Bailey lay on her bunk staring up at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the paintwork, speculating with a slight tinge of guilt that it was kind of nice to have the cell to herself for the time being. Privacy was at such a premium in this place. But, of course, for Sharon’s sake, she would have wished for different circumstances in which to have obtained that privacy.
An orange light filtered through the small window as the sun went down outside, the bars casting long shadows against one wall. She was now locked in for the evening and activity within the prison had died down to the sporadic clang here and there of a distant door opening and closing, the odd shout, the odd cry.
With Sharon’s demise, the overall sense of claustrophobia in the prison had grown even more cloying. Now as night fell, it began to impinge on Bailey more than ever. She lay there, acutely aware that, all alone, she was that much more vulnerable to someone sneaking in when she was asleep pulling out a knife and—
She shut off the thought. She couldn’t afford to let herself succumb to the fear that was enveloping the rest of the inmates otherwise she’d be no good to anyone.
Maybe Frank did have a point about her mental state. After all, here she was insisting on remaining locked up in this miserable and oppressive place surrounded by people who’d happily do her in without a second thought if they knew she was a policewoman. On top of that she was trapped in here with a killer who appeared to have a penchant for scalping and it wasn’t wildly unrealistic to suppose that she herself could be the next victim.
Maybe that last job had sent her round the bend. Maybe she should be paying more attention to Doctor Bodie…
Screw that.
She reminded herself why she was still here. She was here to find out who killed Alice and make sure that they faced the appropriate justice.
It was all about justice at the end of the day.
Justice was the spur that drove her onwards from deep within. Jennifer. An eight-year-old child standing permanently on the periphery of her consciousness, demanding justice, ever since she’d gone missing all those years before. Bailey couldn’t let her down.
She’d told Frank that she was their best shot. But was she really? Now that she knew it wasn’t the gang, she was right back at square one. The murder squad, with their team of dedicated detectives and their fancy technical resources, had been working on this since the beginning and had made little progress in their investigation. Did she really believe that she could do better than them just by herself, all in the space of the next two weeks? Doubts were starting to creep in…
She forcibly quashed them and turned her thoughts again to the evidence, rolling it over and over in her mind, trying to establish a new perspective from which to approach it.
She needed to think like a homicide detective.
She needed to think in terms of offender profiling.
What could she infer about the characteristics of the offender based upon their crime scene behaviour?
There was obviously one blatant element that linked all of the murders – the victims had all been scalped. And that was really all that she had to go on right now. So that had to be where she started.
She’d assumed that this mutilation had just been a gory way for the gang to strike fear into the inmate population. But if the murders weren’t connected to drugs and power, then it would seem that the scalping formed a reason in and of itself.
But who would do such a thing and for what reason? It made little sense, but whatever the motive, the perpetrator was clearly a very sick and dangerous individual.
There had to be some clue somewhere in this huge dilapidated dump. She lay there on her bunk and thought about everything that she’d seen and experienced over the past few weeks, raking over her memories for any salient details. There had to be something. There had to be.