The Murder Code

by Mosby, Steve

  ‘Somewhere he wouldn’t be disturbed.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Somewhere he’d be disturbed just often enough.’

  Laura was silent. It was a horrible idea, of course, but it felt right. I looked up and down the path again. Yes. I was sure of it. Our guy had waited here during the early hours of the morning and killed people as they came along. Ambushed them—struck out at random. Just allowed … what, fate? Fate to choose his victims for him.

  I remembered what Laura had said yesterday.

  ‘It could have been anyone,’ I said.

  Laura glanced overhead.

  ‘No helicopters,’ she said. ‘Won’t be long, though. We need to get the tents up.’

  I nodded absently. Still thinking.

  ‘That’s why they’re arranged the way they are,’ I said. ‘He’s not showing off to us, or at least that’s not all he’s doing. He just put the bodies in there to keep them off the path. And he lined them up the best way to leave space for the next.’

  ‘Christ,’ Laura said.

  I stared at the bodies, neatly filling the alcove.

  ‘And maybe that,’ I said, ‘is the only reason he stopped at three.’

  Thirteen

  WE HELD THE EARLY-AFTERNOON briefing in the largest operation room on the first floor of the department. There were whiteboards and projectors, twenty desks, room for rows of seats. Laura and I had also moved down there. Young had relieved us of extraneous cases; we would work from desks in here for the foreseeable future. He had also granted us ten extra sergeants, and them as many officers from the grunt pool as they wanted. As of today, this case was the department’s number-one priority.

  Because we had a serial killer.

  We waited for the room to settle, and then Laura led the briefing.

  ‘As of today,’ she told the assembled officers, holding out a splayed hand, ‘we are working on the assumption that we have five victims. Vicki Gibson and Derek Evans were killed two nights ago.’

  She gestured at one of the whiteboards, where photographs were pinned along the top. We had a former photo of Vicki Gibson, but not Evans. The crime-scene photos for both were pinned below, standing out stark red against the white background.

  ‘Details are below the photos, and on the information we’ve circulated, which you’ll all be familiar with by now.’

  I watched the room as she spoke. Many of the officers were making notes. That was good: I wanted everyone one hundred per cent intent, everyone alert. I also wanted ideas. I still had the same feeling I’d had back on the waste ground. A kind of dazed, sleepy feeling, but somehow also on edge. As though at some point I was going to start shaking slightly.

  ‘As you’ll be aware,’ Laura said, ‘this morning three further victims were discovered on waste ground beside the Garth estate. The first is believed to be Sandra Peacock, a working girl from the estate. The second is John Kramer, a door supervisor from the Foxton area; we’ll come back to him in a moment. The third victim is yet to be identified.’

  She moved to the projector and then clicked through a series of photographs: hideous shots from the crime scene. I kept my expression implacable, but heard a few half-suppressed gasps from around the room. For many of them, this was their first encounter with the extent of the violence close up. The victims’ heads had almost literally been smashed to pieces.

  ‘Injuries are consistent with those inflicted on Gibson and Evans. The likely weapon is a standard hand-held hammer. As you can see, the victims have been struck so many times that their features have been obliterated.’

  She flicked through most of the photos quickly, but paused on the final one, which showed the carrier bag believed to have belonged to John Kramer. Inside, hidden beneath tangles of tatty old clothes, we had discovered a machete, a hammer, ammonia and a ski mask.

  ‘As of this moment,’ Laura said, ‘we have no explanation for these items being in John Kramer’s possession. One of you will be following that up, but in the meantime, it’s important we separate them out. None of the weapons were used in this attack. As far as we can tell, the killer didn’t even look beneath the clothes.’

  A hand shot up: a male officer at the front.

  ‘Shout out,’ Laura told him. ‘This isn’t a schoolroom.’

  ‘The blood on the clothes?’

  ‘Yes. As you can see, there is a substantial amount of blood on the clothes Kramer brought with him in the bag. We believe—though again, this has yet to be confirmed—that the blood belongs to one or more of the victims. We believe the killer used the clothes to clean his own weapon following the murders.’

  The same officer: ‘You say he didn’t look in the bag. So no robbery at all?’

  ‘Nope. Not only does robbery not appear to be our killer’s motive, he doesn’t seem to even consider it. As far as we can tell, nothing has been taken from any of the scenes. By that, I mean we’ve uncovered several valuables in addition to the weapons believed to belong to John Kramer.’

  ‘Do we have any motive at all?’ A different officer—a female sergeant.

  ‘Not yet. Detective Hicks may have more to say about that, but so far there is no obvious connection between any of the victims. No real similarities in their profiles. What’s most important is the locations of the murders.’

  Laura explained our working theory that the killer had chosen isolated locations rather than specific victims. She didn’t need to spell out the implications of that—that our man didn’t want to kill anyone in particular; he just wanted to kill, and it didn’t seem to matter to him who his victims were.

  So what are you getting out of it? I wondered.

