Spider Read online

Spider uses the toilet and then takes a long, hot shower. There are two white bath towels. He takes one, partly dries himself and sits on the bed, wrapping it around him.

  He notices that he’s breathing hard and his hands are shaking. Even after all these years, after all the killings, he still gets ‘the day-after shakes’. He knows it is only anxiety, the start of a panic attack. This is the time when the fear of being caught is at its most extreme, and experience has taught him that the further away from the crime scene he gets, the quicker the anxiety disappears.

  When he feels a little better he goes back to the bed and sits down, flicking through the TV stations with a remote, zapping channels for any news from Georgetown. WTMA is finishing a warning about tropical depressions and hurricanes and WCSC is in the middle of a report on a Mount Pleasant woman who drowned while boating off Sullivan’s Island. He flicks over to WCBD and instantly recognizes the video footage of the cemetery. After a few seconds a Hispanic-looking reporter appears on screen, talking to a news anchor back in the main studio: ‘Here in this close-knit community of Georgetown there is widespread shock and outrage today, at what most locals regard as not just an unholy act but one of monstrous repulsiveness. Camera crews and journalists have been kept outside the cemetery, but as you’ll have seen from our pictures, shot from the public highway, the desecration seems to be frenzied and extreme. There’s speculation here that it could be the work of sick trophy-hunters or else of a highly disturbed individual who has some kind of mental illness that draws him to the graves of murder victims. The office of Georgetown’s chief of police has today categorically stated that at this stage they see no reason to connect the incident with the so-called Black River Killer, the serial murderer believed to have been responsible for the death of Sarah Elizabeth Kearney.’

  Spider is both amused and irritated. Does the press really believe such nonsense? Don’t they have the intelligence to realize what is really going on? He doubts that the police are so stupid. Surely they won’t misunderstand the significance of what has been done?

  He lies back on the bed, his hair wet on the pillow. Next to him is the other bath towel, wrapped delicately around the object of his affection. The decapitated skull of Sarah Kearney. Spider turns on his left side and with his right hand gently strokes his fingers backwards and forwards across the smooth bone. Has it really been twenty years? Twenty years since he shared the intimacy of her death, and the secret comforts of her cool body?

  ‘We’ll have to go soon, my little Sugarbaby,’ he says softly, kissing her lightly in the middle of the forehead. ‘Sleep just a little longer, but then you and I will have to go. There’s still much for us both to do.’

  10

  San Quirico D’Orcia, Tuscany

  Nancy King was relaxing on the shaded terrace with her first cappuccino of the morning. On her lap was Paolo’s new summer menu. She was pleased to see most of her old favourites were still there, including a choice of classic La Pasta Fatta in Casa, with an amazingly simple tomato sauce to go with the fantastic home-made linguini or tagliatelli. How did the Italians squeeze so much flavour out of so few ingredients? She put the menu down, took a sip of her coffee and squinted out across the sun-hazed valleys. The Tuscan countryside undulated like a series of green waves crashing towards some out-of-sight shoreline. The powder-blue sky was cloudless. Nancy felt more relaxed and alive than she’d done for years. Tuscany had certainly been the right place to choose to start over again.

  Jovanna, one of the two waitresses setting clean white linen on the tables for lunch, clacked her shoes across the paved patio and wooden outer decking, breaking Nancy’s moment of meditation.

  ‘Scusi, Signora,’ she said respectfully. ‘There is someone in reception for you. It is a police officer.’

  Nancy held her breath. She pushed her bare feet into her backless shoes, and strode quickly from the sun-toasted terrace to the cool of the hotel reception. In those brief seconds every imaginable disaster flashed through her mind. Had Jack collapsed again? Had Zack been hurt? What had brought an Italian police officer, unannounced, to her doorstep?

  Nancy had expected to see a policeman, a black-haired carabiniere with a five o’clock shadow and trademark white gloves. Instead, a beautiful young woman in an immaculately tailored charcoal-grey business suit stood waiting in the marbled floor reception area.

  ‘Buon giorno. Signora King?’

  ‘Si.’ Nancy hesitated, her heart skipping a beat.

