Spider - Michael Morley [1]
Thanks also to Leonid Zagalsky in Moscow, for lending me his surname, advising me on the Russian sections and reminding me why you shouldn’t play drinking games with Russians!
Nicki Kennedy and Sam Edenborough at ILA deserve special mention for all the international help they’ve given me, as does Jack Barclay at Everett, Baldwin, Barclay.
I’ve been inspired over the years by meetings with psychological profilers such as the FBI’s Roy Hazelwood and Robert Ressler, and the UK’s Paul Britton and Mike Berry. Similarly, I learned much from distinguished senior police officers in the UK such as Don Dovaston, who did much to pioneer profiling into serial child murders, and Dan Crompton, a police chief who dared to open his doors to the media when most other locked them shut.
I’d also like to extend my gratitude to the late, great Home Office pathologist, Professor Stephen Jones, who taught me much about death and dignity.
My final thanks go to all those real-life heroes who hunt the real-life monsters – thank God you’re all there.
He who fights with monsters might take care,
lest he thereby become a monster.
Friedrich Nietzsche
PROLOGUE
Saturday, 30 June
Georgetown, South Carolina
At the cool, dusky end of a sizzling day, barbecues spit flames while party laughter rolls along the banks of South Carolina’s winding Black River.
Across town, in the sombre silence of Georgetown cemetery a solitary figure searches for the grave of someone once dear to him. He’s travelled for days to make this pilgrimage and is already physically and emotionally drained. In his arms he carries a bundle of flowers, her favourite Rocky Shoals Spider Lilies. The first time he’d spoken to her, she’d been in a local park surrounded by thousands of them, and the flower had taken on a special meaning for both of them.
The headstones of the crowded cemetery bear names almost as old as America itself. Locals have been burying people in these plots since the country’s first Spanish settlers grew old and died here, way back in the mid sixteenth century.
The grave he’s looking for belongs to no one famous; there’s no towering statue, no ornate family tomb to mark her place. Her anonymity disappeared only when her mutilated young body turned up bloated and decomposing in the Tupelo Swamp offshoot from the Black River, a stretch of ancient tumbling water that was once the conduit of commercial colonialism and the main waterway of South Carolina’s plantations.
Finally, he sees her gravestone. Simple black marble, paid for by the community out of special grants for the poor. Engraved in gold lettering is her name: Sarah Elizabeth Kearney. But that wasn’t what he called her. To him she was only ever ‘Sugar’ and he knew that to her he was only ever ‘Spider’. Barely twenty-two years old, she was, like the Spider Lilies that had brought them together, just blossoming, just realizing her beauty and planting the seeds of her dreams.
Spider pulls out some weeds growing among the pebbles on her grave and lays down the big flowers. His mind slips back to their wonderful meeting twenty years ago this very day.
Sugar was so special.
She was his first.
The first he kidnapped.
The first he murdered.
PART ONE
Sunday, 1 July
1
San Quirico D’Orcia, Tuscany
Jack King’s nightmare catapulted him from his sleep.
He sat bolt upright in bed and, despite being dazed and disorientated, he instinctively grabbed for his holstered gun. Only there was no gun, and there hadn’t been one since he quit his job as an FBI profiler more than three years ago.
‘Wake up!’ urged his wife. ‘Wake up, Jack! You’re okay; you’re just dreaming again, it’s only a dream.’
But Jack wasn’t okay. He was far from okay.
He tried to slow his breathing, get his heartbeat down to normal, but his head still fizzed with images: