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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Spider

  Michael Morley is a former television presenter, producer and director, and is currently a Senior Executive Director for an international TV company. He has produced a number of award-winning documentaries, including Murder in Mind about Denis Nilsen, which led to a high-profile High Court battle with the government over the right to broadcast it. For that same documentary Michael often visited the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, and followed FBI agents working in the field. He was also able to interview a number of notorious serial killers.

  Michael divides his time between homes in Derbyshire and the Netherlands. He is married and has three sons.

  All the characters and events in this book are entirely fictitious and no parallels should be drawn with any real-life detectives, criminals or cases.

  ‘A terrifying read that will keep you hooked’ Simon Kernick

  ‘Spider chillingly captures the harsh realities of a deteriorated mind’ Lynda La Plante

  ‘A chillingly vivid thriller. Don’t read it alone in the middle of the night’ Steven Bochco

  Spider

  MICHAEL MORLEY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2008

  1

  Copyright © Michael Morley, 2008 All rights reserved

  That’s Amore. Written by Warren & Brooks

  © 1953 Four Jays Music Publishing Co.

  Peermusic (UK) Ltd. Used by permission.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishements, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  978-0-14-192075-7

  To:

  La gloriosa donna

  della mia mente x

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to all the people who got Spider into print:

  Massimo Del Frate, one of Italy’s greatest and nicest drama producers, helped plant the seeds for this novel over lunch. He, his assistant Benedetta, and no doubt many unnamed others, were also kind enough to help me with the accuracy of the Italian police sections.

  My wife and children gave up our precious times together to let me write, rewrite and rewrite again – thank you for your love, patience and support.

  Stephanie Jackson at Dorling Kindersley was generous enough to introduce me to all the right people – Steph, thanks for going the extra mile when you didn’t really need to.

  Luigi Bonomi should wear a badge saying ‘best agent in the world’ – thanks for your inspiration, guidance and commercial skills – no one does it better.

  Richenda Todd helped enormously with the blunt, brutal and brilliant advice she gave me early on.

  Beverley Cousins at Penguin blessed me with an abundance of painstaking care, eagle eyes, great imagination and wonderful humour – Bev, it’s a true joy learning from you! Thanks also to Alex Clarke, Rob Williams, Liz Smith, Claire Phillips and the rest of the team at Penguin – all your hard work and skills are hugely respected and appreciated.

  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: bleached-white bloodless corpses floating in the Black River – the buzz of flies around dismembered young limbs – bold type headlines announcing the Black River Killer’s latest kill. The horror show ran like some grainy speeded-up old movie that he’d seen far too many times.

  Nancy got out of bed and switched the lights on.

  ‘These nightmares of yours, they’re scaring me to death. Jack, you’ve really got to go and see someone.’

  Most days Jack looked as though he was living the dream, owning and running a small boutique hotel in a Tuscan village that time had barely altered and crime had hardly touched. But some nights – well, some nights he just couldn’t keep up the pretence. And this sure as hell was one of them.

  Jack squinted into the ugly brightness of the bedroom lights, sweat soaked his bare chest and ran down his back.

  ‘Did you hear me? Jack?’

  The visions had gone but now his head was filled with sounds: women screaming in pain, their desperate cries for help echoing out from the dark pits of his memory, and finally the unmistakable sound of razor-sharp steel slicing into human flesh.

  Jack let out a hot, slow breath. ‘I hear you, Nancy. Just give me a minute.’

  It had been three years since his burnout, and despite a change of continents and lifestyles, the past and all its horrors were still haunting him.

  Maybe his wife was right. Maybe he finally had to see someone.

  2

  Georgetown, South Carolina

  Sometimes, late at night, when he’s teetering on the edge of sleep, his mind soft with secret thoughts and emotions, Spider is able to turn the clock back and return to his favourite time.

  The first time.

  Right now, with so many exciting things happening to him, he’s keen to go back, eager to revisit the moments that have made him what he is.

  Lying on his bed, his special bed, the room is dark and his eyes lightly closed. Soon months, years and decades flash by, until it is twenty years ago.

  He’s in sunny Georgetown, down on the Harbor-walk at the waterfront. A young woman strolls past, happy and carefree. She’s slim bodied, dark-haired, respectable and simply dressed in a pink T-shirt, stylishly faded jeans and trainers. It’s her week off work and she’s chilling out, oblivious to the world, oblivious to the man she’s just magnetised to her.

  Spider watches her dine, alone.

  Watches her go to her apartment above the baker’s shop, alone.

  And for days he watches her living there, alone.

  Alone – and vulnerable. Just as he hoped.

  Sarah Kearney never sees him, Spider’s very careful about that, so careful he’s almost invisible. But he’s around. Always there. There, brushing by her in supermarkets, as she grocery shops for one. There, as she queues in the cinema for her solitary seat at the latest romcom. There, as she browses in the bookshop, and finally buys the cookery book, with its special recipes just for one.

  The memories are delicious. Spider savours every second of his mental feast. My, oh my, remembering the old ones, especially the first one, is almost as good as planning the new ones, the next one.

  But Sarah had been sweet. As sweet as Sugar.

