The Murder Code (9 page)

This time she gestured towards the enormous map of the entire city that was stuck to another of the whiteboards. We had a number of locations pinned, but most obvious were the three red markers over the murder sites we’d found.

‘Normally at this point, with five victims, we’d have five big red crosses and be able to think about triangulating a working area that our killer is operating in. As things stand, as you can see, we have three points, two of them very close together. Which isn’t helpful.’

An understatement, and the people in the room knew it. Our killer had attacked men and women, across a range of ages and social classes, at three separate locations. With no obvious connection between the victims, location was key—and yet there was no way of looking at the map and having the slightest idea where he might strike next.

Only that, most likely, he would.

Laura glanced over at me, and I took that as my cue. I slid off the desk I’d been perched on and stood up to address the room.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘What we are dealing with here is a serial killer. And actually, it’s worse than that. Because we’re also dealing with a mass murderer. You all know the difference, right?’

A few of them nodded. It was a small distinction, but an important one. Serial killers usually take individual victims—at most, families—over the course of a number of separate incidents, whereas mass murderers kill multiple victims at a single time. It’s important because the two tend to have very different psychologies underlying them. Serial killers, for example, are almost always sexually motivated, and they usually keep killing, gradually escalating their attacks until they get caught or life intervenes in some way. Mass murderers—school shooters, for example—generally combust in a single incident, often taking their own lives to avoid an inevitable capture.

Serial killers have
types
. In most cases, there is something about the victim that makes the act meaningful for the killer. Multiple murderers open fire indiscriminately, but don’t take as much care to get away. One is slow-burning. One is a flare.

I said, ‘What we’re dealing with here appears to have elements of both. There have been similar instances in the past—spree killers, to an extent—but I’ve never heard of someone doing this. Our perp displays the kind of pathology and violence consistent with a psychologically malformed serial killer. But he kills multiple, apparently unconnected victims in bursts.’

I let that one sink in around the room, ignoring the thought that pressed inside my head.

And that doesn’t make any sense.

After an uncomfortable couple of seconds, the female officer who’d spoken before spoke again.

‘So how can we get this guy?’

I nodded. It was an entirely reasonable question to which I didn’t, as of right now, have an answer.

‘We’ve got a number of strategies to work with. We’ve already looked at door-to-doors in the grids, and we got nothing from them. Those are ongoing in the Garth area as well. Perhaps we’ll get something from there instead. But even if we don’t, let’s not lose sight of the fact he picked these places for a reason. He knew they were isolated enough for his purposes. Even if they seem unrelated, they aren’t.’

It was something small to cling to. The killer had some connection, however oblique, to the places he’d chosen so far. If he’d had a GPS device fitted that recorded his every movement, the data would show that at some point in the past he had been to those places for some reason. His movements formed an unbroken ribbon through history, and at some point that ribbon had touched the grids and the Garth estate. For now, those might be the only two pieces of the ribbon we could see, but as the investigation progressed, we would start to fill in more. We would begin to get a clearer picture of the man that ribbon represented.

That was the hope, anyway.

‘Aside from that,’ I said, ‘we’ll have to see what the forensics turn up. We also need to identify the third victim. My hunch is that asking around the estate, giving some information on her clothing, will get us an ID before too long. Chances are she’s local.’

A third officer, a man, said, ‘Interviewing all the families?’

‘And friends and associates. Like Detective Fellowes said, everything so far points to these victims being randomly targeted. But that isn’t necessarily the case. Perhaps—and we’re stretching here—perhaps last night he only intended to kill the first woman, and the other two just happened on the scene and he felt he had to take care of them too. Or perhaps there is some connection between all the victims.’

There were a few blank looks at that. Understandably—but again, it was
possible
. Regardless, as unlikely as it might be, it was a more comfortable proposition than the alternative: that the killer had casually waited there all night with bodies cooling beside him in the bushes. Squeezing as much fun as he could from his night’s work.

Back to earth, Hicks.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘You’ve all got the files. If you haven’t familiarised yourselves, then do. In the meantime, let’s run through tasks and who’s doing what.’

But that feeling remained with me as I handed out the assignments: the sensation that these weren’t normal murders. That even though they had to fit into my architecture of crime, somehow they did not. That there was something …
different
about them. Something I didn’t want to believe was possible.

Something weird.

Something evil.

Half an hour later, most of the sergeants had dispersed to deal with the jobs they’d been allocated. A couple remained, stationed at desks on the far side of the room, co-ordinating their actions from here for the moment.

I’d worked major operations before, as a sergeant, and more recently as a detective, and it’s always the same. A large, echoing room that officers drift in and out of, picking up actions or dropping off reports. Phones ringing constantly. People talking quietly behind small partitions. Despite the nature of the underlying investigation, a major incident room often has a weirdly positive feel to it. It’s the energy; it rubs off. Everyone is working hard towards the same end, generally making some progress. As a team, even a fragmented one, you drive each other onwards.

Laura and I worked quietly. At three o’clock, an officer dropped off the afternoon post: he had bundles of mail tied with string in a battered green trolley. There were several envelopes for me—notifications of upcoming court appearances for minor crimes—and then one letter that caught my eye.

Addressed by hand. A vaguely childish script, written in blue ink.

Even so, I ripped it open without really thinking. It was only as I unfolded the single sheet of A4 inside that I realised what I was looking at and placed the torn envelope carefully to one side.

‘Laura,’ I said.

‘What?’ She shoved her chair back and walked round to stand beside me. ‘Oh. Shit, Hicks.’

It was a typed letter, beginning:
Dear Detective.

And beside that, in the same blue fountain pen, the same handwriting, the sender had added the word
Hicks
.

