Spider Read online

  ‘Howie, is this going to hurt us? Right now Jack is still on the mend, and, you know, we really could do without any extra stress.’ She found herself scratching at her neck, a nervous habit that she thought she had under control. ‘Tell me honestly, is this going to set him back?’

  Howie needed to drain the last of the beer can before he could answer her. ‘Truth is, Nancy, we’re going to have to reopen the BRK files, and there’s a good chance the press are going to be dragging up lots of old stuff on Jack.’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘I’m real sorry,’ said Howie, hearing her catching her breath on the other end of the line. ‘Are you okay?’

  She breathed out hard. ‘No, I’m not, Howie. I’m really not okay.’

  The good feeling that the beer and chicken had given him vanished. Howie knew it’d take more than a food-high to stop him feeling bad about this one. ‘Nancy, can you at least see that it’s best that I talk to Jack first? Best that I fill him in before he starts catching things on the news or in the papers?’

  ‘Howie, I don’t know. I can’t even think straight at the moment. Jack is in Florence, I’ll have him call you when he gets back.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Howie, pushing the plate of chicken away.

  ‘Sure,’ said Nancy, her voice tinged with bitterness. ‘By the way, Carrie’s right – you are a fat selfish pig who thinks more about the FBI than about anything that should really matter to you.’

  The line was dead before Howie could even think of a reply. It was just gone four a.m. but there was only one thing to do now, and that was open another can of beer.

  25

  Florence – Siena, Tuscany

  Jack read the case documentation twice. He turned back to the handwritten covering letter and dialled the cell phone number of Massimo Albonetti. The outskirts of Florence faded behind him as the train rattled and rumbled towards Siena.

  ‘Pronto,’ said a strong, male Italian voice, the ‘r’ sounding as richly deep as if it had rolled out of the mouth of an opera-trained baritone.

  ‘Massimo, it’s Jack – Jack King.’

  ‘Aaah, Jack,’ Massimo responded warmly, hoping his former FBI colleague had not been too disturbed by his request for help. ‘My friend, how are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, Mass,’ said Jack, picturing ‘the old goat’ at his desk in Rome, no doubt with an espresso on one side and a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the other. ‘I’m sure your young inspector has reported back to you.’

  Massimo cleared his voice, coughing politely into his hand. ‘Forgive me, please. I am so sorry I couldn’t be there toask youin person. Jack, you’ve seen the file, so you know why I needed you to see it so urgently.’

  ‘Yeah, I understand, Mass. No hard feelings, we go back too far for that.’ Jack recalled one of the many long nights they’d spent together, Italian reds to start with, American bourbon to finish. ‘I’d have probably done the same thing myself.’

  Massimo could hear Jack was on a train, knew he was returning to a family he was now being asked to turn his back on. ‘Jack, I wouldn’t have asked this of you if I thought we could solve this case without you. This man, this killer, no one knows him like you do.’

  Jack frowned. He was under no illusions about what joining the investigation could cost him. ‘It’s hardcore, Massimo. Hunting this creep nearly robbed me of everything.’

  Massimo felt awful. ‘iz. I know this. If I was not a policeman, then I would advise you not to get involved. As a friend, I would urge you to stay away and think only of yourself and your family. But Jack, I am a policeman, and so are you. And I know that only you can make a big difference. I know your skills, and with your assistance we have every chance of catching this man.’

  Sunlight blazed across an outspreading quilt of patterned green countryside. Jack stared towards the tree-lined horizon. Had BRK really been here? Had he brought his madness across the continents and poisoned this beautiful land with his bloodshed and barbarism?

  ‘The Barbuggiani case, there can be no mistaking any of the critical details?’

  ‘No,’ said Massimo unhesitatingly. ‘There is no mistake,’ he added, draining the last thick dregs of the inevitable espresso. ‘You are thinking about the hand, Jack, aren’t you?’

  Dozens of images flickered through Jack’s mind: the faces of women, the white morgue sheets being whipped back to reveal skeleton remains, the stumps of young girls’ arms from which the monster had hacked away his prize, the left hand – always the left hand – the hand of marriage.