  ‘Buono. Sono Ispettore Orsetta Portinari. Ho bisogno…’

  ‘In English, tell me in English!’ snapped Nancy, unable to hold back her fears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the policewoman. She took a beat, and then effortlessly switched languages. ‘I am Inspector Orsetta Portinari and I have been sent by my boss Massimo Albonetti in Rome. My boss and Mr King worked together some time ago and now Direttore Albonetti has sent me here to see if Mr King would help us.’

  Nancy’s fears came down a notch. ‘You mean there’s nothing wrong? Nothing’s happened to Jack, or to my son?’

  The young inspector looked confused. ‘I am sorry. I am afraid I do not understand. Your son?’

  Nancy brushed hair from her face. ‘You haven’t come here to tell me something bad about my husband, or my son Zack? They’re both all right?’

  Orsetta shook her head and smiled reassuringly. ‘No. They are both all right.’

  Nancy leant on the black granite counter of the reception desk and sighed with relief. She managed to compose herself before turning back to the detective. ‘Strange how you always think the worst when you see a police officer – even if you’ve been married to one.’

  ‘si,’ said Orsetta.

  ‘Jack’s not here at the moment, he’ll be gone all day. What exactly is this about?’

  Orsetta’s face gave away the fact that she wasn’t going to offer Nancy a straight answer. ‘With respect, Mrs King, it is police business and I would rather discuss it directly with your husband.’

  Ten years of marriage to a cop had taught Nancy to know when she was being fobbed off. Similarly, she knew that cops ducked questions only when the case was important. Her mind flashed back to Maria’s newspaper. ‘Is it about that murdered girl?’

  The detective frowned. ‘I really need to speak directly to your husband. Perhaps you have a cell phone number for him?’

  Nancy’s eyes blazed. It seemed Italian cops were every bit as pushy and rude as American ones. ‘I’d rather not do that. Police business is not our business any longer. Now, would you like to leave a message or not?’

  Orsetta’s face flushed. ‘This is my card,’ she said, slapping it down on the cold counter. ‘It is an urgent police matter. Have him call me as soon as you see him.’ She glared at Nancy. ‘This is not a request, Signora, it is an instruction.’

  For a second the two women locked eyes. Orsetta smiled as sweetly as she could, then elegantly turned on her immaculate heels and left.

  11

  Days Inn Grand Strand, South Carolina

  The lady who answers phones at UMail2Anywhere proves as good as her word. Within an hour of the call, Stan, the delivery boy, turns up with a length of bubble wrap, four cardboard boxes, three sheets of brown paper and a roll of sticky tape. Spider appears at the door seemingly with car oil all over his hands, gets the kid to dump the gear on his bed, then quickly washes and tips him for his trouble. He’s just scrubbed the skull clean of prints and isn’t about to add fresh ones to the parcel he intends to send Sugar home in. Stan hangs around by the pool, drinking lime coke and checking out girls, while his big-tipping client takes his time wrapping some fragile cargo that has to be shipped air mail that afternoon. He seems a nice guy, not many customers give a tip these days, let alone ask his name and thank him. Waiting around for a real gent like that is no problem. The dude has even said he can find him some private work, running errands for a bit more than the basic he gets at UM2A. Says he might have something for him later that day, if he
takes care of this package first, and does a real good job of looking after it.

  Spider pulls on cotton gloves. Not long ago he’d read that cops could somehow pick up prints from inside rubber gloves. He isn’t sure it’s true, but doesn’t intend taking any chances. When he’s finished, he’ll take the gloves with him. Meanwhile, he uses a Swiss Army penknife to cut off a length of the bubble wrap and forces it tight inside Sarah Kearney’s skull. The plastic bulges through the eye sockets and jaw giving a grotesque illusion of membranes, muscles and even life. He wraps another sheet around the outside, holds it down with tape and places the whole thing inside one of the smaller boxes Stan brought him. He seals it with tape and wraps it in a sheet of brown paper. He cuts more bubble wrap, tapes it around the box and places it snugly inside one of the bigger boxes. He runs sticky tape around all the joints and carefully covers the outside with the remaining two sheets of brown paper. He takes a black felt-tip marker from his case and writes the delivery address in nondescript capital letters that contain no clue to his true handwriting. For a second he pauses and takes a slow, satisfying sniff of the pen. It smells of pear drops. Spider smiles at the irony of it all. Who would have thought that innocent reminders of childhood sweets could come to mind when you’re handling the decapitated head of a woman you killed twenty years ago?