  Laura said, ‘If you don’t know the Garth estate, it’s in the north-west of the city, approximately eight miles from the grids, the location of the first incident. Here.’

  This time she gestured towards the enormous map of the entire city that was stuck to another of the whiteboards. We had a number of locations pinned, but most obvious were the three red markers over the murder sites we’d found.

  ‘Normally at this point, with five victims, we’d have five big red crosses and be able to think about triangulating a working area that our killer is operating in. As things stand, as you can see, we have three points, two of them very close together. Which isn’t helpful.’

  An understatement, and the people in the room knew it. Our killer had attacked men and women, across a range of ages and social classes, at three separate locations. With no obvious connection between the victims, location was key—and yet there was no way of looking at the map and having the slightest idea where he might strike next.

  Only that, most likely, he would.

  Laura glanced over at me, and I took that as my cue. I slid off the desk I’d been perched on and stood up to address the room.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What we are dealing with here is a serial killer. And actually, it’s worse than that. Because we’re also dealing with a mass murderer. You all know the difference, right?’

  A few of them nodded. It was a small distinction, but an important one. Serial killers usually take individual victims—at most, families—over the course of a number of separate incidents, whereas mass murderers kill multiple victims at a single time. It’s important because the two tend to have very different psychologies underlying them. Serial killers, for example, are almost always sexually motivated, and they usually keep killing, gradually escalating their attacks until they get caught or life intervenes in some way. Mass murderers—school shooters, for example—generally combust in a single incident, often taking their own lives to avoid an inevitable capture.

  Serial killers have types. In most cases, there is something about the victim that makes the act meaningful for the killer. Multiple murderers open fire indiscriminately, but don’t take as much care to get away. One is slow-burning. One is a flare.

  I said, ‘What we’re dealing with here appears to have elements of both. There have been similar instances in the past�
��spree killers, to an extent—but I’ve never heard of someone doing this. Our perp displays the kind of pathology and violence consistent with a psychologically malformed serial killer. But he kills multiple, apparently unconnected victims in bursts.’

  I let that one sink in around the room, ignoring the thought that pressed inside my head.

  And that doesn’t make any sense.

  After an uncomfortable couple of seconds, the female officer who’d spoken before spoke again.

  ‘So how can we get this guy?’

  I nodded. It was an entirely reasonable question to which I didn’t, as of right now, have an answer.

  ‘We’ve got a number of strategies to work with. We’ve already looked at door-to-doors in the grids, and we got nothing from them. Those are ongoing in the Garth area as well. Perhaps we’ll get something from there instead. But even if we don’t, let’s not lose sight of the fact he picked these places for a reason. He knew they were isolated enough for his purposes. Even if they seem unrelated, they aren’t.’

  It was something small to cling to. The killer had some connection, however oblique, to the places he’d chosen so far. If he’d had a GPS device fitted that recorded his every movement, the data would show that at some point in the past he had been to those places for some reason. His movements formed an unbroken ribbon through history, and at some point that ribbon had touched the grids and the Garth estate. For now, those might be the only two pieces of the ribbon we could see, but as the investigation progressed, we would start to fill in more. We would begin to get a clearer picture of the man that ribbon represented.

  That was the hope, anyway.

  ‘Aside from that,’ I said, ‘we’ll have to see what the forensics turn up. We also need to identify the third victim. My hunch is that asking around the estate, giving some information on her clothing, will get us an ID before too long. Chances are she’s local.’

  A third officer, a man, said, ‘Interviewing all the families?’

  ‘And friends and associates. Like Detective Fellowes said, everything so far points to these victims being randomly targeted. But that isn’t necessarily the case. Perhaps—and we’re stretching here—perhaps last night he only intended to kill the first woman, and the other two just happened on the scene and he felt he had to take care of them too. Or perhaps there is some connection between all the victims.’

  There were a few blank looks at that. Understandably—but again, it was possible. Regardless, as unlikely as it might be, it was a more comfortable proposition than the alternative: that the killer had casually waited there all night with bodies cooling beside him in the bushes. Squeezing as much fun as he could from his night’s work.

  Back to earth, Hicks.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You’ve all got the files. If you haven’t familiarised yourselves, then do. In the meantime, let’s run through tasks and who’s doing what.’

  But that feeling remained with me as I handed out the assignments: the sensation that these weren’t normal murders. That even though they had to fit into my architecture of crime, somehow they did not. That there was something … different about them. Something I didn’t want to believe was possible.

  Something weird.

  Something evil.

  Half an hour later, most of the sergeants had dispersed to deal with the jobs they’d been allocated. A couple remained, stationed at desks on the far side of the room, co-ordinating their actions from here for the moment.

  I’d worked major operations before, as a sergeant, and more recently as a detective, and it’s always the same. A large, echoing room that officers drift in and out of, picking up actions or dropping off reports. Phones ringing constantly. People talking quietly behind small partitions. Despite the nature of the underlying investigation, a major incident room often has a weirdly positive feel to it. It’s the energy; it rubs off. Everyone is working hard towards the same end, generally making some progress. As a team, even a fragmented one, you drive each other onwards.

