completely closed.”
Hell and damnation! An overdose? Eric McAndrew had been clean again. That puncture mark was very suspect too. What were the odds that the pathologist would find no ingested substances in the stomach but plenty of them in the blood? If my immediate suspicions were correct, it didn’t look like our visit to Old Eric on Thursday had turned out at all well for him. Had our killer struck twice last night? First Eric, then Jackie?
“Alright, hang on there until they’re done please. I want to know what they make of it. We won’t get a report on the pathologist’s findings in a hurry so any ‘guess’ they care to make about cause and time of death will be welcome.” After I’d rung off, I told Caitlin what Mills had said.
“So we got the poor man killed, more than likely,” she said tiredly, rubbing her face.
“Let’s just say there’s a good chance he wouldn’t have been targeted if we’d decided not to do our job, shall we?” I fired off a quick text to Shay and put my phone down to turn to her. “What are we supposed to do, Caitlin? Stop looking? Stop following leads? Sit on our hands doing nothing because we’re scared of provoking him?”
“No. You’re right. We can’t do that. But Christ, Conall! Even with our killer�
��s face in our hands, we’re no closer to finding him than we were last week.”
“We will be,” I told her. “It just might take a little longer than any of us would like.”
We needed a lucky break. Maybe my cousin would produce one or maybe we’d get a fresh call that would lead us straight to our killer. We didn’t get one that day.
Walker and Collins came back empty handed. Neither Debbie nor Sharon remembered seeing that face, and the men working on Dominic’s old construction site didn’t recall him either. They’d left a copy with the duty foreman and had been assured it would be shown to the rest of the crew on their next shift there.
At home, later, long after my assigned escort had driven back to town, I caught up on Shay’s progress. He didn’t have anything for me yet but he’d been busy. He had another four ‘possibles’ from driving licences that had matched new, altered composites and was looking into those now. Another batch was currently running through the DVLA. Brad MacRoberts coding club account was still inactive. Apart from that, he’d also set up filtered alerts on all the major supermarkets’ home delivery databases, watching out for any new accounts being opened in the Inverness area and for unusual orders on existing ones.
“If even ten per cent of the calls the hotline received in response to the televised appeal were genuine, then he’s been going out shopping pretty regularly up until now. He might not want to keep risking that.”
I just nodded approvingly. That was a good idea. I had something else I wanted to talk to Shay about though.
“That camera,” I said, catching his gaze and holding it, “in Jackie’s garden. I saw you stop and stare at it for a good five seconds before you went to dig up the receiver. I don’t suppose you’d care to explain what you were thinking?”
He just shrugged. “Probably exactly what you think I was thinking. Our killer must be wondering how we got hold of that picture of him in Kinmylies on Tuesday night. I don’t believe, for one second, that he thinks the police took that. So maybe someone gave it to you? Someone else who wants him stopped? The way psychoses usually work, he’ll have come up with some ‘rational’ explanation for it by now that matches his existing beliefs.”
Death in the Black Wood Page 21
