by Val McDermid
“Geronimo it is,” Tony said. Now he had a name, he could build a dialogue between them. He could ease into his target’s shoes, working out his steps and learning his gait. He could chart his progress and explore his fantasies. For this type of killing was always about fantasies. Geronimo, like so many others before him, could find no satisfaction in reality. For whatever reason, he had never learned to fit in. He had never matured into a rounded individual, however dysfunctional. He had become stuck at the point where the universe revolved around him and where fantasies could fulfil the desires that the real world refused to.
Tony understood that psychological state only too well. He had spent his own adult life feeling out of place in the world. He had lived with a sense of worthlessness that made it impossible to love, for loving carried implicit within it the conviction that one deserved to be loved in return. And he had never been able to believe that about himself. He had constructed his own series of masks, an empathetic sequence of facades that allowed him to blend in. Passing for human. If his circumstances had been different, he had always believed he might have ended up a predator himself, instead of a hunter. It was that awareness that underpinned all he did. It made him supremely good at unpicking the minds of the deranged and depraved.
It also made him supremely bad at forging relationships that penetrated beyond the superficial. Mostly, he had accepted that as a price worth paying for having in his grasp so useful and beneficial a skill. Carol Jordan was the only person who had ever made him feel that this was just another lie he told himself.
He knew he didn’t deserve her. But the harder he tried to pull away from her, the stronger the tug towards her grew. One of these days he was going to have to take the chance of losing what he did best in the attempt to become what he had never understood how to be. Being a man instead of acting a part might alter him so profoundly that he could no longer navigate the labyrinth of messy minds.
But that was for another day. Tony gave himself a mental shake and set about reading the trail that Geronimo had left behind him. He began to plough through the contents of the crime files, taking notes as he went. The material from Heidelberg and Leiden was comprehensive, the boxes containing everything from witness statements to crime scene photographs and background reports on the victims. Luckily, the Dutch files had been translated into English for Petra’s benefit, so he had no trouble reading them, apart from the odd awkward rendering. There was almost nothing from Bremen, simply because the investigation was still in the early stages and Petra’s request hadn’t yet borne much fruit.
Petra had made no attempt to engage him in conversation once he began, simply placing a fresh pot of coffee on the dining table where he was working. She poured herself a cup and said, “I’m going out soon. I have to keep watch over Carol.”
He’d nodded absently, not really taking it in. He was too wrapped up in his study of the victims. It was after midnight when he finished his preliminary read through. He had a stack of paper with scribbled notes at his elbow. He would have to draw up a formal table relating all three cases to each other, but first he needed to know more about the academic specialities of the targets. He stood up and stretched, the muscles in his neck and back protesting at the sudden movement. Time for a change of scene.
He packed up his notes and let himself out of the flat. A short taxi ride brought him back to his apartment block. In the street, he glanced up at the third-floor windows. All was shrouded in darkness. If Carol was home, she was probably in bed. Their meeting could wait.
Upstairs, Tony ignored his still-packed bags and set up his laptop on the small writing table. He connected to the internet and navigated to the metasearch engine that he found most useful for tracking academic references. Within an hour, he had a reasonable overview of the research interests of Walter Neumann, Pieter de Groot and Margarethe Schilling. He scrolled back and forth through the material he’d downloaded, puzzled. He’d expected to find some glaring connection that would link the three dead psychologists. But their areas of specialism ranged from Margarethe’s interest in religious belief systems, de Groot’s studies of emotional abuse and Neumann’s work on the psychological dynamics of sadomasochism.
He went through to the kitchen and brewed himself a fresh pot of coffee while he ran through what he’d learned and compared it against what experience had taught him. Every serial offender had a mental profile of his victims. Usually, the common factors that linked them were purely physical. Whether the victims were all males, all females or a mix of the two, it was almost always possible to draw conclusions about the type he would go for. The elderly female victims of a certain kind of rapist; the vulnerable waifs who appealed to the sort of killer who had been abused himself as a child; the beautiful blondes who had to be wiped out because they would never look twice at the woeful inadequate who preyed on them. Even though the details of the offences could vary widely, the victims were usually as much a physical signature as the actions the offender took to make the crime uniquely his.
With this case, it had been clear from his first glance at the police reports that this wasn’t true of Geronimo. Unusually, what remained absolutely constant and inviolable was the ritual. There seemed no sign of escalation or variation caused by a lack of satisfaction with previous efforts. The victims themselves varied widely, from de Groot’s trimly muscled frame to Margarethe’s neat slenderness to Neumann’s comfortable bulk. That meant there had to be another element at play in the selection process, and Tony had been utterly convinced it must lie in a shared professional interest, since this was the one thing that connected the dead. Which only went to show how foolish it was to theorize ahead of the data, he reminded himself as he carried his cup back through to the living room.
“What is it about psychologists that winds you up, Geronimo?” he asked out loud. “Do you hate them? Did a psychologist make decisions that adversely affected the way your life has turned out? Or do you think they need to be put out of their misery? Is this personal, or do you see yourself as an altruist? Are you doing them a favour or are you doing the world a favour?”
