by James Carol
Like a kid in his early twenties with the surname Winter ending up with white hair. When you get down to it, as far as cosmic flukes go, it’s really not that impressive. Impressive is when two high-school sweethearts separated by circumstance and oceans and half a century of living bump into each other on vacation in some bizarre out-of-the-way corner of the globe, and get to pick things up right where they left off all those years ago.
I ordered the full English breakfast from room service because God only knew when I’d get to eat again. The first coffee washed down my breakfast, the second came out onto the balcony with me. With the city waking up below me, I lit a cigarette and took a long drag. The sky was a bright, sharp blue that reminded me of the winter mornings back in Virginia. The lack of cloud cover meant it felt even colder than yesterday, the mercury struggling to stay in the twenties. My morning fix of caffeine and nicotine kickstarted my system, and by the time I got back inside I was good to go.
Hatcher had emailed through a folder that contained the before and after pictures of the victims. I started with Patricia Maynard’s photos since she was the victim I knew best. The before picture was fairly typical in that it showed Patricia Maynard caught in a happy moment. These photos were supplied by the family and it was only natural that they would want their loved ones remembered with a rose-tinted glow. The truth was that Patricia Maynard was human. She had good days and bad days. Sometimes she was happy, sometimes she was sad, and sometimes she was angry. There were times she was a joy to be with, and times when she was a complete pain in the ass. The rollercoaster of emotions and moods of a normal life, in other words.
This photo froze her in a moment when she was at her best. It was taken in a restaurant and she was smiling as though she didn’t have a care. There was no indication that she was going to end up colliding head-on with her worst nightmare, and that her life would effectively be over.
The photograph had been cropped to show Patricia Maynard’s face, making it difficult to tell what the occasion was. Maybe it was her birthday, maybe it was someone else’s birthday. It had been a celebration of some sort. You didn’t take photographs in a restaurant unless there was a reason you wanted to remember the occasion.
Her hair was brunette, her eyes brown, and she was attractive. Not stop-the-traffic gorgeous like Templeton, but she would definitely make a man look twice. She was in good shape, healthy and a good weight, and she was wearing a blouse with the top two buttons undone to show off a glimpse of her cleavage and the tiniest tease of lace. Patricia Maynard had been a happy, confident, attractive woman who’d had her whole life ahead of her.
The after photo had been taken by a police photographer and there was nothing rose-tinted about it whatsoever. This photograph was stark and brutal, and there wasn’t a hint of the confident, attractive woman Patricia Maynard had once been. Her eyes were puffy and red and shut tight, like she’d gone fifteen rounds in a boxing ring. The slackness in her face made me think of stroke victims.
I went through the before and after photographs for the other three victims, the rose-tinted family shots and the cold, stark police shots. Sarah Flight, Margaret Smith, Caroline Brant. I pulled up the four after shots and arranged them in two neat rows. Sarah Flight and Margaret Smith were on the top row, Caroline Brant and Patricia Maynard were on the bottom. A prickle of excitement made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Laid out like that with their bald heads and their puffy boxer eyes, they could have been one person.
I opened a new screen and pulled up the before photos and laid them out in the same configuration as the after photos. I saw the resemblance immediately. I’d missed it earlier because two of the victims had dyed their hair. Hatcher answered his phone on the second ring.
‘I’ve sent a car,’ he said. ‘It’ll be there in a few minutes.’
‘That’s great. I need the car, but I’m not coming in. Not this morning, anyway.’
‘What about the profile?’
‘I need to do some more work on it.’
‘What the hell are you talking about, Winter? You said it would be ready by this morning.’
‘Shut up and listen a second. I don’t have a profile for the unsub but I do have a profile for the next victim. Have you got a pen?’
There was a rustle of paper and plastic on the other end of the line, then Hatcher was back. ‘Okay, fire away.’
