Michael Morley - Spider

Sunlight blazed across an outspreading quilt of patterned green countryside. Jack stared towards the tree-lined horizon. Had BRK really been here? Had he brought his madness across the continents and poisoned this beautiful land with his bloodshed and barbarism?

'The Barbuggiani case, there can be no mistaking any of the critical details?'

'No,' said Massimo unhesitatingly. 'There is no mistake,' he added, draining the last thick dregs of the inevitable espresso. 'You are thinking about the hand, Jack, aren't you?'

Dozens of images flickered through Jack's mind: the faces of women, the white morgue sheets being whipped back to reveal skeleton remains, the stumps of young girls' arms from which the monster had hacked away his prize, the left hand – always the left hand – the hand of marriage.

Massimo pulled on his cigarette. He wished he were face to face with his friend, glasses of something strong on a table between them, something to numb the shock he was sure Jack was feeling, something to remind them of old times. He blew out the smoke and tried not to make his words sound too hard. 'There is no mistake. This man, he severed the hand in the same way as your other cases.'

'Where?' pressed Jack. 'In the notes it's not clear exactly where he made the cut.'

'The incision was around the lower carpals.' Massimo picked a speck of tobacco from his tongue. 'It was a diagonal cut, slicing between the carpals and the ulna and radius bones.'

Jack started to sweat. His mind filled with more flashbacks, this time of the killer, not his victims. He saw the man at work, moving slowly and carefully, preparing meticulously for what he was about to do. The monster manoeuvring his victim's arm into position – was she alive at the time? Amputation attempts on the first victims were crude and sickeningly experimental; there were chisel marks and hesitant saw lines, chipping and gouging on bone, signs that maybe a hammer had been used to try to smash off his trophies. But that quickly became a thing of the past; soon BRK got himself the right tools for the job, no doubt read up on where to make the most effective cuts.

'Are you still there, Jack?' said Massimo. 'I can't hear you.'

'A bad line,' said Jack. 'Tell me, Mass – what had your guy used to cut with?' He steadied himself for the answer.

'Some kind of professional hacksaw. By the look of the teeth marks it's a bone saw, maybe an autopsy saw, most probably a butcher's bone saw.'

'Shit!' said Jack. 'Were the teeth on the saw clean, or were any of them broken?'

'Not clean,' confirmed Massimo. 'It was an old saw. It had been used before. Forensics say they think it's most likely a 35- or 40-centimetre blade with two sets of damaged teeth.'

'Thirty-five to 40, what's that, 15, 16 inches?'

Massimo confirmed the conversion. 'That's about right.'

'Let me guess,' said Jack. 'The first breaks come in a cluster of three. Then there's an undamaged stretch of teeth running for about 7 inches, that's roughly 17 centimetres, and then one more damaged tooth, slanting to the left.'

'Hard to say,' said Massimo. 'There's certainly evidence of some broken teeth. Jack, I'm afraid it's the same man. There can be no doubt about it.'

Jack couldn't speak. It was all still sinking in. Just over twenty-four hours ago he'd travelled to Florence seeking what Nancy called 'closure'. Now everything was very much open again. Wide open, like an infected wound that refuses to heal up.

Massimo waited patiently. Down the line he could hear silence and then the sound of a passing train. He knew his friend was struggling to come to terms with it all.

'Okay. I'm in,' said Jack decisively. 'I'll help you. There's no choice really. I have to give this another shot. I'll call you on a better line when I'm at home in San Quirico and we can work out the logistics from there.'

'Va bene. Molto bene, grazie,' said Massimo gently. He was going to add something else but the line went dead; Jack had already hung up.

Massimo held the phone in one hand and tapped it thoughtfully into the palm of the other, before returning it to the cradle. There were still some things he hadn't told Jack about Cristina Barbuggiani's murder; disturbing facts he could now only tell him when he saw him in person.

West Village, SoHo, New York The first strokes of a watercolour dawn were being painted across New York as Howie settled down at the desk by a window in his den. Sometimes he worked better in the early hours, when his mind was clear of the clutter that came cascading in as soon as he set foot in the office.

The Bigwigs back in Virginia had now officially asked him to reopen the BRK case and he needed every waking second of the day to start ramping up the enquiry. They'd tasked him with putting together a small team (nothing over budget) to re-examine evidence and work with the cops in Georgetown to see whether the desecration of Sarah Kearney's grave gave them anything new.

Howie nursed a mug of black coffee and began to wade through a forest of background paperwork he'd hauled home from the office. He started with the computerized statistical and psychological profiles that had been produced by PROFILER and VICAP, the FBI's two main serial-killer computer systems. BRK took up a zillion gigs of data, and the depth of the study was making things tougher not easier. The stats were hard to stomach at any time of day, but pre-breakfast, they were totally unpalatable. More than thirty thousand witness statements spread across forty cities, spanning twenty years. More than eighty thousand vehicle-check entries, more than two thousand previous offender study cases. Howie felt his will to live draining from him. Man, the fingerprint checking alone was enough to reduce you to tears. IAFIS, the FBI's own Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, had run more than seven thousand sets of prints through its database, making comparisons with more than forty million cases on its Criminal Master File, and had generated more than ten thousand latent fingerprint reports. On top of that, they'd used cutting-edge science to lift dozens of DNA traces out of the prints themselves. The boffins behind CODIS, the Bureau's Combined DNA Index System, had pumped their databases but the genetic profiles that they extracted hadn't matched any known offenders. In the old days, the problem had been that science hadn't been good enough to retrieve vital evidence; these days the difficulty was reversed. There was so much evidence; it was exhausting to work out what had come from the victim, the attacker or just innocent people whose paths had crossed a criminal crossroads. So how much closer had all the technology and science brought them to finding their man?

Not an inch.

Sure, there were prints, genetic profiles, statistical profiles, suggested car sightings, and suchlike. But nothing that could lead them to a prime suspect. And without a suspect, they had jack shit. Data was great if your perp was already a convicted felon, but if he'd never been written up, then it wasn't worth a dime.

With all that in mind, Howie decided to go back to basics. He was determined to take a helicopter view, to try to avoid the forest of information and concentrate on the big chunky black trees that stood out like storm-blasted oaks at the centre of it all. To do that, he knew he had to start all over again, look at the mass of evidence as though it was the first time he'd seen it.

Some things were obvious. The twenty-year time span between the first accredited murder and his last killing meant the guy was at least middle-aged by now. More interestingly, that span meant that he'd killed throughout his most sexually active years and had carried on. A sure sign that he was more than a sexually motivated murderer and that he would never stop. There would be an end to it only when he was caught, or when he died.