Grimoire Diabolique

“Well, yeah, but before you can do that, you have to verify the common-denominators of the modus. Once you’ve done that, you gotta pursue a workable analysis of the of the motive. Remember, this is a serial killer we’re talking about, not some meth-head punk knocking over 7-Elevens. Serial killers are calculating, careful. Some guy all fucked up on ice goes out and rapes a girl—that’s easy. I’ll have the fucker in custody in less than forty-eight hours and I’ll send him up for thirty years. But a serial killer?”

“All right, I don’t know much about this kind of stuff,” I admitted. “After all, this is Seattle, not Detroit.”

“Good, good,” he said. “So we establish the m.o., and with that we can analyze the motive. Once we’ve analyzed the motive, then we determine a what?”

“Uhhhh….”

“A psychological profile of the killer.”

“Well, that was my next guess,” I said.

“Only until we’ve established some working psych profile can we then effectively identify suspects.”

“Okay, I’m following you.”

Shaking his head, he crushed the next cigarette out in an ashtray that read Yoo-hoo, Mabel? Black Label! along the rim. “And? From the standpoint of a journalist, the most important question in this case is…what?”

The last guy in the world I wanted to look stupid in front of was Jameson. I was stressed not to say the wrong thing. “Why, uh, why is the killer…cutting off their hands?”

“Right!” he nearly yelled and cracked his open palm against the bar-top. “Finally, one of you ink-stained liberal press schmucks has got it! The police can’t do squat until they’ve established an index of suspects, and we can’t do that until we’ve derived a profile of the killer. Why is he killing these girls and taking their hands?”

“But…” My thoughts tugged back and forth. “If he cuts off their hands, they can’t leave fingerprints, can’t be identified, and if they can’t be identified, your investigation becomes obstructed.”

“No, no, no,” he griped. “In my office I showed you the ID list. We ID’d more than half of the victims already. A lot of the girls still had their ID’s on their bodies when we found them. So what’s that tell you?”

“The killer doesn’t—”

“Right, he either thinks he’s hidden the bodies so well that they’ll never be found, or he doesn’t care if they’re ID’d. And, from there, the most logical deduction can only be?”

“He’s…taking their hands for some other reason?” I posed.

“See? I knew you were smarter than these other bozos.” Jameson actually seemed pleased that I’d figured some of it out. “That’s what we’ve done. We’ve put more man-hours into this investigation than fucking Noah put into the Arc. The killer’s collecting their hands. And when we find the reason, we’ll get our suspects. Here, take this,” he said, and reached down to his floor. What he hauled up was a briefcase. It felt heavy enough to contain a couple of cinder blocks.

“What is this?” I asked.

“The entire case file.”

I sat back down, put on my glasses, and opened the case. “This looks like over a thousand pages of data.”

“More than that,” Jameson said. “Sixteen hundred so far. You want to be an honest journalist—”

“I am an honest journalist,” I reminded him.

“—then do your homework. Read the fucking file, read the whole thing. And when you’re done, if you can honestly say that me and my men are being negligent, then tell me so…and I’ll resign my post. Deal?”

I flipped through the fat stack of paper. It looked like a lot of work. I was fascinated.

“Deal,” I said.

“I knew you wouldn’t walk out on this.” Jameson, half-drunk now, rose to his feet. “I’ll talk to ya soon, pal. Oh, and the beers are on you, right?” He slapped me hard on the back and grinned. “You can write ’em off on your taxes as a research expense…”

««—»»

Jameson was afflicted by the very thing he condemned: alcoholism. That much was clear. But in spite of his hypocrisy, I had to stick to my own guns. I’m a journalist; to be honest, I had to be objective. I had to separate Jameson’s drunken hatred and bigotry from the task. Not a lot of newspaper writers do that, they jump on the easiest bandwagon—and I’ve done that myself—to please their editors buy increasing unit sales. The Green River Killer is the best example in the Pacific Northwest…and it was all a sham, it was all hype. Everybody jumped on the state’s favorite suspect…and it turned out to be the wrong guy. I knew I was better than that, so I decided that it didn’t matter that Jameson was a reckless racist prick. All that mattered was the quality of the job he was doing.

And it looked like he wasn’t doing half-bad.