Spider

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.

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?'

'I wonder about what he's doing, who he might share his life with, how he manages to live with himself. How normal he may be, or appear to be.'