  He flattens the spare boxes and puts them and the tape and bubble wrap inside his suitcase. Spider then carries the box out to the landing and places it at the foot of the front door. His room is on the second floor of the three-storey motel block and from the door he can clearly see Stan. The kid is checking out some teenagers in bikinis so tiny you could floss your teeth with them.

  ‘Hey, Stan!’ he shouts.

  The delivery boy breaks from his adolescent daydreaming and raises a hand to acknowledge the call. By the time Stan appears on the landing, Spider has removed his gloves, tucked a cell phone between his left ear and shoulder blade and is writing something on a motel notepad while seemingly talking to someone.

  ‘Yeah, sure, I finished the work about an hour ago and I should be able to get the accounts faxed to you sometime this afternoon. Don’t you worry about it.’

  Stan can see the guy is real busy. He nods at the parcel on the floor and asks, ‘It’s ready to go?’

  ‘Just a second,’ says Spider to the party on the phone, covering the mouthpiece as he answers Stan. ‘Yeah, you can take it. Thanks again for waiting. I’ll call your number later for the other job.’

  ‘Sure, no problem,’ says Stan, picking up the box, smiling and walking away.

  Spider carries on pretending to talk. He watches the boy until he is out of sight and then ducks back into the motel room. So far, so good, his plan is going well. He takes a bottle of ink from his suitcase and deliberately spills it over the bedsheets and pillows. Quickly, he uses the room towels to mop up the mess, then hauls the whole bundle into the shower and turns on the taps. Next, he calls room service and tells them he’s tripped and spilt ink everywhere but is soaking the sheets to get the stain out. A Mexican maid is at his room quicker than a 100-metre sprinter on steroids. She shouts at him in Spanish but settles down when he gives her ten dollars and helps her squeeze out the soaking linen and put it into her cart. He feels better knowing that within ten minutes all the sheets, quilt cover, pillows and towels that may contain traces of his DNA will be in a boil wash in the laundry room.

  Spider double-checks the bedroom to ensure he hasn’t left anything behind. He grabs his belongings, locks the door and heads down to the twenty-four-hour reception desk to settle his bill. He pretends to be embarrassed about ‘the accident’ and is polite and apologetic. After a call is made to Housekeeping, he’s told that everything is okay and there won’t be any extra charge. He thanks the clerk, pays cash and leaves to collect his silver Chevy Metro hire car from the forecourt. He’s only minutes away from the Thrifty Rent-a-Car depot on Jetport Road, where he’d used a false driver’s ID to hire the eighty-dollars-a-day special and again had paid cash. Good old untraceable cash, the international currency of crime.

  It takes an age for the attendant to get to him, then like everyone else, he objects furiously when he gets stung for the petrol surcharge. He’s still complaining when he catches the shuttle over to the airport’s main terminal. Spider’s first stop is the Delta ticket desk, where he pays cash for his one-way trip out of South Carolina. He checks in his suitcase, collects his boarding pass and heads off for something to eat.

  He has plenty of time before his flight.

  There’s one last call to make. One more piece of important business to take care of before he can catch his plane out of Myrtle.

  12

  Florence, Tuscany

  Were the nightmares always the same? Was he frightened of going to sleep after them? During the waking hours did he have flashbacks of what happened in the dreams? The questions came thick and fast but Jack didn’t duck any of them, not even when Elisabetta Fenella asked if he was depressed, tearful, overly emotional or even impotent.

