Spider - Michael Morley [38]
With all that in mind, Howie decided to go back to basics. He was determined to take a helicopter view, to try to avoid the forest of information and concentrate on the big chunky black trees that stood out like storm-blasted oaks at the centre of it all. To do that, he knew he had to start all over again, look at the mass of evidence as though it was the first time he’d seen it.
Some things were obvious. The twenty-year time span between the first accredited murder and his last killing meant the guy was at least middle-aged by now. More interestingly, that span meant that he’d killed throughout his most sexually active years and had carried on. A sure sign that he was more than a sexually motivated murderer and that he would never stop. There would be an end to it only when he was caught, or when he died.
All the murder victims were white women, and statistics showed that this meant he was probably also white. The spread of bodies was vast and covered more areas of the United States than the press had ever been told. BRK got his tag from the cluster of killings around the Black River in South Carolina, but the truth was that this guy had been killing all along the Atlantic coastline. Body parts had washed up in Jacksonville, Swan Quarter, Hertford and even Hampton. There had been discoveries as far north as the Canadian border, down to the Miami coast, and even out towards Mexico. There had been such a spread of abduction and disposal sites that detectives reasoned that BRK was the sole master of his own life, a single man, either unemployed or wealthy, who was able to go freely wherever and whenever he wanted, without being accountable to anyone. Howie put down the basics:
White
Middle-aged
No criminal record
Driver’s licence
Good geographic knowledge
Unemployed/Self-sufficient
Free to travel around
Single
No dependants
‘Great!’ he said, throwing his arms open with mock enthusiasm. ‘Guess that narrows things down to a mere sixty million white American males.’
Howie knew the crime stats backwards, and remembering them never made him feel better. About seventeen thousand people are murdered each year in America, fewer than six killings per hundred thousand of the population. But most murders are easy-solves, domestics that go wrong, drug grudges, gang warfare fought out in the streets with more spectators than a ball game. Most homicides were the work of ‘amateurs’, first-timers who panicked after the kill and ran for cover, desperate to dump the victim and get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible. They weren’t like BRK.
This perp, or ‘this fucking weird sicko fruitcake’ as Howie called him, wanted to hold on to the bodies as long as he could. There could be several reasons why. Profilers believed BRK was highly intelligent and knew that by moving the body away from the abduction scene he made things doubly difficult for any investigation. First off, no enquiry really starts until the body is found. A missing person’s hunt attracts only a fraction of the police resources and press coverage of a murder hunt. When the corpse is removed from the abduction site, this critical crime scene gets rained on, trampled on by people and pissed on by dogs. In short, crucial evidence is destroyed. The next complication is jurisdiction. A well-placed body can have the FBI, the city cops and the sheriff’s office rolling up their sleeves to slug it out for the right to run the investigation (or, in some cases that Howie’s known, to avoid running it). Finally, the big humdinger. If a serial killer can lure his prey away, and kill in a closed and controlled environment in which he won’t make evidential mistakes and can clean up after himself, then the CSI teams don’t even have a death scene to investigate.
Most of the profilers reckoned this last factor was the real reason BRK kept his bodies. But not Jack. Jack had often gone against