11
‘You’re looking for a woman aged twenty-five to thirty-five.’ I kept it slow so Hatcher’s pen could keep up. ‘She’s going to be married, but there will be problems in the marriage. The husband will have had an affair. Possibly multiple affairs.’
‘I don’t know if you can make that assumption, Winter. The Flights’ marriage was sound. Granted there were problems in the other victims’ marriages, but the Flights were fine.’
‘Were they?’
‘We checked it out. They were as happy as Romeo and Juliet.’
‘Not the best example,’ I said.
‘My people are good. If there had been anything going on they would have found it.’
‘And you’re prepared to put your money where your mouth is?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Let’s say twenty pounds. No, let’s make it interesting. How about fifty?’
‘That isn’t exactly ethical,’ said Hatcher.
‘Firstly, you haven’t said no. And secondly, that’s loser talk.’
‘Fine, I’ll be happy to take your money.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘The victim will be a brunette, brown eyes, and she’ll be attractive, too. Bear in mind that her hair might be dyed, so don’t rule out other colours. Caroline Brant and Margaret Smith both dyed their hair. What you’re looking for is a natural brunette. She’ll be a career woman, educated to university level. This is a high-risk target for our unsub.’
‘Why take that risk?’ Hatcher asked. ‘If this guy’s whole game is to make these women suffer, why not kidnap a prostitute or a junkie?’
‘Because that’s not his whole game. These women represent someone significant to him. His ex-wife, would be my initial guess. Whoever the real target is, she’s the one he really wants to hurt, but he doesn’t have the courage to do that yet. He’s scared of her. Absolutely terrified. That makes him angry, and he takes that anger out on his victims.’
‘So, he’s just practising with these other women, working up the courage to go after his ex.’
‘Pretty much,’ I agreed. ‘You need to get your people to look at every missing person report for the last three days. All of them. I’m particularly interested in anyone reported missing over the last twenty-four hours. If I’m right about the way this unsub is escalating then that’s where we’ll find our next victim.’
‘So you think he’s already snatched someone?’
‘Without a doubt.’
‘What sort of area are we looking at?’
‘Everything north of the Thames.’
Hatcher took a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line, a reaction that was perfectly understandable since I’d just narrowed the search down to an area of hundreds of square miles and a population in the millions.
‘It gets worse,’ I added. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he starts targeting victims outside of London. That stunt with the car park security light in St Albans shows he’s looking for ways to mislead us. From here on we need to assume he’ll send us on a wild goose chase at every opportunity. That said, let’s start with the area inside the M25 first. If we don’t get any hits there we’ll widen the search to take in the Home Counties.’
‘I’ll get right on to it,’ said Hatcher.
‘I’m going to need to see photographs ASAP. Send them to my cellphone.’
‘No problem. So when can I expect a full profile?’
‘I’ll have something for you by the end of the day.’
I hung up, put my coat on, stuffed my cigarettes and Zippo into a pocket, then headed downstairs. An unmarked BMW w
as waiting outside and I had to smile when I saw the driver. I stepped from the Cosmopolitan’s revolving door and walked over to the car.
‘Morning, Templeton.’
‘Morning, Winter.’
Templeton was leaning against the BMW dressed in a thick padded coat. Her jeans were so tight they clung to her legs like a second skin, and her blonde hair was scraped back in a ponytail. If anything, the daylight made her eyes appear even more spectacular. The way she was leaning on the car, she could have been in an advert.
‘So you drew the short straw again,’ I said.
‘Believe it or not, I volunteered for this. I’m interested in seeing you work first-hand.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘You should be. Usually, I’d rather pull out my own wisdom teeth than play babysitter.’
We got into the car and buckled up. A rock channel kicked in when the key was turned, classic Aerosmith pumping from the speakers. Templeton leant over the dash and turned the volume down. The engine had heated up during the drive from New Scotland Yard and the heater was working overtime to keep the chill out.
‘You said babysitter rather than taxi driver,’ I said. ‘That means you’ve spoken to Hatcher.’
Templeton nodded. ‘He called five minutes ago. He said you hadn’t done the profile yet. He sounded pretty pissed off about it.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘He told me to keep an eye on you and report back on everything you get up to.’
‘Will you?’
‘That depends on what you get up to. So where do you want to go?’
‘Enfield. I want to visit the first victim, Sarah Flight.’
We turned right out of the Cosmopolitan’s driveway and I flashed my cigarette pack at Templeton.
‘Fine with me, so long as you’re sharing,’ she said.
I lit two cigarettes and passed one to Templeton. The traffic was slow and sticky. Almost as bad as New York traffic, but nowhere near as bad as LA traffic. We drove in silence, Templeton concentrating on driving while I concentrated on the case. It was a comfortable silence, companionable, there was nothing forced about it.
I finished my cigarette and pitched the butt out of the window, hit a button on my door and the window buzzed shut. Thirty seconds later, Templeton followed suit. The buildings got smaller and greyer and bleaker the further north we drove. The winter sunshine made the architecture look better than it had yesterday, but not by much. The radio played a steady stream of classics. Hendrix, the Eagles, Led Zeppelin. Great tunes from a long-ago time.
‘So what was he like?’
I’d heard that question plenty of times so I didn’t need to ask who Templeton was referring to. Usually people waited until they knew me better, but I wasn’t surprised she’d asked. She didn’t strike me as someone who would tiptoe around a subject.
‘He was completely plausible,’ I said. ‘A pillar of the community. He taught math at college and by all accounts he was popular with his colleagues. The kids liked him, too. He was outgoing and inspiring, your typical eccentric teacher. He had one of those brains that never switches off. While he was at San Quentin numerous attempts were made to measure his IQ but he just used them as an excuse to mess with the shrinks. All any of them could say for certain was that he’d easily qualify for Mensa.’
‘You didn’t suspect anything?’
‘If you mean, did I suspect that my father was a serial killer, then, no, I didn’t.’
‘But there was something not quite right about him, wasn’t there?’
I remembered a barbecue back when I was eight or nine, a couple of years before the FBI swooped in and arrested my father and my world turned upside down. The men were all gathered around the barbecue, and my father was in the middle of them. He was wearing a cook’s apron, a beer in one hand, a set of tongs in the other. The beer had flowed freely all afternoon and everyone was laughing and joking and having a wonderful time. My father was laughing and joking right along with them. Except there was something a little too forced about his laughter. What I remembered most was that my father’s laugh didn’t quite reach his eyes.
‘In hindsight, the signs were there,’ I said. ‘I like to think if I met him now I would see straight through him. But I was just a kid. I was eleven when the FBI arrested him. He murdered his first victim before I was born. At home he swung between being distant and being controlling, but he was no worse than my friends’ fathers. In fact, he was better than most of them. Of course, all my buddies thought he was great, because that was the face he showed them.’
‘Why do I feel like I’m only being given the edited highlights?’
‘Because you are.’
‘Look,’ said Templeton, ‘if you don’t want to talk about this, that’s fine. I understand.’
‘It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it, it’s just that I don’t really know what to say. If he was an unsub I could give you a complete profile, chapter and verse. But he was my father. I’m just too close to offer any sort of objectivity.’
‘You blame yourself, don’t you? You think you could have done something to save those girls.’
‘And you sound like the shrink back at Quantico.’
‘You’re dodging my question.’
‘Of course I am. We’ve only just met. Let’s save the heavy stuff for when we know each other better.’
I tapped another cigarette from my pack and offered one to Templeton. She declined with a shake of the head. A shaft of sunlight shone through the driver window and caught her just right. This was my first opportunity to study her profile up close. The view was every bit as impressive as the front view. She had great bone structure, a cute nose, high Scandinavian cheekbones.
