The Likeness

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Either he’s local or he’s spent an awful lot of time around Glenskehy, one way or another. He’s very comfortable in the area. He hung around for ages after the stabbing; killers who’re off their turf tend to get uneasy and split as fast as they can. And going by the maps, the place is a maze, but he managed to find her-in the dead of night, with no street lamps-after she got away from him.”

For some reason this was harder than usual. I had analyzed the living bejasus out of every fact we had, gone back over every textbook, but I couldn’t make the killer materialize. Every time I reached out for him, he streamed between my fingers like smoke and slid away over the horizon, left me staring at no silhouette except Lexie’s. I tried to tell myself profiling is like any other skill, doing a backflip, riding a bike: get out of practice and your instinct goes rusty; that doesn’t have to mean it’s gone for good.

I found my cigarettes-I think better if I have something to do with my hands. “He knows Glenskehy, all right, and he almost definitely knew our girl. For one thing, we’ve got the positioning of the body: her face was turned away, towards the wall. Any kind of focus on the victim’s face-covering it, disfiguring it, turning it away-usually means it’s personal; the killer and the victim knew each other.”

“Or,” Frank said, swinging his legs up onto the sofa and balancing his mug on his stomach, “it’s pure coincidence: that’s just the way she landed when he put her down.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But we’ve also got the fact that he found her. That cottage is well off the lane; in the dark, you wouldn’t even know it was there unless you were looking for it specifically. The time lag says he wasn’t exactly hot on her trail, so I doubt he actually saw her go in there, and once she was sitting down the wall would hide her from the road. Unless she had her torch on and our guy spotted the light-and why would you switch on a torch if you were trying to hide from a homicidal maniac?-then he had to have a reason for checking there. I think he knew she liked the cottage.”

“None of that says she knew him,” Frank said. “Just that he knew her. If he’d been stalking her for a while, say, he could feel like there was a personal connection, and he’d have a good handle on her habits.”

I shook my head. “I’m not completely ruling out a stalker, but if that’s what we’re dealing with, he was at least an acquaintance of hers. She was stabbed from the front, remember. She wasn’t running away, and she wasn’t jumped from behind; they were face to face, she knew he was there, they could well have been talking for a while. And she didn’t have any defensive wounds. To me, that says she wasn’t on guard. This guy was up close and she was at ease with him, right up until the second he stabbed her. Me, I wouldn’t be all that relaxed with a complete stranger who showed up at that hour in the middle of nowhere.”

“All of which will be a lot more use,” Frank said, “just as soon as we have a clue who this girl knew, exactly.”

“Anything else I can look for?” Sam asked, ignoring him-I could see the effort. “Would you say he’s got a record?”

“He probably has some kind of criminal experience,” I said. “He did a damn good job of cleaning up after himself. There’s a good chance he’s never got caught, if he’s this careful, but maybe he learned the hard way. If you’re going through files, you could try looking for stuff like car theft, burglary, arson-something that would take cleanup skills but wouldn’t involve any direct contact with victims. No assault, including sexual assault. Judging by how crap he is at killing people, he’d had no practice being violent, or practically none.”

“He’s not that crap,” Sam said quietly. “He got the job done.”

“Barely,” I said. “Through dumb luck, more than anything. And I don’t think that’s the job he went there to do. There are elements of this crime that just don’t match up. Like I said on Sunday, the stabbing reads as unplanned, spontaneous; but everything around that moment is a whole lot more organized. Your guy knew where to find her-I don’t buy the idea that he just happened to wander into her, at midnight on some back lane in the middle of nowhere. Either he knew her routine, or they’d arranged to meet. And after the stabbing, he kept his head and he took his time: tracked her down, searched her, erased his footprints and wiped her stuff clean-and that says he wasn’t wearing gloves. Again, he wasn’t planning on a murder.”

“He was carrying a knife,” Frank pointed out. “What was he planning on, whittling?”