Killing the Shadows Page 7

  He pointed to the farthest desk, where two stacks of files leaned against each other at a precarious angle. “I thought you could work over there,” he said. “I’m sorry our accommodation is so poor, but this was the only space available. At least the coffee is drinkable,” he added with a sardonic smile.

  And at least there was a power point nearby, Fiona thought as she squeezed into the tiny gap between the chair and the desk. “Are these the murder files?” she asked.

  Berrocal nodded. “All ready for you.”

  It took her a few hours to plough through dozens of separate reports, stretching her Spanish to the limits of her dictionary and beyond. There had been a couple of occasions when she’d had to concede defeat and ask Berrocal for a translation of passages that baffled her. She had made notes as she’d gone along, working with the database painstakingly evolved by her and one of her PhD students which assigned probabilities to particular features of the two murders. The program then analysed which common features were significant in terms of attributing the crimes to one particular perpetrator. For example, most stranger killings took place after dark; that any two crimes in a series had happened at night was therefore not of much significance when it came to linking them. But it was relatively rare to commit a sexual assault on a dead body with a broken bottle, so the fact that these two crimes exhibited that particular feature was given a much higher significance by the program.

  Most of the original data had come from the FBI, who had been remarkably generous with details of past cases once they had realized she was happy to have the information stripped of personal details like names of victims and perpetrators. Fiona recognized that like most statistical analyses produced by psychologists, her database was at best only a partial snapshot of the whole, but it did give her some valuable insights into the nature of the crimes she was dealing with. Perhaps more importantly, it allowed her to say with some degree of certainty whether individual crimes were part of a series or likely to be the work of separate offenders.

  By the end of her afternoon’s work, she had demonstrated empirically what the police had already decided on the basis of common sense and experience; the two murders were undoubtedly the work of one man. If that had been the only service she could have provided, there wouldn’t have been much point in her making the trip. But she was convinced that by analysing the data she already had, she could point the police towards other crimes the killer might have committed. With access to that information, she might finally be able to construct a useful geographical profile.

  What she needed now was to get out of the police station and let her mind roam free over the nuggets of information she had extracted from the files.

  She had got back to the room to find a note from Kit propped up on the desk. “Gone down to the bar. Meet me there when you get in, and we’ll have dinner.” She’d smiled then and crossed to the window to check out the view. It was strange to think that the beauty spread out before her concealed all the normal range of human ugliness. Somewhere in that honeycomb maze of buildings, a killer was probably going about his business, unsuspected by anyone. Fiona hoped that she could point the police in the right direction, so they could find him before he killed again.

  But that was for later. Fiona turned away from the window and stripped off her clothes, wrinkling her nose at the smell of smoke that lingered in their fibres. A quick shower, then she changed into jeans and a ribbed silk shirt.

  Fiona found Kit at a table in the corner of the bar, hunched over his laptop with a glass of inky red wine to hand and a bowl of olives pushed to one side. She put an arm across his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. “Had a good day?” she asked, settling into the leather chair opposite him.

  He looked up, startled. “Hi. Just let me save this.” He finished what he was doing and turned off the computer. Folding it closed, he grinned at her. “They let you have an evening off?”

  “Sort of. I’ve got to write a report later, but only a short one. It won’t take long. I’m letting it bed down before I commit myself.” A waiter appeared and Fiona ordered a chilled manzanilla. “What have you been up to?”

  Kit looked faintly sheepish. “I went for a wander this afternoon. Just to soak up the ambience, you know? This place, it’s steeped in history. You can practically smell it in the air. Every corner you turn, there’s something to see, something to imagine. Anyway, I got to thinking about the Inquisition, about what it must have been like here back then.”

  Fiona groaned. “Don’t tell me. It gave you the idea for a book.”

  Kit smiled. “It started the wheels turning.”

  “Is that what you were doing on the laptop?”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s way too early to be writing stuff down. I was just doing a bit of polishing on what I’ve been writing this last week or so. Tickling and tidying, the boring bollocks. What about you? What kind of day have you had?”

  The waiter put Fiona’s drink in front of her and she took a sip. “Routine. Going through files by the numbers. Berrocal’s very organized. Very on the ball. You don’t have to explain anything twice to him.”

  “That makes your life a bit easier.”

  “You’re not kidding. The trouble is, there’s not much to go at. Normally, a killer chooses a body dump for reasons that are very personal to him. But because these body dumps have particular historical significance, it complicates things. I’m not sure how much use geographical profiling will be.”

  Kit shrugged. “You can only do your best. They certainly go in for gruesome in these parts. They’ve got this daft little train that takes you through the city and round the ring road on the other side of the river and the commentary is totally bizarre. It’s in Spanish and German and a sort of fractured English, and they tell you all this stuff about the bloody history of the town. They’ve even got this place called the Gorge of the Woman with Her Throat Cut. Can you believe that?”

  Fiona was surprised. “They tell you about that on the tourist trip?”

  He nodded. “I know, it’s not the sort of thing you’d normally boast about, is it?”