She must have felt me staring because she glanced over and gave me a look. Front-on, her face had that perfect symmetry the camera loved. Break it down to a bunch of numbers and it would no doubt follow the Golden Ratio, 1:1.618, a ratio that had fascinated artists and mathematicians for the last two and a half thousand years. Evidence of the Golden Ratio could be found throughout nature, and it could be found in the driver’s seat of the BMW.
I wondered why Templeton had opted for a breadline cop’s salary when she could have earned a fortune trading off her looks. Following in Daddy’s footsteps was a plausible explanation, but my gut feeling was that I was also getting the edited highlights. I cracked open my window and lit the cigarette. A Stones tune came on the radio and Templeton cranked up the volume. She was lost in the song, head bobbing in time with the beat, lips following the lyric word for word. I took another drag on my cigarette then went back to thinking about the case.
12
Rachel’s eyes sprang open but all she saw was a darkness that was so dense it consumed her. There was no light whatsoever, not so much as a single stray shaft sneaking through a window or around a door. Her heart was hammering as though it was about to burst through her chest and her breath came in short, sharp gasps, each one edging her closer to a full-blown panic attack. The dark took each breath and bounced it back, amplifying the sound.
Her mattress was so thin she could feel the cold, hard floor beneath her. The smell of bleach scratched at her nose and the back of her throat. Everything came flooding back at once. She saw herself sat in the front seat of the Porsche, grinning like she’d won the lottery. She saw the shiny steel glint of the needle.
Rachel tried to stand and a wave of nausea washed through her. She vomited, but managed to tip forward at the last second so most of it hit the floor rather than her clothes or the mattress. The smell of last night’s red wine and stomach acid made her throw up again. She kept on gagging and vomiting until all that came up was bile. Rachel wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her head ached, her palms were clammy, and she felt shivery and shaky, like she was suffering from flu.
She slumped back onto the mattress and tried to control her breathing. Panic pulled at her and she forced herself back from the edge. Slowly.
Gradually. She took a couple of deep breaths and the acidic stink of vomit stung her nose. She gagged, and would have been sick again if there had been anything left in her stomach. She coughed a couple of times and wiped her mouth, took another deep breath and told herself to get it together. Her breathing steadied.
Rachel waved a hand through the dark until she found a tiled wall. The tiles were smooth and cool beneath her hands, square like bathroom tiles, each side roughly fifteen centimetres long. Rachel used the wall to stand, little by little, moving slowly. Her head spun but her legs seemed to hold up okay.
The floor tiles were larger than the wall tiles, closer to a metre square, cold and glossy beneath her naked feet. She moved around tentatively, trying to get a sense of her surroundings. There was a door in the third wall she came to. It felt solid. Her hands slid over the painted surface until she found the handle. She tried it. Locked. Her heart started racing again and this time the panic got hold. A whooshing sound filled her ears and she had a sense of falling.
Then nothing.
When she opened her eyes everything was still pitch black. The floor was a cold crush against her back, and her limbs felt stiff and awkward. A bruise was growing on the side of her head from where she had hit the ground. She guessed she’d been out for a while, but couldn’t say how long. Rachel got unsteadily to her feet and followed the wall back to the mattress. There were no more doors.
She slid down the wall and pressed herself into the corner, hugged her knees in tight and turned herself into a ball. She barely noticed the tears streaming down her face. This situation was as messed up as it got. She was going to die. She was certain of it. That wasn’t what scared her the most, though. What terrified her more than anything was the fact that she was still alive.
She’d seen the way Adam’s smile changed last night. One second it had been friendly and full of humour. I’m going to be your best friend, that smile had promised. I’m going to take you away from your sorry excuse for a life and transport you into the sort of life you always dreamt of, the sort of life you always felt you deserved. In a beat his smile had changed to that predator’s smile. Rachel’s stomach tightened and she thought she was going to be sick again. Her legs and arms turned to water and the tears flowed freely down her cheeks. She wondered if Jamie had called the police yet. That thought was followed swiftly by another, one that brought a fresh wave of tears.