  Laura and I worked quietly. At three o’clock, an officer dropped off the afternoon post: he had bundles of mail tied with string in a battered green trolley. There were several envelopes for me—notifications of upcoming court appearances for minor crimes—and then one letter that caught my eye.

  Addressed by hand. A vaguely childish script, written in blue ink.

  Even so, I ripped it open without really thinking. It was only as I unfolded the single sheet of A4 inside that I realised what I was looking at and placed the torn envelope carefully to one side.

  ‘Laura,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ She shoved her chair back and walked round to stand beside me. ‘Oh. Shit, Hicks.’

  It was a typed letter, beginning: Dear Detective.

  And beside that, in the same blue fountain pen, the same handwriting, the sender had added the word Hicks.

  Fourteen

  DEAR DETECTIVE HICKS

  I don’t know who you are yet. And at the time of writing this letter, you don’t know who I am either. You have no idea of my existence and no inkling of what I am about to do. The truth is, I still don’t know quite when it will begin myself. That is why it’s going to work. That is why you’ll never catch me.

  Randomness has fascinated me since I was a child, right from the moment my father brought home the simple computer on which I first learned to program and code. I was only five or six years old at the time, but already I understood the machine and how it worked: that it was just an elaborate calculator, one that would perform whatever operation I told it to and nothing more. Inside its cheap plastic shell, one thing led to the next in a blind, obedient process. Every single output was created entirely by the inputs. It followed orders.

  Except that one of the first commands I learned was to generate a random number. How could that be?

  Even as a child, I understood it had to be an illusion. As I grew older, my father taught me, and I made further studies of my own: of sequences and codes. I learned how computers use pseudo-random number generators to hide their logical patterns. A unique seed number, derived from the exact date and time, is fed through a complicated equation to produce a new number that, while derived solely from the first, appears unconnected to an untrained eye. That new number, fed back in, creates a third.

  And so on.

  In such a way, a string of apparently random numbers is generated. If you know the pattern and any single number, you know the whole sequence, but for most purposes, the illusion of randomness is sufficient.

  That wouldn’t be good enough for you, would it?

  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the problem: how to generate a code even you wont be able to crack. A string for which the underlying pattern cannot possibly be discerned. That is what I have spent months working on. That is what I believe I have achieved. And it is finally time to test it. On you.

  As I write this, I am still waiting for the right moment to begin. The right initial seed. I do not know where or when it will be. I do not know who. That is why it will work: because I do not know yet who will die first.

  But I do know it will be soon.

  Fifteen

  ‘SO,’ YOUNG SAID. ‘THIS letter.’

  Laura and I were sitting across from him in his fifth-floor office. We might have relocated to the main operations room downstairs, but Young certainly hadn’t. I didn’t like being taken away from the heart of the investigation, even momentarily, but the flip side was it at least enabled us to run our own ship. Young was big on that. While he needed and wanted to know of every development, he wasn’t bothered about being seen to be. For all his hardass reputation, he was a good boss.

  The letter was the first item on the agenda.

  Laura said, ‘I think Hicks wrote it, sir.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ I said.

  ‘Seriously, sir—his prints will be all over it.’

  I leaned forward. ‘As I’ve said a hundred times, I could hardly have discovered this potential crim
e scene without contaminating it, could I?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Give it up, you two.’ Young sniffed. ‘Other prints?’

  ‘Ongoing, sir.’ I leaned back. ‘But so far we’ve got standard cheap eighty-weight paper that appears to have been untouched by human hands. Other than my own. There’s a load on the envelope, but that’s to be expected. They’re being processed now anyway.’

  He nodded. ‘Okay. On a practical level, what else?’

  There are plenty of traps people can fall into when sending things to the police. Dropping a letter into a postbox might feel like an anonymous, unobserved act, but there are hundreds of potential mistakes we can look into.

  We caught a blackmailer once who included a printout of a Streetview map to show where he wanted the money dropped. In terms of prints and DNA it was totally clean, and he was probably congratulating himself right up to the moment we knocked on his door. How did we find him? Because to print the map you had to access it online, and his was the only ISP address to look at that particular page in years. People rarely think of everything.

  ‘Prints aside,’ Laura said, ‘the envelope was sticker-sealed, so we won’t get DNA from that. We’ve already followed up the postmarks though.’

  That was normally one of our best chances: that it was possible to trace the path of the letter back through time and space. We already knew the letter box it had been posted in, and the collection batch. That gave us a window of time in which our man had definitely been at a specific location—another cross on the map, albeit a much more tentative one this time.

  ‘It’s a box on Main Street, old town,’ Laura said. ‘CCTV only gives an oblique view. It’s probably not good enough for any kind of pre-arrest identification. Maybe useful afterwards, though.’

  Young frowned again—more of a scowl this time. I felt the same way. After an arrest was all well and good. What we needed, more than anything else right now, was something to help us find the guy in the first place.