  Massimo pulled on his cigarette. He wished he were face to face with his friend, glasses of something strong on a table between them, something to numb the shock he was sure Jack was feeling, something to remind them of old times. He blew out the smoke and tried not to make his words sound too hard. ‘There is no mistake. This man, he severed the hand in the same way as your other cases.’

  ‘Where?’ pressed Jack. ‘In the notes it’s not clear exactly where he made the cut.’

  ‘The incision was around the lower carpals.’ Massimo picked a speck of tobacco from his tongue. ‘It was a diagonal cut, slicing between the carpals and the ulna and radius bones.’

  Jack started to sweat. His mind filled with more flashbacks, this time of the killer, not his victims. He saw the man at work, moving slowly and carefully, preparing meticulously for what he was about to do. The monster manoeuvring his victim’s arm into position – was she alive at the time? Amputation attempts on the first victims were crude and sickeningly experimental; there were chisel marks and hesitant saw lines, chipping and gouging on bone, signs that maybe a hammer had been used to try to smash off his trophies. But that quickly became a thing of the past; soon BRK got himself the right tools for the job, no doubt read up on where to make the most effective cuts.

  ‘Are you still there, Jack?’ said Massimo. ‘I can’t hear you.’

  ‘A bad line,’ said Jack. ‘Tell me, Mass – what had your guy used to cut with?’ He steadied himself for the answer.

  ‘Some kind of professional hacksaw. By the look of the teeth marks it’s a bone saw, maybe an autopsy saw, most probably a butcher’s bone saw.’

  ‘Shit!’ said Jack. ‘Were the teeth on the saw clean, or were any of them broken?’

  ‘Not clean,’ confirmed Massimo. ‘It was an old saw. It had been used before. Forensics say they think it’s most likely a 35- or 40-centimetre blade with two sets of damaged teeth.’

  ‘Thirty-five to 40, what’s that, 15, 16 inches?’

  Massimo confirmed the conversion. ‘That’s about right.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Jack. ‘The first breaks come in a cluster of three. Then there’s an undamaged stretch of teeth running for about 7 inches, that’s roughly 17 centimetres, and then one more damaged tooth, slanting to the left.’

  ‘Hard to say,’ said Massimo. ‘There’s certainly evidence of some broken teeth. Jack, I’m afraid it’s the same man. There can be no doubt about it.’

  Jack couldn’t speak. It was all still sinking in. Just over twenty-four hours ago he’d travelled to Florence seeking what Nancy called ‘closure’. Now everything was very much open again. Wide open, like an infected wound that refuses to heal up.

  Massimo waited patiently. Down the line he could hear silence and then the sound of a passing train. He knew his friend was struggling to come to terms with it all.

  ‘Okay. I’m in,’ said Jack decisively. ‘I’ll help you. There’s no choice really. I have to give this another shot. I’ll call you on a better line when I’m at home in San Quirico and we can work out the logistics from there.’

  ‘Va bene. Molto bene, grazie,’ said Massimo gently. He was going to add something else but the line went dead; Jack had already hung up.

  Massimo held the phone in one hand and tapped it thoughtfully into the palm of the other, before returning it to the cradle. There were still some things he hadn’t told Jack about Cristina Barbuggiani’s murder; disturbi
ng facts he could now only tell him when he saw him in person.

  26

  West Village, SoHo, New York

  The first strokes of a watercolour dawn were being painted across New York as Howie settled down at the desk by a window in his den. Sometimes he worked better in the early hours, when his mind was clear of the clutter that came cascading in as soon as he set foot in the office.

  The Bigwigs back in Virginia had now officially asked him to reopen the BRK case and he needed every waking second of the day to start ramping up the enquiry. They’d tasked him with putting together a small team (nothing over budget) to re-examine evidence and work with the cops in Georgetown to see whether the desecration of Sarah Kearney’s grave gave them anything new.