  Spider’s heart races as he recalls how he followed her in his old Chevy as she caught a bus out to Landsford, a 400-acre state park off US-21 out towards Richburg. He had been his usual invisible self as she’d sauntered around the nineteenth century canals, sat a while near an old lock-keeper’s cottage and finally headed out of the crowds to a solitary spot near the Catawba River.

  Twenty years later he could still remember every word they’d spoken.

  You never forget your first kill. Not a single second of it.

  The air had been fresh with pine and grass, the sun hot and high, and Sugar, well Sugar had been sitting sweetly on a carpet of white flowers, cherishing one of the massive spiky blooms in the cup of her hand.

  Pretty as a picture.

  And then he’d shown himself. Confident and calm, polite and unthreatening. Just like he’d planned. Just like he’d dreamed.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ he said, walking confidently towards her. ‘What are they?’

  For a second she seemed startled, then she spoke up, just like her daddy had taught her. ‘Lilies. Rocky Shoals Spider Lilies.’ There was a warm drawl in her hesitant voice. A voice he’d craved to hear. A voice he knew he would soon be the last to listen to.

  They sat and talked; he made her laugh, flattered her with compliments and even made her blush a little. It was a perfect afternoon. Just as he’d hoped.

  They had coffee in the crowded café and he told her how he worked as a company auditor, a stuffy job that he hated. He had to come to the park for some space and air.

  She knows just what he meant; she loved to be outside too.

  When it got to the point where they should go, he’d told her that he’d had a lovely time, in fact he couldn’t remember the last time he enjoyed himself so much. She blushed again and said she’d had fun too. It damn near broke his heart that he had to leave, had to deliver some boring accounts to some boring businessmen east of Georgetown.

  She looked disappointed. He was sure of that. She’d wanted to spend more time with him, he could remember that clearly. In fact, looking back, it was almost as though she’d picked him, as much as he’d picked her.

  Don’t people always say that in the end it is always the women who do the choosing?

  They’d been together for almost three hours when they finally passed through the park’s gates and, looking back now, well it seems incredible, but if truth be known, for a moment he’d thought of not going through with it.

  That made him smile.

  Not gone through with it? How could he have thought that? My, how things would have been different if he’d simply said goodbye and gone his own way.

  3

  San Quirico D’Orcia, Tuscany

  Neither Jack nor Nancy could get back to sleep. That had become routine too. His wife was the only person he could bring himself to talk to, the only one who could even begin to understand what had happened to him, and how it had left him.

  The real nightmare had started long before the nocturnal ones. Overworking and over-caring had led to Jack’s collapse at JFK, after a cold case conference in LA, right in the middle of the hunt for BRK and just days before the birth of their son.

  Now, he and Nancy went over the ground again, searching for a way to find some peace: Jack’s weeks in intensive care, unable to speak or walk properly, afraid that he’d die or be crippled for the rest of his life; Nancy’s fears that he’d let his job ruin their marriage, her thoughts of leaving him, taking Zack to her parents’ house and starting over again. As usual, they didn’t leave a stone unturned. And as usual they didn’t make any real progress.

  Nancy King was tall, trim and tough. The daughter of a Marine, she knew how to deal with a crisis. Or at least she thought she did. After Jack’s crash and burn, they’d seen La Casa Strada on an Internet auction and she’d just known that they had to buy that hotel and start over in a new country.

  A new beginning. A new way of life.

  That’s what she’d said they’d needed, and tha
t was what she’d been determined they’d have. Only now, well now, it seemed that new beginning was on hold.

  And on hold was something Nancy wasn’t going to settle for.

  Dawn was filtering through the shuttered windows when she finally got back to the prickly suggestion that Jack seek some professional help. ‘The Bureau gave you a number for a psychiatrist in Florence, a good one who said she’d see you at the drop of a hat. Ring her in the morning.’

  ‘The female trickcyclist –,’ Jack tried to joke his way out of it, ‘– you really think I need to see this shrink?’

  His wife raised an eyebrow. ‘Honey, we both know you need to see a shrink. Now please get it done, yeah?’

  He gave in. ‘Yeah, I’ll get it done.’ He sounded defeated, but even as he spoke, he felt slightly better at hearing himself admit that after all this time there might just be some help on its way. ‘You want some breakfast?’ he asked, standing in front of an open window in his boxers, patting his belly.

  Behind him, Nancy could see the sun shimmering and rising across the velvet green valley. Below them, she could hear their chef, arriving in the kitchen, opening his giant fridges for supplies and starting his routine preparations before his staff arrived. She loved this place, loved her new beginning and she so wanted Jack to love it too. ‘Paolo’s in, he’ll cook us eggs, maybe some pancetta as well.’

  Jack leaned over his wife and kissed her. ‘I’ll get coffee too, I think we both need it.’

  She watched him pull on tracksuit pants and a T-shirt. Despite his emotional vulnerability, he still looked every inch the college athlete she’d fallen in love with. ‘Eleven years, Jack King. In a few days’ time we’ll have been married for eleven years. How did it all fly by so fast?’

  Jack didn’t have the answer. ‘I guess the good times always seem to go the quickest and the bad times stick around too long.’