  “That’s where one of our murder victims was dumped,” Fiona said slowly. “I was working on the assumption that only locals would be familiar with it.”

  “Well, I can tell you all about it,” Kit said. “This woman shagged one of the guards and let the enemy attack the city, so they cut her throat to make sure she wouldn’t be doing that again in a hurry.”

  “Did you go down to San Juan de los Reyes? The big monastery church?”

  “I walked past it. I’m saving it for tomorrow.”

  “Did you notice the chains on the facade?”

  “It’s hard to miss them. According to the guide book, Fernando and Isabella had them hung up there after the reconquest of Granada. They were used to shackle the Moors’ Christian prisoners. I must say, if that’s typical of Isabella’s idea of decor, I can’t wait to see the inside. Eat your heart out, Home Front,” he added with an ironic grin. “Why do you ask?”

  “That’s where the second body was found. You’ve only been here half a day, and already you know the story behind both body dumps. It makes me wonder if I’m right in what I’m thinking.”

  Kit patted her hand and assumed an expression of mock-patronage. “Never mind, love, you can’t be right all of the time. You leave that to me.”

  Fiona snorted with laughter. “I’m so glad I’ve got you to rely on. Now, are we going to eat dinner, or what?”

  Fiona sipped a glass of brandy and studied the rough ideas she’d sketched out. In the background, the sound of Kit’s fingers tapping the keyboard of his laptop was faintly soothing. Even the mosquito buzz of his Walkman was comforting in its familiarity. He never interfered when she had work to do, something she was eternally grateful for. She had heard too many of her friends complain that if their man wasn’t working, neither were they supposed to be. Kit was always happy to occupy himself with his own work or a book, or to
take himself off to a bar and make new acquaintances. I am convinced that the perpetrator’s primary interest is not sexual satisfaction, (she read.) However, the nature of the sexual mutilation he has performed postmortem is suggestive. I believe it is a way of demonstrating contempt for what he sees as the ‘weakness’ of his victims, which leads me to postulate that his method of contact with his victims was one of physical or sexual appeal. At its most crude, I would suggest that he picked them up, possibly on an earlier occasion, and arranged to meet them on the nights of the murders. He may have baited his approach with the suggestion that his specialist knowledge might be of use to them in their professional lives. It is clear that he does not appear to pose a threat to those he has selected as victims. He knows the kind of places where his potential victims are to be found. This implies considerable local knowledge and suggests that he is a native of Toledo. These were not killings that occurred out of sexual rage because of failure of performance or over arousal but from a different motive entirely.

  So far, so good, she thought. She didn’t think there was much to argue with there. These crimes demonstrate a relatively high level of sophistication and planning. It is therefore unlikely that the perpetrator is new to the world of criminal activity. He is far too comfortable with what he is doing. But if we accept that the motivation behind these murders is not primarily sexual, it therefore follows that it’s unlikely his previous crimes have been sexual in their nature. Given that both crime scenes are significant tourist sites, and that both victims were foreigners, I believe the key to the killer’s motivation is his view of visitors to his city. He sees them not as a benefit but as interlopers who are not to be welcomed. I think it most likely that his past crimes will have targeted either tourists or businesses related to tourism. He most probably began with acts of vandalism against hotels or businesses catering for tourists, such as souvenir shops. This may have escalated into attacks on tourists themselves, such as muggings.

  Fiona sat back and considered. What she was suggesting was by no means a conventional profile of a serial killer, but she had been struck from the first by the unusual nature of the crime scenes. Most killers left their bodies where they killed them or chose carefully selected body dumps that had significance only because they were unlikely to be spotted abandoning the corpse. This killer had taken a high risk with his second victim, so the sites were clearly symbolic for him at a deep level. For once, where the bodies had been found seemed at least as important as the selection of the victims. They weren’t just places that symbolized violence. They would also have meaning for the casual visitor to the city, as Kit’s experience demonstrated.

  She was pleased with the progress she had made. Now it was up to Salvador Berrocal to persuade the local police to give her the data she needed on crimes against property and persons related to tourism. Armed with that information, Fiona would be able to apply her theories of crime linkage to figure out which crimes had common offenders.

  Once she had established which acts were part of series as opposed to isolated events, she would map the relevant scenes of crime on a street plan of the city that had been scanned into her computer. The powerful geographical profiling software loaded on her laptop would apply a complex series of algorithms to the points on the map. It would then chart probable areas where the perpetrator of those crimes might live or work. She could add the murder scenes to the mix, and if they didn’t significantly distort the areas the computer had suggested, she might be able to indicate to Berrocal the area of the city the killer called home.

  Ten years ago, Fiona mused, she’d have been laughed off the platform if she’d dared to suggest that a mixture of psychological profiling, crime linkage and geographical profiling could lead to the capture of a killer. Back then, there simply hadn’t been powerful enough computer programmes to crunch the numbers fast enough, even if anyone had considered this an area worth investigating. The world of criminal investigation had changed faster than anyone could have imagined. At last, technology was outstripping the ability of criminals to keep one step ahead of it. And she was lucky enough to be part of the revolution.