  Howie nursed a mug of black coffee and began to wade through a forest of background paperwork he’d hauled home from the office. He started with the computerized statistical and psychological profiles that had been produced by PROFILER and VICAP, the FBI’s two main serial-killer computer systems. BRK took up a zillion gigs of data, and the depth of the study was making things tougher not easier. The stats were hard to stomach at any time of day, but pre-breakfast, they were totally unpalatable. More than thirty thousand witness statements spread across forty cities, spanning twenty years. More than eighty thousand vehicle-check entries, more than two thousand previous offender study cases. Howie felt his will to live draining from him. Man, the fingerprint checking alone was enough to reduce you to tears. IAFIS, the FBI’s own Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, had run more than seven thousand sets of prints through its database, making comparisons with more than forty million cases on its Criminal Master File, and had generated more than ten thousand latent fingerprint reports. On top of that, they’d used cutting-edge science to lift dozens of DNA traces out of the prints themselves. The boffins behind CODIS, the Bureau’s Combined DNA Index System, had pumped their databases but the genetic profiles that they extracted hadn’t matched any known offenders. In the old days, the problem had been that science hadn’t been good enough to retrieve vital evidence; these days the difficulty was reversed. There was so much evidence; it was exhausting to work out what had come from the victim, the attacker or just innocent people whose paths had crossed a criminal crossroads. So how much closer had all the technology and science brought them to finding their man?

  Not an inch.

  Sure, there were prints, genetic profiles, statistical profiles, suggested car sightings, and suchlike. But nothing that could lead them to a prime suspect. And without a suspect, they had jack shit. Data was great if your perp was already a convicted felon, but if he’d never been written up, then it wasn’t worth a dime.

  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 the wisdom of the crowd. He reckoned there were other, much simpler reasons. As Howie picked up his coffee again, his old buddy’s words came rolling back to him: ‘He just can’t bear to let his victims go. He wants to keep them for ever. Dead bodies can’t run out on you. He’s killing for companionship.’

  Howie swallowed the bitter black coffee and considered how much better it would taste with another doughnut, especially a chocolate one. Right now he could do with food to aid his troubled thoughts.

  The only real clue this guy gives us is how he disposes of the bodies.

  He chops them up and spreads them all over the place.

  He drives to rivers, swamps, estuaries, wherever there’s deep water, and tosses the body parts in.

  What does all that tell us?

  Jack had asked the question many times and they’d come up with dozens of theories. He was drawn to water; he was a fisherman; he was brought up by a river; or maybe he saw his father use the river as a garbage chute. Maybe he was a sailor, perhaps he knew the local ports and used them to come and go, before and after the killings. The FBI had checked it all out, even double-checked some of it. Perhaps Jack’s simple explanation had been right all along.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is, Howie; next to fire, water is the best way to get rid of a corpse. Three-quarters of our planet is covered in water; that’s a big place to hide bodies. Bury a corpse and you can almost always see the soil’s been disturbed; people walk by, animals dig it up, before you know it there’s a 911 being rung in. But weigh down
body parts, then drop them in deep water and for a long time no one but Davy Jones will find out what you’ve done. When something eventually does come to the surface, it’s stripped barer than a KFC drumstick during a Superbowl. Trust me, Howie, the only fixation this guy has with water is that it’s a tool to help him. If he can find a better tool, then he’ll switch from water in a shot.’

  Howie went back to his profile and added:

  Organized

  Careful

  Intelligent

  Ruthless

  Meticulous

  He almost also wrote down ‘pancakes, ham and fresh coffee’; because they were on his mind as he fought back another pre-breakfast grumble around his bulging belt-line.

  If he had to describe the killer right now, he’d say he was looking at a white male, of above average intelligence, aged about forty-five, with no previous criminal record, who was financially independent, drove an unexceptional vehicle and probably didn’t even have a parking ticket to his name. He wasn’t a risk-taker; he was a grey type of fella who blended in with whatever was going on and never stood out from the crowd. He was single, most likely never married and was – was what? Howie paused as he considered his sexuality. Was he homosexual? Were they homosexual attacks on pretty heterosexual women? He didn’t think so. Why should they be? Howie crossed it off his mental list. Were they heterosexual lust murders? Maybe. Perhaps the dismemberment was disguising something that he did to the corpse, something so depraved that he didn’t want another living soul to discover what he’d done. It was a possibility. But there was no real trace evidence to support it. No semen on the bodies, or in body wounds, no sign of anything being rammed, jammed or slammed into any orifice. There had been some markings on the wrist and shin bones, possibly fetishist restraints, but more likely just the work of a methodical jailer making sure his prisoner didn’t escape. He wished again that Jack was there to help him. Serial sex crimes had been his buddy’s speciality. There had been no one better in the business.