Death Match

Mauchly peered at the screen for a long moment. “You’re right. For fifteen minutes each day, the keystrokes are precisely identical.”

“And they’re typed at precisely the same time each day.” Tara pointed at the screen. “Down to the second. How likely is that?”

“So what’s it mean?” Lash asked.

Mauchly glanced at him. “Our employees know their work is monitored. Handerling knows that if he tried anything obvious — like disabling the keystroke logger, for instance — he’d come under immediate attention. Looks like he’s found a way to throw up a smokescreen, perhaps run a macro of i

“He may have found a vulnerability in the system,” said Tara. “Some loophole or flaw he’s exploiting.”

“So is there some way we can see what he was really up to during those fifteen minutes?” Lash asked.

“No,” said Mauchly.

“Yes,” said Tara.

They looked at her.

“Maybe. We also use video cameras to take screen captures of all management terminals, right? They’re infrequent, and random. But maybe we’ll get lucky.”

She typed a fresh flurry of commands, then paused. “Looks like there’s been only one recent screen capture from Handerling’s terminal during that fifteen-minute block. On September 13.”

“Can you print it out, please?” Mauchly asked.

She moused a few commands and the printer on the desk began to hum. Mauchly grabbed the sheet as it fed out and they looked at the blurred image:

EDEN — PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL

RESULTS OF SQL QUERY AGAINST DATASET A$4719

OPERATOR: UNKNOWN

TIME: 14:38:02.98 SEPT 13 04

CPU CYCLES: 23054

END QUERY

“Oh, Jesus,” Tara breathed.

“Those other names,” Lash said. “Supercouples?”

Mauchly nodded. “All six to date.”

But Lash barely heard him. His mind was racing now. Serial killers are creatures of habit…

Staring at the list, he remembered something — something chilling.

“You mentioned an Amtrak ticket,” he said to Tara. “And an advance motel reservation?”

Tara’s eyes suddenly widened. She turned back to the keyboard.

“A reservation on the Acela to Boston. This coming Friday morning.”

“And the motel location?”

“Burlingame, Massachusetts.”

Mauchly stepped away from the terminal. The dispassionate demeanor was gone. “Tara, I want you to get a record of Handerling’s phone calls. Both from his desk and his apartment. Will you do that?”

Tara nodded, picked up the phone.

“Thank you.” Mauchly started for the door, turned back. “Now, Dr. Lash, you’ll have to excuse me. There are several things I need to do.”

TWENTY-FIVE

In many ways, the scene was like the others: the room in disarray, the mirrors broken, the bedroom curtains swept back as if inviting the night to witness the outrage. And yet in others it was very, very different. The woman lay in an embarrassment of blood, flowing from the ruined body in a terrible corona. And in the merciless glare of the crime lights the walls shone white, naked, devoid of any scrawled messages.

Captain Masterton glanced up from the corpse. His face had the pinched look of a cop under pressure from all directions.

“I was wondering when you’d get here, Lash. Say hello to victim number three. Helen Martin, aged thirty-two.”

Masterton kept staring at him. He seemed about to make another biting comment on the thi

“Christ, Lash, you’re like a zombie. Every time I see you, you look a little worse.”

“We’ll go into that some other time. How long has she been dead?”

“Less than an hour.”

“Any indication of rape? Vaginal penetration?”

“The ME’s on his way, but there doesn’t appear to be any. No signs of a burglary gone wrong, either. Just like the others. But we caught a bit of a break this time. A neighbor called in the commotion. No description of a vehicle, but we’ve already got cars stationed at major intersections, freeway on-ramps. Maybe we’ll catch a break.”

The crime scene was still so fresh the local cops were just begi

The body was brutalized in what was clearly a blitz attack. That was the hallmark of a socially defective killer. And yet the house was secluded, backing up on woods, private: this was no crime of opportunity, no blitz attack. And then there were the broken mirrors, which normally indicated a killer’s discomfort with creating such a scene. But such killers also covered their victims, hid their faces: this woman was naked, her limbs arranged with a ghastly provocativeness. And yet again this crime was not about sex. It was not about robbery. And this time, there was not even the ritual halo of severed toes and fingertips to lend a compulsive taint to the murder.

To build a profile, you had to get into the head of the murderer, ask questions. What had happened in this room? Why did it happen this particular way? Even mass-murderers had their twisted logic. But there was no logic here, no foundation on which to build an understanding.

His eyes traveled over the walls of the bedroom. In the previous two murders, they had been covered with rambling, half-coherent rants: a bloody mélange of contradiction.

This time, the walls were blank.

Why?

His eyes stopped on the big picture window facing the woods behind the house. As before, the blinds were thrown wide, revealing a pane of black that reflected the sodium lights back at him. It was hard to be sure in the painful glare, but he thought he could make out faint smudges on the glass, black upon black.

“Masterton. Can you direct those lights away from the window?”

The ME had just arrived, and the captain had moved across the room to confer with him. He looked over.

“What was that, Lash?”

“Those lights there, by the window. Turn them this way.”

Masterton shrugged, spoke to Ahearn, his second in command.

As the glare of the light hit him, the window fell into shadow. He stepped forward, Masterton following now. High up on the glass, a few large words were scrawled in bloody finger-paint:

I’ve got what I need now. Thank you.

“Oh, shit,” he murmured.

“He’s done,” Masterton said, coming up, Detective Ahearn at his shoulder. “Thank God, Lash. It’s finished.”

“No,” he replied. “No, it’s not. It’s just begi

Lash sat up in bed, wide awake, waiting for the memories to fade. He glanced at the clock: half past one. He stood up, then hesitated, sinking back to the side of the bed.

Four nights in a row, with perhaps as many hours of sleep to show for all of them. He couldn’t afford to show up at Eden semiconscious; not tomorrow, he couldn’t.

He rose again and — without giving himself a chance to reconsider — went to the bathroom, pulled out the box of Seconal, grabbed a small handful, and washed them down with a mouthful of water. Then he returned to bed, arranged the covers carefully, and gradually slipped into dark dreams.

It was the sound of church bells that woke him; the bells of his wedding, pealing from the dust-bleached mission of Carmel-by-the-Sea. And yet the bells were too loud somehow, and they went on and on, refusing to stop.