He flicked back through the information he’d garnered from the web. “If this is about something somebody did to you, why are you going for academics? If you were fucked up by some educational psychologist or some pre-sentence report in the courts, why aren’t you going for practitioners? What do academics do that clinicians don’t?”
If anyone could answer that question, it should be him. He’d walked on both sides of the wire, after all. He’d started out as a clinician and turned to academe only relatively recently. What was different about his own working life these days, apart from the obvious one—that he didn’t see patients? Was that it? “Are you taking it out on academics because they’re not putting their training to proper use, Geronimo?” he asked of the hazy shade who was refusing to take shape in his mind.
“No, I don’t think so,” he continued. “That’s too ridiculous. Nobody kills people because they’re not fucking with people’s heads.” He rubbed his tired eyes with his knuckles and leaned back in the chair. What did university staff do? They lectured. They supervised graduate students. They did research.
“Research,” he said softly, jerking upright. Hastily, he looked back through the articles and papers written by the three victims. This time, he saw it. “Experiments,” Tony exclaimed with satisfaction. The one thing that academics did, that all three of these victims had done, that could remotely be defined as messing with people’s heads was to carry out experiments with live human subjects.
“You believe you’ve suffered as a result of psychological experiments,” he said, confident now. “Something happened to make your life different from other people’s lives, and you blame the psychologists. You see them as vivisectionists of the mind. That’s it, Geronimo, isn’t it?” He knew at some instinctive level that he’d conjured up the visceral motivation behind this series of killings.
Now he was ready to begin thinking
about drafting his profile. But the hour was late, and he knew it would be better left for morning. Reluctantly, he turned off his machine and unzipped his travel bag. He doubted he’d get much sleep, but at least he could go through the motions. And tomorrow not only would he have the chance to do what he did best, he’d see Carol again. The thought made him smile. For once, he was convinced the positive elements of their relationship were starting to outweigh the bitter memories of the past. He might be kidding himself about that, but at least he was willing to put the theory to the test.
22
The second act seemed to last forever. Carol couldn’t concentrate on the music; all her mind was capable of was rerunning their conversation and finding fault with what she’d said and how she’d said it. She wished she’d had the chance to role-play the scenario with Tony in advance. At least then she’d have felt more confident that she was pushing the right buttons. It wasn’t that she’d expected instant capitulation from Radecki. But she had hoped for something more than his obstinate refusal to acknowledge that he had any idea what she was talking about.
She was aware too of his eyes on her. His seat was set slightly further back than hers, and out of the corner of her peripheral vision, she could sense him studying her for long periods. She couldn’t catch his expression, which made her feel exposed and edgy. What was he thinking? What effect was she having on him?
Carol stifled a sigh of relief as the second act reached its climax with the wedding of the vixen and her mate. No echoes there, she thought thankfully. Before the house lights could come up, she saw Tadeusz rise from his chair and move to the back wall. She turned to catch him reaching inside the pocket of the overcoat hanging on a hook by the door. His hand came out holding a mobile phone. “I have some calls to make,” he said loudly, so his voice would carry over the applause. “I will be back shortly.”
“Yes,” she breathed triumphantly as the door closed behind him. He had decided to check her out. Morgan had told her not to worry about the UK end of her cover story; they had, he assured her, been working on it for a while. Her alias was a name that had been fed on to the streets from two directions. Undercover cops had mentioned her as a player in a quiet but powerful way. And the people brought in for questioning after Colin Osborne’s shooting had all been questioned hard about Caroline Jackson. “We really leaned on them,” Morgan had explained. “The interviewing officers were all briefed to act as if they couldn’t believe it when the suspects said they’d never heard of you. They planted the idea that you were connected to Colin, that you were in the same line of business, and that you and he had big plans for the future. So when Radecki starts to check you out—and he will check you out, make no mistake about that—you’ll show up as a name that people have heard of. The fact that nobody knows you face to face is something you can work to your advantage. It makes you look as if you’re a completely clean operator, like Radecki himself.”
Morgan had been right about that at least. She was sure Radecki was making those first calls right now. And she had a trump card to play later this evening that should tip the balance and get him as interested in her as a potential business partner as he was clearly intrigued by her as a woman.
Tadeusz was gone for the whole of the second interval, not returning until ten minutes into the third act. Carol deliberately didn’t turn round when he came back, pretending to be entirely absorbed in the music. As the opera drew to a close, Carol wondered if Radecki was seeing parallels between the action on stage and what was happening to him this evening. There was the dying vixen, killed more by accident than design. And there was the gamekeeper, confronted with one of the vixen’s cubs, which he recognizes as the spitting image of her mother. Was all this provoking resonances for him? She could only hope so. The more her resemblance to Katerina was hammered home, the better for her chances of success.
As the audience burst into their final round of applause, he pulled his chair forward so it was in line with hers. He leaned close to her. She smelled the faint tang of cigar smoke and the complex notes of an expensive cologne. “It has been interesting to meet you. Even though I still don’t understand what you were talking about.”