  Eventually, she managed to persuade him to take her through his childhood. Unlike that of those he had pursued in his professional life, his own past contained no trauma, no abuse or deprivation, just the solid love and support of two parents who had been teenage sweethearts. They stayed married for more than thirty years, inseparable until five years earlier when a hit-and-run driver killed his father soon after his retirement. Jack Snr had been a New York City cop all his working life and his mother, Brenda, had been a night sister at the Mount Sinai Medical Center near Central Park. His mother had died alone, in her sleep, just over three years ago of a heart attack. Jack still thought it was probably as much to do with being broken-hearted as with the high cholesterol that doctors believed had clogged her arteries.

  ‘Would it be fair to say…’ said Fenella, checking dates in her file, ‘… that just before your collapse, the stress was at its peak?’

  ‘Stress comes with the job,’ said Jack. ‘I’m not sure I felt significantly pressured then.’

  ‘But if we look at the timings, we see your mother dies, and then weeks later you collapse at an airport. You think they are entirely unconnected?’

  Jack hated easy-fit psychology. Life was full of shitty coincidences and sometimes lots of good things happened all at once, sometimes you got dealt several crappy hands one after the other. ‘I don’t for one moment buy the idea that my mother’s death in any way contributed to my illness,’ he said, sounding slightly annoyed. ‘Of course I loved her, of course it saddened me deeply, but I’d dealt with that. I’d understood that part of my life was over. Listen,’ he continued, more sharply than he’d intended, ‘every working day of my life, I was up close and personal to some form of death. I saw all variety of dead mothers, dead children and even dead babies. I met death in binders of crime scene photographs, on slabs down at the city morgue, under the buzz of a cranium bone saw in an autopsy and I saw death in the eyes and souls of all the evil bastards who had taken a life. Death and I are no strangers, we’ve been in close contact for a lot of my life.’

  Fenella paused. She let the heat from his monologue cool in the air around them. She knew she needed to give him some space. In time he’d come to recognize that even he should have given himself the opportunity to grieve properly for his parents. She decided to move on and opened the file on the coffee table. She found herself swallowing hard and steadying herself for what lay ahead. The details of the Black River Killer’s reign of terror made horrific reading, even for a hardened professional. ‘This was the case you were working on when you were taken ill. Sixteen victims, maybe more, going back at least two decades?’

  ‘Undoubtedly more,’ said Jack. He glanced at the file papers and the gates to his memory burst open: victims’ faces, glazed dead eyes, corpses mutilated as the killer hacked off the body part he always kept as a trophy; all the abominations rushed through again.

  ‘Tell me about him,’ urged Fenella.

&
nbsp; There was so much Jack could say that he barely knew where to begin. ‘BRK, that’s what the press called him, started like so many of them do. His first prey, or at least what we think was his first, was a young woman living in an isolated area. Somehow he abducted, murdered and killed her, then he dumped her body in the Black River, hence his nickname. Once he realized he could kill and get away with it, he developed a taste for it. He grew more confident and started to experiment. His paraphilias probably widened, his fantasies grew deeper and we started to discover evidence that he tortured the women before he killed them.’

  Fenella took a sip of water and made notes as Jack continued.

  ‘It became part of BRK’s MO to keep the corpses for as long as possible. Then, as soon as decomposition set in, he moved quickly to get rid of them, disposing of their bodies in the Black River. As time passed and he grew more experienced, he began dismembering the bodies and weighing down their severed limbs in plastic refuse sacks before scattering them miles apart. With every kill he’d become harder to catch.’

  ‘How often do you think about the Black River Killer?’

  ‘A lot. I still think of him a lot.’

  Fenella glanced at some dates in her notes. ‘It’s more than three years since you worked on the case, what makes you still think about him so much?’

  Jack shrugged.

  ‘Is it when a new murder occurs, or do you find yourself just thinking about him without any reason?’

  ‘He’s not killed since I was working the investigation. His last victim was the one I was handling when I had the collapse.’

  Fenella made more notes, then added, ‘So it isn’t news about him that triggers your thoughts and your nightmares?’

  ‘No. He’s always there at the back of my mind, I never lose his shadow, it’s always around somewhere.’

  ‘Tell me, during the day, when your mind turns to him, what are you thinking?’