The Postcard Killers

    Then they got dressed and took out the Polaroid camera. Sylvia looked at the bodies on the bed, hesitating, deciding if the look was right.

    “What do you think about this?” she asked. “Does it work?”

    Mac raised the camera. The brightness of the flash blinded them momentarily.

    “Works pretty damn well,” he said. “Maybe the best one yet. Even better than Rome.”

    Sylvia opened the room’s door with her elbow and they stepped out into the corridor. No security cameras, they’d made sure of that on the way up. Mac pulled his sleeve down over his fingers and hung the DO NOT

    DISTURB sign outside the door. The door closed with an almost inaudible click.

    The sounds of the night faded into silence. The gentle patter of the shower inside the room could just be heard above the hum of the ventilation system.

    “Stairs or elevator?” Mac asked.

    “Elevator,” Sylvia said. “I’m tired. Murder is hard work, darling.”

    They waited until the doors had closed and the elevator was descending before they kissed.

    “I love being on honeymoon with you,” Sylvia said, and Mac smiled brilliantly.

Part One

Chapter 1

Thursday, June 10

Berlin, Germany

    THE VIEW FROM THE HOTEL room consisted of a scarred brick wall and three rubbish bins. It was probably still daylight somewhere up above the alley, because Jacob Kanon could make out a fat German rat having itself a good time in the bin farthest to the left.

    He took a large sip from the mug of Riesling wine.

    It was debatable whether the situation inside or outside the room’s thin pane of glass was more depressing.

    He turned his back on the window and looked down at the postcards spread out across the hotel bed.

    There was a pattern here, wasn’t there, a twisted logic that he couldn’t see. The killers were trying to tell him something. The bastards who were cutting the throats of young couples all over Europe were screaming right in his face.

    They were shouting their message, but Jacob couldn’t hear what they were saying, couldn’t make out their words, couldn’t understand what they meant, and until he could work out their language, he wouldn’t be able to stop them. He drank the rest of the wine in his mug and poured some more. Then he sat down on the bed, messing up the order he had just arranged for the postcards.

    “Let’s look at it this way, then. Let me see who you are!”

    Jacob Kanon, a homicide detective from the NYPD’s 32nd Precinct, was a long way from home. He was in Berlin because the killers had brought him here. He had been following their progress for six months, always two steps behind, maybe even three or four.

    Only now had the magnitude of their depravity started to sink in with the police authorities around Europe. Because the killers carried out only one or two murders in each country, it had taken time for the pattern to emerge, for everyone except him to see it plainly.

    Some of the stupid bastards still didn’t see it, and wouldn’t take help from an American, even a fucking smart one who had everything riding on this case. He picked up the copies of the postcard from Florence. The first one.

Chapter 2

    THE POSTCARD SHOWED THE BASILICA di San Miniato al Monte, and on the back was the now familiar quote. He read the lines and drank more wine, then let the card fall and picked up the next one, and the next, and the next.

Athens: a picture of the Olympic Stadium from 2004. Salzburg: an anonymous street scene.

Madrid: Las Ventas.

    And then Rome, Rome, Rome…

    Jacob put his hands over his face for a few seconds before getting up and going over to the rickety desk by the wall.

    He sat down on the Windsor chair and rested his arms on his notes, the notes he had made about the various victims, his interpretations, the tentative connections he had made.

    He knew very little about the Berlin couple yet, just their names and ages: Karen and Billy Cowley, both twenty-three, from Canberra in Australia. Drugged and murdered in their rented apartment close to Charitй University Hospital, for which they had paid two weeks in advance but which they hadn’t had the chance to fully enjoy. Instead, they had their throats cut and were mutilated on their second or possibly third day in the apartment. It was four days, maybe five or six, before they were even found. Stupid,arrogant German police! Acting like they knew everything, when they knew solittle.

    Jacob got up, went over to the bed again, and picked up the Polaroid picture of the couple that had been posted to the journalist at the BerlinerZeitung. This was the point where his brain had reached the limit for what it could absorb.

    Why did the killers send first postcards and then grisly photographs of the slaughter to the media in the cities where they carried out their murders?

    To shock?

    To get fame and acclaim?