Carol turned her head and met his eyes. “You take a lot of convincing. I like that in a colleague. People who trust too easily tend to talk too openly, which isn’t clever in our line of business. Look, why don’t you give me a call tomorrow? We can meet and discuss matters of mutual interest.”
He raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think we have a mutual interest. At least, not in terms of business. But I think I might like to meet you again.”
Carol shook her head. “This is a business trip for me. I don’t have time to waste on social engagements.”
“That’s a shame,” he said, his face guarded now.
The applause began to die away and she reached down for her evening bag. “Look, Colin had problems with his end of your joint operation. He was good at promising but he couldn’t always deliver. That’s probably why he’s dead now. The people you sent to him, they expected him to supply them with documentation. That’s what they’d paid through the nose for, after all. But he didn’t have a proper source. That’s why he was always setting them up to get caught.”
Tadeusz’s eyebrows rose slightly. “Is this supposed to mean something to me?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea if you were aware of what he did with the illegals after you passed them on, but he was skating on thin ice. Eventually the immigration service was bound to cotton on to his connection with all these little sweatshops that kept getting raided.” Carol gave him a questioning look. “Especially since the raids were engineered by Colin himself, whatever he may have said to the contrary.”
She could see she had him now. He might still have a condescending smile on his face, a look of puzzlement in his eyes, but he didn’t want her to stop.
“I’m different,” she continued. “I never promise what I can’t deliver.” She opened her evening bag as the opera house lights came up, and took out what she thought of as the ace up her sleeve. It was an Italian passport. When she’d asked Morgan whether it was a fake or the real thing, he’d simply smiled and said, “It’s not going to get you into trouble. Whatever checks Radecki makes, it’ll come up clean.”
She held it out to him. “An act of good faith. I can get hold of as many of these as I need, within reason. You bring me people who can pay the price, and I’ll make sure I keep my end of the bargain.”
His curiosity finally overcame his caution. He took the passport from her and flicked it open at the ID page. His own face stared back at him, a faint smile on his lips. The passport said he was Tadeo Radice, born in Trieste. He studied it attentively, moving it back and forward to let the light catch it. Then he turned back to the beginning and looked through it. Finally, he met Carol’s eyes, his gaze serious. “Where did you get the photograph?” he said.
“That was the easy part. A news magazine did an interview with you last year, remember? Part of a series about Berlin businessmen who had seized the opportunity of reunification to build a new empire? I pulled it up out of their on-line archives and scaled down one of the pics. So, tomorrow? Why don’t you call me in the morning?” She fished in her bag again and came out with a business card that simply gave her name and mobile phone number. “I really do think we should talk.” She handed him the card, gave him the full hundred-watt smile and watched the play of emotions in his eyes again.
He held out the passport to her. “Very interesting.”
Carol shook her head. “It’s no use to me. Keep it. You never know when it might come in handy.” She stood up and straightened her dress, smoothing it down over her hips in a consciously sexual gesture. “Call me,” she said, heading for the door. She grasped the handle then turned. “Otherwise, you’ll never see me again.”
As she stepped back into the corridor, Carol became conscious of her body once more. The adrenaline that had kept her so firmly in control inside
the opera box was starting to bleed away, leaving her weak-kneed and worn out. But she couldn’t afford to relax yet. If Radecki was anything like as good as he was supposed to be, he would have arranged for someone to pick her up when she left his box, and to stick with her. She and Petra had discussed how they would handle that. Petra would hang well back, but close enough to make sure Carol got into a cab and to check out who was on her tail. Petra would try to follow the followers, but would take no risks of discovery.
Exhausted though she was, she acted as nonchalant as she could manage and made her way down to the cloakroom to stand in line and collect her coat. Or rather, Caroline Jackson’s coat, a luxuriously soft lambskin that managed the trick of fashionable elegance coupled with the kind of warmth that early spring in Berlin demanded. Without looking around to see if she could spot the expected tail, she strolled out of the Staatsoper and stood by the kerb, looking for a passing taxi.
Me and half of Berlin, she thought wearily after five minutes, when her attempts to snag a ride had completely failed. Feeling a hand touch her arm, she whirled round, eyes wide, fight or flight reflexes on full alert. Radecki stood behind her. Whether it was deliberate or not, he maintained the perfect distance to avoid crowding her. Even in her heightened state of anxiety, Carol noted how unusual that was in a man. “I’m sorry, I startled you,” he said.
She collected herself quickly. “You did,” she said with a smile. “Just be grateful I didn’t have my pepper spray in my hand.”
He inclined his head with a rueful look. “I couldn’t help noticing when I came out that you were having trouble getting a cab. Perhaps I can help?” He reached for his mobile phone. “My driver can have the car here inside five minutes. He can take you wherever you want to go.”
So much easier than following me, Carol thought with admiration. “That would be very kind,” she said. “My feet are freezing.”