Crabbe's kitchen held little food that could be considered fresh. Frozen goods, mostly white stuff made of flour – pies, pizzas, dim sims; packaged noodle meals in the cupboards, flavoured milk toppings, and bags and bags of salty snacks – potato and corn chips, Cheezels. A loaf of white bread, jam, and no-frills, plastic-wrapped cheese slices in the fridge, along with margarine, four litres of milk, and a can of whipped cream. Four litres. Sheesh. For one guy. Jill was willing to bet she'd find laxatives or suppositories in the bathroom cupboard. No way this guy's bowels were doing anything of their own accord.
She re-holstered her firearm and retrieved the box from the hallway. She knew what she'd find in the bedroom, but went in anyway. The rest of the taskforce would also be collecting anything incriminating left at their scenes, although most of their evidence had been collated already and was now over at Central. The Leichhardt detectives had found pornography in the cupboard next to Crabbe's bed and on the PC he kept on a small desk in the bedroom. They'd taken most of this in and given Jill authority to clear the rest. A digital camera had been found, smashed, next to his body, but the techies had already managed to retrieve from it dozens of skin-crawling images of kids.
In the bedroom, Jill pulled on latex gloves and piled CDs, magazines and videocassettes into the box, avoiding looking at any of the pictures. A huge, glossy-black cockroach scuttled across one of the pillows on the bed.
'Missing your master?' she said aloud to the insect, deriving some satisfaction from the fact that Crabbe's face had earlier been lying on that pillow.
She moved through to the bathroom; although relatively clean, the mould growing in the grout made her grimace. She stared at the fungus and thought about the man who had lived here. 'That's just what you were, Crabbe,' she said to the shower walls. 'Mould growing in wet cracks.' She turned to the small, mirrored cupboard on the wall. Anti-dandruff shampoo, condoms. The usual toiletries and medicines. Laxatives. She smiled deprecatingly and closed the cabinet. Her own face in the mirror startled her. Sometimes she couldn't recognise herself. She left the bathroom.
Jill picked up the box and left the house; she couldn't wait now to have a shower. Setting the box down, she took a few photos of the doorway, the shrubbery, the park behind it, the street. They'd have all these photos anyway, but she wanted to make sure she'd recorded what she saw. She put the box in the car boot and walked around to the driver's door, preparing to leave. A few porch lights were on at the neighbours', and the streetlights would come on soon. It was still a beautiful late afternoon. A sprawling frangipani in the park sat in a lake of sweet scented blossoms, the smell almost cloying on the warm breeze.
The swing set sat forlornly in the centre of the park. She walked over and sat on the swing, looked back at the house. This area would have been like a stage to Crabbe, on his lounge, leering through his window. She moved over to the graffiti-covered park bench and sat down. She realised that just as Crabbe could watch the park, someone sitting on this bench could watch him too. If his curtains remained open, anyone sitting here could see right through his house.
Her mobile pealed and she snapped it open.
'Hi, Ma,' she smiled into the phone. 'Working… Yeah, yeah, I'm going home now.' She talked for a few moments longer, agreeing to meet her mother in the city for shopping on the weekend, and then ended the call. As she was putting the phone back in her pocket, she looked at the ground at her feet. Next to a chocolate wrapper and a used condom was a small mound of crushed out cigarette butts. Gitanes, lipstick rimmed.
Mercy, what are you doing? she thought.
A dog barked a welcome to its returning owner, and a baby squalled. Jill got off the bench and headed back to her car for an evidence bag to collect the butts.
38
'It's possible that you're describing a mission-oriented serial killer.'
As agreed in their first meeting, the taskforce had decided to consult a forensic psychiatrist. Jardine had arranged the appointment, and because the doctor was very busy and they were pressed for time, they'd agreed to meet on his turf, the university campus at which he taught part-time.
Jill shifted a little in the lecture-theatre chair and focused upon the doctor's words.
'You see, there are several types of multiple murderers,' the psychiatrist continued, instructing them as he might his forensic science and psychology students. 'Australia uses the American FBI system developed in the eighties to classify homicides by patterns and motives.
'Most mass murderers are sexually motivated, but I don't see a lot of evidence for this in these cases. Rather, your perp might consider they are ridding the world of evil – hence the "mission-oriented" label. The aim here is for power, control. Sometimes they see themselves as God. Of course, the motive could still be revenge, as you've speculated, but the killer may also see their acts as benefiting society in some way.'
Jill coughed quietly. No-one needed her opinion on that point right now.
'Given that the murders have been committed in such a short time period,' said the doctor, 'it could be the case that this is a spree killer, someone who is on a non-stop rampage, with little cool-down time between murders. Do you have any evidence that this person could have struck at any other time or place?'
'No,' answered Jardine. 'As far as we're aware, this is it, although we're in the process of checking past homicides across the country.'
'Although it's a rather arbitrary distinction,' the doctor continued, 'a serial killer differs from a spree killer in the amount of cooling down time they have between hits. The serial killer might wait weeks or months before killing again, and can function well between kills in an ordinary life. The spree killer, on the other hand, is in a frenzy, spending all of their waking hours planning and enacting the next death.'
'Does it really matter what we call this son-of-a-bitch?' Elvis was perched on the edge of a desk in the auditorium. Jill had spent a couple of moments wondering whether this was in order to be positioned at a greater height than the rest of them – a power play – or because his belly couldn't fit under the desks permanently attached to the chairs. Watching him move a little as he spoke, she suspected the latter.
'Well, you're right to some extent,' the psychiatrist re-sponded. 'Labelling your chap as a serial or spree killer is not terribly important.' Jill saw Elvis smirk. 'However, finding the right motivation for these acts is essential, in my view, for hunting him down.
'As it's your task to catch this fellow, I'll run through a list of the motivations for multiple murders, and together we'll consider the appropriate taxonomy.'
The tall, slim, greying man moved to the whiteboard at the front of the room.
'Before you begin, Professor Mendelssohn' – Scotty was crammed into one of the little desks, and he'd actually raised his hand like a schoolboy – 'it's just that you keep saying "fellow" and "chap", and we're not positive it is a bloke doing this.'
Jill had so far only told Scotty about the distinctive cigarette butts she found in the park next to Crabbe's home, the type Mercy smoked. She wanted a chance to better understand what Mercy was up to before she sicked the dogs onto her. She didn't want to believe that Mercy could be responsible for the killing. It was more than that, though – howcould she be responsible? The violence was so extreme, and Mercy just did not seem physically large enough.
'Quite right, young man,' said Professor Mendelssohn, 'we must keep an open mind. There have been female serial killers, although they are, of course, much rarer than their male counterparts. And so, keeping that in mind, we'll consider motivation.'