Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

Summer was always a mixed blessing for a single mother. Once school was out, the whole business of organizing the day became an exhausting exercise in logistics and scheduling. This inevitably involved her ex-husband, whose meticulously organized agendas were just one of the many hurdles she was going to face in the coming months. To make matters even worse, Kristine had just learned that Clark and Donnie Wallis were going to Europe for four months.

The Wallises owned the house that backed on to Kristine’s, and their son Brent was Thomas’s best friend. Kristine thought Brent was kind of dorky, if the truth were told, but she recognized that he and Thomas together possessed the key to a magic kingdom she would never enter. They played happily for hours on end, massaging each other’s fantasies and fears in ways that were incomprehensible to any adult, but which kept them occupied and only rarely ended in tears. Clark Wallis had confided to Kristine that the relationship with Thomas had been “really helpful with Brent’s anger management.”

So when Donnie called with the news that Clark, a systems analyst with Microsoft, was being sent to Frankfurt to oversee the installation of a new computer network for a German bank, and that she and the kids were going along, Kristine felt as if the long-threatened Seattle earthquake had arrived, demolishing some structures, rendering others unsafe, and opening up giant fissures in the texture of her life. Donnie’s interest was in finding someone to rent their house, not an easy task given the short notice and limited period of availability.

Kristine had promised to do what she could, not out of a sense of loyalty to the Wallises but because that would enable her to add a condition which Donnie hadn’t mentioned: that the prospective renters should have children, preferably boys, ideally of about Thomas’s age. She loved the Wallingford neighborhood where she lived, but its demographic mix tended to be split fairly evenly between older couples whose children had left home and younger ones whose offspring were still in diapers.

To the left of the cedar where Thomas was perched rose a gaunt telephone pole, a stripped tree trunk with metal climbing brackets imitating the vanished branches. The stave of cables running up the street was intersected by three wires strung at an angle, feeding her house and the one next door. Where they crossed, the wires appeared to thin out, as though melting into each other. One of the crows which had started infesting the neighborhood sat on an insulator, emitting raucous cries. Kristine briefly fantasized about getting her pistol from the locked drawer where she kept it and blowing the evil thing away in a shower of blood and feathers.

She knew very well that far from being evil, the crows probably fulfilled some vital function in the internal economy of the biomass, but to her they were as much intruders as the nonnative species of plants imported by nostalgic immigrants. Like holly or Scotch broom, the crows, arrogant and rapacious, seemed to symbolize other, more sinister forms of invasion which Kristine sensed at work behind the Renton massacre.

Her attempt to demonstrate that this was not an inexplicable anomaly but part of a campaign of organized killings had taken on the character of a crusade whose fervor, she knew, had made her something of a joke at work. It was true that she was overmotivated. As a native Seattleite, she felt affronted by the idea that something like this could happen here, and as a devout though lapsed Christian she was appalled that it could happen anywhere. But if she was obsessing, then her superiors, it seemed to her, were in denial.

“Close, but no cigar,” Dick Rice had replied when Kristine had given him her dog-and-pony show on the possibility of a link with the case in Kansas City.

Rice, a tough, taciturn man in his mid-forties whose first reaction to any topic was what could it do for or to his career, was head of the Criminal Investigation Division of King County Police. Kristine knew his wife, who was a pillar of the smells ‘n’ bells Episcopal church on Queen Anne Hill which she attended on the increasingly rare occasions when the urge took her, and she had taken advantage of this to go straight to the top.

“OK, so they both bought the same kind of shoes. BFD. You know how many pairs of those Nikes they sell every year?”

“The gun was the same too,” Kristine put in defensively, and immediately regretted it.

“The same caliber,” Rice shot back. “We don’t even know it was a six-shot or automatic, never mind the make or model.”

“And the shells, and the tape, and the handcuffs …”

Rice stared at her for a moment with his wary, reptilian eyes. Then he shook his head.

“I took a course, Kristine, statistical theory? They got some numbers-butt from UW in to explain the whole thing. One of the things he did, he gave us these lists of random numbers and got us to see if any of them had any significance in terms of our lives. And it was just amazing! One guy found his complete date of birth, another got almost all his phone number, someone else found his social security plus his daughter’s age. But none of it means a damn thing. They’re just strings of numbers churned out by a computer someplace.”

Rice tapped the memo which Kristine had sent him.

“It’s the same with this. Sure, you’ve found a few corresponding features in one other case among the hundreds of thousands reported all over the country every year. You know what? It would be amazing if you hadn’t . If we asked HITS to run a search for homicide victims with green eyes, a birthday in March, fallen arches and a grandparent living in Spokane, I bet it would come up with a few matches. That’s because computers are so smart they’re dumb enough to answer any question you ask them. What I’m saying, even if you came up with half a dozen matches a lot tighter than this, you’d still be well within the statistical norm. And since you’re pitching this KC job so hard, I take it you didn’t.”

Kristine Kjarstad looked away, conceding the point. Initially, she had been optimistic about the outcome of computer searches, both at state and federal level. In fact it had been the routine chore of filling out the mandatory HITS form on the Renton killings which had originally forced her to confront her growing doubts about the way the case was being handled.

All police and sheriffs’ departments in Washington State were required to submit information on murders, attempted murders and predatory sex offenses to the computerized Homicide Investigation and Tracking System run by the state attorney general’s office. The paperwork was supposed to take thirty minutes to complete, but in this particular case Kristine had spent over an hour puzzling out the most appropriate answers. The basic facts were easily transcribed from her full report: the date and time parameters, victim characteristics and background, method of operation, cause of death and forensic details. Things started to get tricky at the section headed INCIDENT CLASSIFICATION.

There were thirty-two choices, ranging from “Heat of anger” and “Drug-related” to “Psychopathic” and the chilling “Fun/amusement.” Confronting this list, Kristine quickly realized that she could check five or six completely different categories, each of them as plausible as the others. Was it “Domestic violence” or “Serial/possible serial”? “Hate” or “Cult (ritualistic)”? “Conspiracy” or “Mental/ insane”? She finally opted for “Unable to determine.”

But when she came to the next question-“Based on your experience and the results of the investigation of this case, do you believe this offender has killed before?”-she found herself, after a considerable struggle, marking “Yes.” It took even longer to complete the sentence “Evidence suggests the victim in this case is …” Here she hesitated still longer, before choosing response three, “a victim in a possible series.” And the pattern which had been lying dormant in her mind finally became clear when for “Victim-offender relationship” she passed over “Spouse,” “Family member (other,” “Friend,” “Acquaintance (business, drugs, etc)” and checked “Total stranger.”