Oliver Stark - American Devil

‘I need a sample, Winston.’

Winston stood up without question and took the small bottle. ‘You gonna let me go back to the hospital?’ he asked as he unzipped himself and urinated into the small bottle.

‘If you’re good I will,’ said Dr Keys.

‘I’m invisible out here. No one sees me. I can just walk right through them.’

‘Well, I can make you visible again, Winston. Don’t you worry.’

Winston nodded. Dr Keys sat down on a small side table and took out a notebook. ‘I’ve got some things I need to go through with you. It’s all in the name of rehabilitation. It’s a new approach to help guys like you reintegrate. What we do, Winston, is ask you to follow some of those urges of yours under close supervision. We monitor your testosterone levels each week and see if there’s a pattern.’

‘You want me to follow my urges?’

‘That’s right, Winston. What we will try to do is watch you and monitor how you act out here in the real world. Then we can see if we understand you a little better. Are you interested?’

Winston stared for a moment and then nodded. ‘I guess.’

Forty minutes later, Dr Keys walked out of the halfway house and took a quick turn around the perimeter of the building. Winston was an obedient patient. He would do as he was told. It was looking like a very good choice. Dr Keys was pleased. Before he left, he had enough time to find the only Volvo in the parking lot and, therefore, the car belonging to Miss Adams.

He took out a small thin blade from his pocket, slipped it under the hood then yanked the engine cover open. He quickly identified the brake feed and cut a nick in the pipe. That would give her perhaps another three hours of driving before, hopefully, she paralysed herself driving across a red light.

Dr Levene’s Office

November 19, 5.30 p.m.

Harper and Eddie took the news from the Medical Examiner back to Williamson and the team. The cherry blossom hidden in Amy’s throat and now inside Jessica showed the killer was enjoying setting a little puzzle for the cops. Harper wondered if the killer was starting his next phase. He had started to communicate with the police and media by posing the corpse and hiding his signature cherry blossom.

Harper took the Mary-Jane file from Williamson’s desk and began looking for some evidence to back up his idea that her killing had not been planned. It took him about an hour to read through the key documents and they seemed to confirm what he’d thought. He took out the interview with Mary-Jane’s school principal. She said that Mary-Jane had left school at 1 p.m. that day, just after the end of the morning session, as she’d forgotten an essay. The killer could not have known that, could he? If he didn’t know that she was going to be home then it might have been a chance meeting. He might have been scoping out her apartment. Harper took out the report from A-Z Security, the company responsible for the elaborate entry procedure at the Samuelson building. It showed that someone entered the apartment on Mrs Samuelson’s card at 12.30 p.m., half an hour before Mary-Jane left for home.

That was the evidence he needed. The killer was in her apartment. He hadn’t followed her in. He didn’t expect her to return. This guy was an obsessive stalker with multiple targets who needed to get closer and closer to his victims just to keep the buzz alive. He felt the need to get so close that he touched them up in the street, took things they owned and even tried to snoop around where they lived and get intimate shots. Then, he took it one step further. He wanted to be in Mary-Jane’s bedroom. He needed to be there, so he broke in. Harper let the situation come to life in his mind. He had been wrong to think that the killer was stalking her that day. How else would the killer know she’d left school early? He didn’t know, did he? She came back early, he was in her room. He saw her. She screamed. He panicked and grabbed her. She had no idea he was a killer and fought hard, but he’d held her easily. He was strong. Nothing was overturned in her apartment, but she had bruises all over her body. The autopsy had found his skin under her fingernails. She had fought him.

He had to stop her or his whole plan would fail. He put his hands round her neck. He just kept them there until she stopped breathing.

Harper knew he was right. That was what happened. An accident. An unfortunate coincidence that he chose to steal into her room on the day she had forgotten her homework and slipped back at lunchtime.

An accident had triggered all his fantasies. And he’d liked it. Christ, he’d really got a taste for it.

Harper had an idea about what they might do. A long shot, but he needed to talk this through with someone who understood criminal behaviour. He needed Dr Levene’s input.

Forty minutes later, Harper hurried up the corridor towards Denise Levene’s office. He needed someone to show him how to unlock the symbols. He pushed straight through the office door and looked directly at her. ‘He didn’t mean to kill Mary-Jane. She disturbed him. I want to know the implications for his behaviour.’

Denise stared up at Harper with a look of surprise. She pointed across to the chair in the middle of the room. ‘I’m with a client, Tom.’

‘Did you not hear me? We need to talk now. He’s killing every couple of days. Grace Frazer on November 14, Amy Lloyd-Gardner on November 16. He killed again last night.’

‘Yeah, I heard it on the radio this morning. Can you give me a moment, Tom? I’m with someone.’

Tom moved towards her desk. ‘How is he keeping up the pace? Psychologically? Is it possible? I’ve never known anything like it.’

Denise stood up and walked round her desk. She smiled at her client, a rookie officer who was now looking more terrified than ever, and put her hand softly on Tom’s shoulder. ‘Can you just step outside for a moment and let me wrap up here?’

Tom only then noticed the cowering figure looking lost in the big black leather chair. He apologized and retreated.

Outside her office, Tom paced. The need to move was more powerful than anything else. He needed to do something. The killer needed to be engaged or flushed out. With the profiler at the New York field office going cold on the case and refusing to take a line, the team was left with old-fashioned detective work — piecing together every piece of available information and looking for something that linked the bodies and crime scenes with the identity of the unsub. But Harper knew, just as the rest of the team knew, that that took time and it was just dawning on them that time was something the killer was using against them. He was leaving them no time to assimilate and process the details before he struck again.

Harper picked up a magazine, flicked through it absently and then threw it back down on the glass table. He looked at his watch, and then, right beside it, the thick green attitude band that Denise Levene had somehow got him to agree to wear at the end of the last session. He put it on after the fiasco at Erin Nash’s apartment. Denise was right, he got angry a lot. Now he was feeling the anger burning up inside him, so he pulled the elastic back and let it slap hard against his wrist. It twanged and stung. He did it once more. Yeah, it distracted him momentarily.

Denise appeared at the door of her office with the rookie, who made a big detour as he walked away to avoid Tom Harper’s great brooding figure. Denise was feeling excited rather than annoyed. The case had been keeping her awake since Tom had talked about it the previous morning and now he was here unprompted. She’d pieced together what she knew about the killer but she needed detailed crime scene information if she was going to be able to help. Maybe Tom Harper would fill in some of the missing pieces.