Spider

Fenella knew he was self-censoring, holding back the full force of what was filling his thoughts. 'And do you think about how he actually felt while committing those acts?'

'No, not as much as I used to,' he answered. 'When I was working on the case, I used to think about that a lot. We are trained to think like that, to put ourselves in the shoes of those we hunt. We have to think how they think, feel how they feel, and understand what it's like to do what they do.'

'And what do you think it's like?'

'For them? What do I think scum like BRK feel when they do these things?'

'Yes.'

Jack's face hardened. 'I think, for them, the experience is amazing. Godlike. They literally have the power of life and death. And that, for the BRKs of this world, killing is the ultimate thrill. Nothing on earth compares to it and, once they have experienced it, they are addicted as surely as if murder were a narcotic.'

The flashbacks came again: blood splatters, floaters in the river, fingertip searches. Jack mentally dammed the flood of images.

Fenella leant forward on the couch and lowered her voice. 'You don't sound judgemental. How do you do that?'

'Do what?' He gave her a puzzled look.

'Suppress the disgust, the repulsion that you must feel?'

Jack was thrown for a minute. The honest answer was that he didn't feel anything any more. The endless diet of homicidal horror had bludgeoned his senses into dullness. But how could he say that out loud and not sound inhumane? How could he admit that victims and killers had ceased being people and had been reduced in his mind to objects and puzzles, a mere algebra of violence? 'It's a good question,' he conceded. 'To be judgemental would be to blinker myself as an investigator, and I can't afford to do that. I can't afford any killer or rapist I interview to see any sign of that. Whatever they've done, however they've taken a life, I have to show them that I'm there to understand why they did it, rather than condemn what they've done.'

Fenella noted that he still spoke, and to a large extent behaved, as though he were an FBI agent. It was something she'd come back to, perhaps at another session, if indeed there was one. 'I want to move on now to the exact content of your nightmares. Are you comfortable doing that?'

Jack shifted defensively in his seat. 'You going to go all Freudian and Jungian on me?'

'Maybe a little. Freud described dreaming as "the royal road to the unconscious" and I think it's a route worth going down.'

'Then, let's go.' Jack was surprised to see that he'd clasped his hands and was bracing himself. He felt his temperature rise and his heartbeat quicken. He closed his eyes for a second and stared into the grey-black eggshell darkness of his mind. 'I'm at an autopsy. It's being held in the middle of a night, in some dead-end town I've never been to before. It's not my case; the cop in charge has asked me to step in at the last minute. We're all downstairs, in some kind of basement; looks more like a cellar in a house than an autopsy room. It's cold and has the sweet stink of old sump oil and running damp. The walls are brick and painted white, the floor is black and hard and your feet crunch when you move, as though you are walking on broken glass. Rusty pipes run along the ceiling and hiss and rumble in a way that makes you think they are going to break and burst at any minute.'

She noted the vividness and starkness of his language, how even in his dreams Jack had a sharpened sense of observation, was aware of sounds, smells and even things under his feet that he couldn't see.

'The ME's working like crazy, almost as though he's a surgeon trying to save a life, rather than a pathologist methodically opening up a body. He's moving so quickly around the slab I can't see who he is. Every time I reposition myself to try to say something, the guy shifts on to another part of the body. The girl on the slab is sixteen-year-old Lisa Maria Jenkins, BRK's last known victim. She'd been butchered like a piece of meat. Head, hands, legs, feet, all cut off. Her left hand was never discovered, BRK had kept it as a trophy. But in the dream, Lisa's intact; looking as beautiful as her last birthday picture, when her long brown hair was tied back in a pony-tail.'

Jack struggled to go on. Clearly the cognitive experience was troubling him, but Fenella did nothing to fill the silence or give him a way out. He pinched his eyes for a second, then continued. 'As I look at her face, I realize something's wrong. She's still breathing. I shout "Hey, look, look, she's alive!', but the ME ignores me and just carries on cutting her open, pulling intestines and organs out of a huge cavity in her stomach. Suddenly, the pipes break free from the wall and start pouring blood on to the floor, as if they're giant veins. I'm screaming now, "Stop! For Christ's sake, stop cutting her, she's alive!" But he blanks me. As I rush around the table to try to get hold of him he runs the buzz saw across her neck, decapitating her. I recognize him now. I realize why he's been dodging me, not letting me see his face.'

'You say you recognize him. Who is it, Jack?'

He raised his head and stared straight at her. 'It's me. The monster in my dreams is me.'

It was Fenella's turn to sit in silence, pen motionless on the notepaper.

'Tell me, please tell me; how can I control these nightmares?'

Fenella's heart went out to him. She understood his dilemma and it was a dark and dangerous one. 'Jack, you already have control. The level of lucidity you describe indicates that you deliberately trigger these thoughts. Subconsciously you want to see these things, you have a need to re-examine the case that you walked away from and, in the absence of new evidence, your imagination is inventing it.'

Jack was staring at the floor. He nodded slowly. He understood now, but what was the way out? 'What exactly do I have to do to stop them?'

The psychiatrist waited until he raised his eyes to look at her. 'You already know that, don't you?'

And he did.

Jack fully understood that he could choose to stop the nightmares any time he wanted. But he could only do so by admitting to himself that his personal hunt to catch the Black River Killer really was over.

13

FBI Field Office, New York Special Agent Howie Baumguard sat at his desk, losing a messy hand-wrestling competition with a deli lunch. The bagel spewed salmon out of one side and low-fat cheese out of the other. He licked the cheese away but the salmon hit his paperwork before he could juggle it into his hungry mouth. He'd missed breakfast and had been forced to cancel a lunch appointment, so right now the bagel and a blisteringly hot Americano figured top of his list of life's priorities. Howie was carrying too much weight, not just for his own liking but also for that of Carrie, his size-zero, Botox-addicted wife, who'd pronounced that either the 'love handles' went or Howie could start learning how to cook for one on the few cents she'd leave him after she sued his fat ass for all the alimony she could get.

Not many people would have been able to even think about eating when faced with what was on Howie's desk, but the FBI man had seen much worse and eaten much more. The pictures had been sent in by the cops over in Georgetown and downloaded and printed up by Admin. The glossies were good CSU shots, cold and brutal in their framing but hugely informative. Wide angles set the scene, first from out on the streets that surrounded the cemetery. Then there were 'aerials', high views, presumably from the nearby church, that showed the layout of the graves. Gradually the shots got closer to the desecration. They were framed wide-angle, then medium close-up, big close-up and finally damned near microscopic.

Howie's chubby fingers struggled to pick up the stray salmon. Finally, he caught it and then accidentally wiped the grease residue on a mid-shot of Sarah Elizabeth Kearney's decapitated corpse. Poor kid, thought Howie, dabbing away the grease, just twenty-two when she was butchered. If she'd lived, she would have been forty-two today, probably with a daughter of her own and maybe even grandkids. What kind of sick fuck would rob someone of their future like that? And more to the point, what even sicker fuck would dig her up two decades later and pull the skull off her skeletonized corpse? Howie shook his head in disbelief. To the best of his knowledge, twenty-first-century grave-robbing was damned unusual stuff. On the rare occasions that it happened, the perp was usually some whacked-out druggie, maybe a weird devil worshipper or, every now and then, an extremely disturbed husband who simply couldn't accept that his wife was gone for ever. Local cops always tried to hush up these kinds of cases and the newspapers usually played ball on the latter.