  And in the morning, she could put her skills to the test once more. Working with the police to capture killers was the most exciting thing she had ever done. But she never lost sight of the fact that she was dealing with real lives, not just a series of mathematical events and computer calculations. If what she did couldn’t save lives, it was ultimately meaningless. And so, every case she was involved in became not only a professional challenge. It was nothing less than a measure of herself.

  TEN

  Fiona walked into the smoky office just after eleven. Berrocal and his two detectives were all deep in telephone conversations, barely looking up at her arrival. She’d faxed her report to Berrocal at eight, knowing he’d need some time to assemble the material she needed. She’d used the three hours to have a leisurely breakfast in bed with Kit then to accompany him to see the definitive El Greco, the Burial of the Count of Orgaz, displayed in splendid isolation in an annex to the church of San Tomas. It had been a better start to the day than reading police files.

  The stacks of folders on her desk looked the same as they had the day before. She waited for Berrocal to replace the receiver, then spoke. “Hi. Are the reports on the vandalism and assaults not here yet?”

  Berrocal nodded. “That’s them on your desk. Unsolved are on the left, the solved on the right. These are from the last twelve months.”

  “Quick work.”

  He shrugged. “They knew I’d be on their back till they came up with what you asked for. They like a quiet life. Can anyone help you with this, or is it something you must do yourself?”

  “Unfortunately, I need to analyse the data myself,” Fiona told him. “What about a map of the city?”

  Berrocal raised a finger, admonishing himself. “I have them here.” He turned to the remaining empty desk and raked around in the top drawer, coming up with a small tourist map and a larger, more detailed street map. “I wasn’t certain which one would meet your needs best,” he added, handing them to her.

  “I don’t suppose they’ve got a scanner here?” Fiona asked without hope.

  Berrocal shrugged. “There must be one somewhere.”

  “I need the detailed map scanned in as a GIF file,” she said, opening her laptop case and fishing out a blank floppy. “If you can have it put on the floppy, I can transfer it to my system.”

  He nodded, turning to the nearer of the two detectives. He snapped something in fast Spanish. The detective quickly ended his call and gave his boss a quizzical look. Berrocal thrust the map and the floppy at him and rattled off a string of short sharp sentences. The detective gave Fiona a radiant smile and made for the door. Clearly even being a gopher for the English consultant was preferable to being cooped up in this box. “E café con leche para dos,” Berrocal added with a wicked grin at the disappearing back.

  “Thanks,” Fiona said, reaching for the first file. She had to devise a checklist of significant factors; time of the offence, date of the offence, what form the vandalism had taken, and a dozen other particulars. Then she had painstakingly to enter the details. Where there was a known offender, she also had to input every piece of information relevant to his history and his previous crimes. There were forty-seven files to work through and the fact that everything was in Spanish slowed things down even further. It made for a long day, punctuated by regular cartons of coffee and snacks that she couldn’t have itemized five minutes after she’d eaten them, so intense was her concentration.

  Finally, she sat back and waited while the computer sorted the data and offered up the results of its calculations. Unsurprisingly, most of the incidents came up as discrete events. But among those, there were three groupings of crime reports that each appeared likely to have the same perpetrator. The first was a series of attacks on souvenir shops. In every case, the crimes had taken place between two and three in the morning on weekdays. The fir
st three involved paint being thrown across the windows. But then there had been an escalation. Four further attacks had taken place where the windows had been smashed and paint thrown on to the shops’ stock. All the crimes were from the unsolved pile.

  A second series featured graffiti daubed on the walls of restaurants and hotels. But here, the slogans were political right-wing rants about Spain for the Spanish, and the banishment of immigrants. Fiona immediately discounted these as the work of her killer.

  A third series emerged from the unsolved pile. Within the past four months, three tourists had been attacked on their way back to their hotels in the early hours of the morning. Berrocal had already told her that Toledo was, by Spanish standards, an early-to-bed city, with most of the cafes and restaurants closed by eleven. But there were a few late-night bars, and the victims had all been in one or other of those. They had been walking back to their hotels alone when a masked man had jumped out from the mouth of an alley and attacked them. There had been no demand for money, just a silent and savage assault lasting a few minutes before their assailant ran off into the maze of narrow passages nearby.

  Fiona gave a deep sigh of satisfaction. When crime linkage worked well, it was like a small miracle unfolding before her. Now she could enter the locations of the two significant series into her geographic profiling software and see what emerged.

  Kit had watched Fiona walk up the hill from San Tomas, admiring her smooth stride and the way the cut of her trousers gave emphasis to the gentle swell of her hips. I am a lucky bastard, he congratulated himself, luxuriating briefly in the memory of their leisurely morning in bed. Even if she did his head in sometimes with her perpetual need to analyse and dissect everything and everyone who crossed her path, he wouldn’t have swapped her for any woman he’d ever met. One of the things he loved about her was her dedication to the job she did. But even when she was possessed by a case, she never lost sight of the importance of their relationship.