Michael Marshall - The Straw Men

He paused. Nina waited. He wasn't looking at her. He didn't even seem aware of her presence. He stood on the very edge of the patio. From the doorway his outline looked indistinct. When he started again, he spoke more slowly.

'A man is looking for something. He has an anxiety, something that can only be resolved through a certain course of action, which he has become aware of through accident or trial and error. He hasn't allowed it to happen for a while. He's been good. He hasn't done the bad thing. He's kept himself to himself, and not done anyone any harm. He's never going to do it again. He's not weak — he doesn't need it. Not now, maybe not ever. Maybe he's never going to do it again. Maybe he can leave it behind.

Maybe it's over.

'But gradually… it stops being okay. It starts getting harder. His concentration goes. He finds he can't function. He can't focus on his job, his family, his life. He's getting tense. Ideas start recurring, patterns of fantasy. He's becoming anxious, and what makes it worse is that he knows what is causing it. He knows the only thing that is going to resolve it. He begins to revisit old campaigns in his head, but they don't help. He may find it difficult to remember them in any detail. They don't diminish the way he's feeling now. It's yesterday's news. You can't resolve a current anxiety through something that has already happened: last year's good times do not combat this week's misery. He needs something in front of him, something he hasn't done yet. Not even the talismans help, the things he kept, the proof that he's done it before. All they do is remind him that it's possible. He needs to do it so much and knows that he can't live without it

— and in any event, no matter how hard he tries, he's already done it and there can never be any real peace or any hope of forgiveness. His life is tainted and he can't go back.

'And so, accidentally, almost, he starts looking again. He may tell himself that this is all he is doing. Looking. That he is more in control now. That this time he will only look, not take. But he will start looking again, and once he has taken this step there can be only one outcome. He will forget how bad he felt last time, as the memory of a hangover will not stop you drinking next Friday night. He may have done it so many times that he no longer feels bad about it even in prospect. It may be the only thing that has meaning to him. He will go to a place he's been before, or somewhere like it. He will have a plan by now. This is a dangerous business, and he will have developed ways of reducing the risk. This is where the intersections come into play, because the intersections are the man, and lie at the heart of his paths. They come from the places where he feels safe, where he wanders as himself. Some will think of it as a hunting ground. Others will just think of it as somewhere they blend in, or where nobody watches, where they're invisible. Where he is not weak, but has power; where he is not part of the crowd, but above it. His hidden places, the ones where people come to find him, where the thing he is looking for walks in out of the evening and into a night he has planned for them. He will watch for a while, and then finally one night, when the girl turns as she walks down the street, she will see someone behind her and then it will all be over until it's time to clean up and feel sick and promise God or whoever you think listens that he will never, ever do it again.'

'And that's how you found him,' Nina prompted.

'No. We found nothing that tied all the girls together. We never came close to finding the man because we could never work out where he'd first seen the girls. That's why, when Karen disappeared, I ended up falling back on the places the girls had been taken from. They were the only sites we knew were linked to the killer. It was all I had left. There's no link. No way of finding one. Except… last time he did come back. He came back to visit a site, and I thought it was to relive what had happened there. And once I'd seen him at two of them, I believed he was the man. And so I tracked him, and I found

him.'

'But then,' Nina said, choosing her words carefully, 'you discovered that he wasn't the man after all.'

'Wrong. The man I killed was the man who abducted some of the girls.'

'Are you saying the one now is a copycat?'

'No. I'm saying I killed the waiter, not the man who ordered the beer.'

'I don't understand.'

'The man who sent the parcels was different from the one who abducted the girls.'

Nina stared at him. 'The Upright Man decides he needs a girl, and he just puts in an order? And then

this guy just goes out and snatches them to order? Like a fucking pizza delivery?' 'That's why no more girls disappeared after Karen, even though someone delivered the package. The man who abducted them was gone. The killer was still alive.'

'But serial killers don't work that way. Okay, there's been a few who worked in pairs. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng. John and Richard Darrow. The Wests, depending how you look at it. But nothing like this.'

'Not until now,' he agreed. 'But we live in a changing world, where everything is bigger, brighter and better. Convenient. On-demand.'

'Then how come there were no links between all of the girls? The abductor must have had a standard MO, like you said. We should have been able to find it.'

'If it was the same man each time.'

Nina just looked at him, and blinked. 'There were two abductors?'

'Maybe more. Why not?'

'Because, John, because The Upright Man has only taken one potential victim in the last two years. Sarah Becker.'

'Who says it's just him?' He picked up the wine bottle, found it was empty. 'You must have some more wine somewhere.'

Nina followed him as he walked back into the house. He opened the fridge, stared with disbelief at its emptiness.

'John, I don't have anything more to drink. What do you mean, who says it's just him?'

'How many serial killers you got working in California at this time?'

'At least seven, maybe as many as eleven. Depends how you define…'

'Exactly. And those are the ones you know about. In one state, and a state that comes way down the rankings. Call it a hundred and fifty nationwide, and say ten to fifteen of them can afford twenty thousand a pop. Maybe more. Maybe a lot more. That's a client base. A big one. You could get a fucking bank loan on the back of that business plan.'

'Even if you're right, which frankly remains to be proved, how does this help us find Sarah Becker?'

'It doesn't,' he admitted, and his nervous energy abruptly disappeared. He rubbed his forehead with

his fingers, hard. 'I assume the Feds are still running down any lines leading from the family?'

Nina nodded.

'Well,' he said, sounding tired and defeated. 'Then I guess we just wait.' He was watching the mute television. They were still doing a wrap-up of recent mass murders, background to the high street massacre in England. 'Have you been following this?'

'I've tried not to,' she said. They stood in the kitchen and watched it together awhile. There was no real news. They still didn't know why the man might have done it. A search of his house had turned up some generic hate literature, another gun, a computer full of porn, and a very bad painting of a number of dark figures against a white background, like wraiths in front of snow.

None of it was judged to be important.

18

'You have to give me something more than water,' Sarah had said. Her voice sounded weak, even to herself. She had repeated this sentence many times. It had become

the first thing she said every time the lid was removed.

'Don't you like the water?'

'I like the water. Thank you for the water. But I need something more. You have to give me