Dull light slithered over the page, throwing its shadows over the words of the coroner’s report. Words he knew too well. Descriptions of savagery he didn’t need photographs to visualise.
Daniel Mannelli thumbed over the page, swallowing a mouthful of lukewarm coffee, tasting it leak down his throat like treacle. The face of Caroline Öberg smiled up at him in one shot. Her mutilated corpse bled for him in the black and white beside it. He could hear the squad room busy with subdued life.
He shifted his glance towards the window, his thoughts drifting through the plate glass and out onto the street, seeking out the Trinity Killer and his elegiac cortege.
He stood, paced, sat again.
And not for the first time he found his thoughts chasing around the rabbit-warren of murky streets and murkier crimes that were described so accurately by The Watcher.
Questions he had, but no answers to go with them. Where did he learn so much about the killings he described, the mutilations? A handful of detectives had been trusted with truth about the garrottings and dismemberments, no words for the press, no hints to the blackly macabre side of The Trinity’s nature. Murders and murderers there were aplenty, the number of active serial killers in the States alone had peaked at over eighty in the last month, but this kind of killing, this brutal vivisectionist nightmare, this was a taboo limited to single figures. The damaged killers whose psychoses and neuroses drove them into the arms of depravation.
But slowly things had begun adding up; after Brendon Ellery’s call to Delgado about his copycat theory, The Watcher’s cleaning up made a sick kind of sense. Not a copycat killer. A street cleaner who lacked the subtle artistry of the man he followed. A man killing the dead because his own demons insisted they would rise again.
Mannelli reached around for the tape recorder, suddenly needing to hear the voice again, knowing it and knowing he knew it.
“Doesn’t hurt does it, padre?” Bill Stern wheezed at him.