I couldn’t turn to Potash for help—if he didn’t take me seriously, how seriously would he take the discussion? I’d have to work on my own.
The central question of criminal profiling is this: what does the killer do that he doesn’t have to do? Find that, and you find everything. As much as the average person wouldn’t believe it, serial killers have very clear, often very simple reasons for what they do—reasons you probably disagree with if you’re not a killer, but a bad reason is still a reason, and the reasons we do things affect the way that we do them. Imagine you’re closing a door: why are you closing it? If you’re leaving your house to go to school or to work, you probably close the door firmly behind you and make sure it’s locked before you go. If you’re sneaking out at night, you probably close it softly and slowly, doing everything as quietly as you can so nobody hears. If you’re leaving because you just had an argument, you might slam the door behind you and walk away without looking to see if it stayed closed. All you really have to do is close the door, but the way you close it says everything. Killing is the same. The way you choose your victim, isolate it, kill it, even the way you leave the body—whether you arrange it like killers in the movies, or just run away and hope nobody sees you. These choices, even if they’re subconscious, can tell investigators even more about you than your fingerprints.
The Withered, though they kill for different reasons, still have reasons. Crowley stole body parts from his victims, and while a normal serial killer might do that as a way of remembering the kill, Crowley did it because he was rebuilding his body. It was supernatural, and impossible to decipher in the beginning, but it still helped me to figure him out. It still helped me to kill him.
Mary killed children, exclusively. She killed remotely, or on a delay. I got out a clean sheet of paper, hoping that the process of taking notes could substitute for a human sounding board, and wrote down everything I knew about her methods. She got to know some of her victims before she killed them, but not all. Was that a crucial part of the process? Did it affect the outcome? Maybe that was why she worked as a nurse: because she needed prolonged contact to make it happen. Whatever “it” was. If all she needed was the occasional sick child, she could get the same access as a janitor or even a volunteer who visited once a week. And yet she was a nurse. Why?
I looked through my stack of papers for her timeline. Ostler had bought me a laptop to work on and sent all of these documents through e-mail, but I hated that machine. Living on my own, with no one breathing down my neck or checking my Internet history, I’d spent nearly a week binge-watching every horrible thing I could find—entire message boards and websites about death, displaying the most graphic images and even videos of head wounds, shark bites, gunshots, and more. I’d nearly lost control then, and I’d even fallen back on my old habits and started a Dumpster fire or two, on the far side of town where no one would link it to me. Nothing serious, just a little safety valve to release the pressure that was building up inside of me, pouring it out in a burst of flame and heat and dancing red—
No. Stay focused. Push it away.
I have a job to do.
I looked at the printout of our reconstructed timeline. Mary didn’t seem to kill on any predictable schedule: sometimes one a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. Two of her kills were less than a week apart. Kelly was convinced this meant there were more we didn’t know about, but I doubted it. If two per week was Mary’s standard schedule, and we just didn’t know about the others, where were they? How could she kill that many people and keep them hidden? Fort Bruce simply wasn’t big enough. The hospital was the most advanced in the region, and people came in from all over hoping to get the best care they could. That created a large enough population for Mary to hide her activities. Obviously it was possible that some of the kills we attributed to her were not, and some of the kills we thought were unrelated were actually hers, but even if we gave her credit for every dead child in the hospital, it didn’t add up to the frequency Kelly suggested.
But that left us with the original problem: why the erratic schedule? She seemed to kill for health reasons, like Crowley had—rejuvenating themselves every time their bodies got too degraded to function properly—but Crowley had followed a predictable pattern. When his kills got closer together, it was because his degeneration was accelerating. Mary’s pace seemed to speed up and slow down almost at random. There had to be an explanation, and if Kelly’s was wrong, what was right?
The bedroom door opened abruptly, and Potash dragged Boy Dog in from the hall with a grunt. “He’s staying in your room.”
“I can’t have him in here,” I said, practically jumping up. “I have rules—”