D
EAR DETECTIVE HICKS

I don’t know who you are yet. And at the time of writing this letter, you don’t know who I am either. You have no idea of my existence and no inkling of what I am about to do. The truth is, I still don’t know quite when it will begin myself. That is why it’s going to work. That is why you’ll never catch me.

Randomness has fascinated me since I was a child, right from the moment my father brought home the simple computer on which I first learned to program and code. I was only five or six years old at the time, but already I understood the machine and how it worked: that it was just an elaborate calculator, one that would perform whatever operation I told it to and nothing more. Inside its cheap plastic shell, one thing led to the next in a blind, obedient process. Every single output was created entirely by the inputs. It followed orders.

Except that one of the first commands I learned was to generate a random number. How could that be?

Even as a child, I understood it had to be an illusion. As I grew older, my father taught me, and I made further studies of my own: of sequences and codes. I learned how computers use pseudo-random number generators to hide their logical patterns. A unique seed number, derived from the exact date and time, is fed through a complicated equation to produce a new number that, while derived solely from the first, appears unconnected to an untrained eye. That new number, fed back in, creates a third.

And so on.

In such a way, a string of apparently random numbers is generated. If you know the pattern and any single number, you know the whole sequence, but for most purposes, the illusion of randomness is sufficient.

That wouldn’t be good enough for you, would it?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the problem: how to generate a code even you wont be able to crack. A string for which the underlying pattern cannot possibly be discerned. That is what I have spent months working on. That is what I believe I have achieved. And it is finally time to test it. On you.

As I write this, I am still waiting for the right moment to begin. The right initial seed. I do not know where or when it will be. I do not know who. That is why it will work: because I do not know yet who will die first.

But I do know it will be soon.

‘S
O,’ YOUNG SAID. ‘THIS
letter.’

Laura and I were sitting across from him in his fifth-floor office. We might have relocated to the main operations room downstairs, but Young certainly hadn’t. I didn’t like being taken away from the heart of the investigation, even momentarily, but the flip side was it at least enabled us to run our own ship. Young was big on that. While he needed and wanted to know of every development, he wasn’t bothered about being seen to be. For all his hardass reputation, he was a good boss.

The letter was the first item on the agenda.

Laura said, ‘I think Hicks wrote it, sir.’

‘Ha ha,’ I said.

‘Seriously, sir—his prints will be all over it.’

I leaned forward. ‘As I’ve said a hundred times, I could hardly have discovered this potential crime scene
without
contaminating it, could I?’

‘If you say so.’

‘Give it up, you two.’ Young sniffed. ‘Other prints?’

‘Ongoing, sir.’ I leaned back. ‘But so far we’ve got standard cheap eighty-weight paper that appears to have been untouched by human hands. Other than my own. There’s a load on the envelope, but that’s to be expected. They’re being processed now anyway.’

He nodded. ‘Okay. On a practical level, what else?’

There are plenty of traps people can fall into when sending things to the police. Dropping a letter into a postbox might feel like an anonymous, unobserved act, but there are hundreds of potential mistakes we can look into.

We caught a blackmailer once who included a printout of a Streetview map to show where he wanted the money dropped. In terms of prints and DNA it was totally clean, and he was probably congratulating himself right up to the moment we knocked on his door. How did we find him? Because to print the map you had to access it online, and his was the only ISP address to look at that particular page in years. People rarely think of everything.

‘Prints aside,’ Laura said, ‘the envelope was sticker-sealed, so we won’t get DNA from that. We’ve already followed up the postmarks though.’

That was normally one of our best chances: that it was possible to trace the path of the letter back through time and space. We already knew the letter box it had been posted in, and the collection batch. That gave us a window of time in which our man had definitely been at a specific location—another cross on the map, albeit a much more tentative one this time.

‘It’s a box on Main Street, old town,’ Laura said. ‘CCTV only gives an oblique view. It’s probably not good enough for any kind of pre-arrest identification. Maybe useful afterwards, though.’

Young frowned again—more of a scowl this time. I felt the same way. After an arrest was all well and good. What we needed, more than anything else right now, was something to help us find the guy in the first place.

‘And the timing?’

I said, ‘It was sent yesterday afternoon, between the lunch-time and evening collections. A five-hour period. The IT people are already pulling images for us. I don’t know how many we’ll end up with. Obviously it’s a busy area and he posted at a busy time. We’ll get something, though. It’ll be fuzzy, but one of those people will be him.’

Scant consolation, but still true. We
would
have a photograph of the person who’d sent the letter—even if we wouldn’t know for sure which of the people he was.

Young tapped a pen on his desk absently.

‘He posted it
after
the murders of Gibson and Evans.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do we think it’s genuine?’

‘I don’t,’ Laura said. ‘Hicks isn’t sure.’

Young looked at me. I shrugged.

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing in there that couldn’t have been gleaned from the news reports. But at the same, if it’s someone pranking us, there’s also a whole lot
less
.’

Young nodded. ‘That’s what’s giving me pause too.’

‘I mean, he doesn’t even describe the victims, when he could have done. If it’s just some nut looking to troll us, he could have made it much more convincing.’

‘But if it’s real …?’

‘If it’s real, the contents still don’t make any sense. He claims to have written the letter before the first killing. He’s even pre-printed it and written my name on by hand. I don’t know how to explain that.’

‘Well
try
, Hicks.’

‘The only thing I can think is that he wanted to emphasise the … randomness. Because it’s a challenge, isn’t it? The way it reads, he wants to test us. So perhaps it’s important to him that we’re in on it from the very beginning. That we know he was planning it long before he started killing.’