The Shadow Maker (39 page)

He cleared his throat. ‘To summarise - victim’s name: Catherine Lentz. Known to her friends as Cathy. Age: twenty-one. Full-time student, part-time prostitute. Doing her final year in business studies at Monash. Lived in Geelong till she got a place at uni. She was sharing a rented house with another female student and supplementing her Austudy money by taking cash for sex, the deal being she only took clients back to her bedroom when the other girl was away, which was the case on Friday. Our killer picked her up at a bar, the Scholar’s Tavern, around nine p.m. and drove her back to the house in Oakleigh, where the sequence of events went like this …’

Mace looked down at his notes. ‘The chain of events we’ve surmised is as follows: Cathy agreed to a bondage session, attaching handcuffs to the four corners of her bed. She also agreed to light a fire in the bedroom hearth, despite the warm weather. About this stage she let in two angora rabbits from the backyard - her housemate’s pets - to feed them. We assume the killer went to the bathroom at the same time. Having put the rabbit food on the kitchen floor, Cathy went to her bedroom and got undressed. Her killer came back from the bathroom with a metal towel rail that he’d dislodged from the wall.’

He glanced around at them grimly. ‘Cathy tried to fight him off

- we found defensive injuries on her hands and forearms. Broken knuckles, severe contusions. He was hitting her hard. Smashed her skull, front and back. He cuffed her, hand and foot, and as she lay on the bed, probably unconscious, he had sex with her. Then he went to the kitchen, found a sharp carving knife and used it to slice her nose off to the bone. She was still alive at this stage and bleeding from the external wound, but it was the massive trauma to her brain - and the internal haemorrhage - that killed her a few minutes later.

When he’d finished, he dumped the knife on the floor, went to the bathroom, washed his hands and left.’

Mace breathed out a heavy sigh. ‘The place is a mess. The body wasn’t discovered by the housemate till after midnight this morning, and in the meantime the rabbits went berserk. They weren’t used to being shut inside for so long. They panicked, tried to get out, jumped onto shelves and got at food, crapped all over the place, knocked everything off tables, shredded the furniture, and one of them impaled itself on a magnetic knife rack. At first we thought the killer had done the rabbit as well, so the pathologist had to do a post-mortem on it. Turned out to have died thirty-six hours after Cathy.’

He thumped the table with his fist. ‘This freak’s attacked four times in less than three weeks, leaving two dead, two maimed for life and a trail of forensic evidence. We’ve got his fingerprints, blood type, DNA, hairs, fibres. We have his age group and a consistent description - the man who picked up Cathy was neatly groomed and smartly dressed, wearing mirror shades. We’ve got so much to nail him with

- but we still don’t know where to look. We know he drives an MX-5

and a ute, but we’ve already ruled out the list of drivers who are registered owners of both types of vehicle. We’ve taken the prints and DNA of nearly fifty Plato’s Cave customers and none of them is our man. With the club now shut, Kavella dead, his databases erased and his membership list a work of fiction, what looked like our best line of inquiry has hit a wall.’ He sighed, before adding finally, ‘We need to come up with a fresh approach. When you get your assignments I want you all to read through the files. We need to identify evidence, leads or people we haven’t followed up. Okay, let’s get on with it.’

Rita finished reading the case file updates in her office, pushed back from the desk, stretched out her legs and put her hands behind her head. Another freshly issued .38 lay holstered beside her keyboard.

When Loftus knocked lightly on the glass-panelled door and walked in, she swivelled around to face him.

‘Glad to be back profiling?’ he asked.

‘It’s a welcome change.’

‘So have you come up with any ideas?’

‘It’s the psych that bugs me,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘The contradictions.’

‘Maybe the Hacker just flips, then panics.’

‘Flips, possibly. Panics, no. His parting acts of mutilation are unnecessary and deliberate. They have deep meaning for him. He’s leaving his signature. But I can’t square the inconsistencies.’

‘One thing I’ve learnt, Van Hassel, through the long and lonely years, is the universal presence of miscalculation. Not just for evildoers, but for us too.’

He tapped one of the postcards taped to the wall above her desk with his finger. It was a picture of the Mandelbrot set with a quote superimposed: ‘Reality is structured chaos.’

‘Are you telling me I’m way off beam?’ asked Rita.

‘No. I’m saying for every classification - social, criminal, psychological - there’s always the odd one out.’

‘But he’s not on his own.’ She clicked on the mouse and called up a past file. ‘He makes two of a kind with the Scalper.’

‘In what way? The Scalper spiked women’s drinks with Rohypnol then hacked off their hair.’

‘Yes, and his first two victims were scarred for life, but survived …’

‘The final two,’ interrupted Loftus, ‘he decapitated. Then he seemed to stop. What are you getting at?’

‘I wasn’t here for the investigation, so tell me how it ended.’

‘Funny you should ask - Mace and I were discussing it earlier this morning,’ said Loftus uncomfortably. ‘We seem to be reliving the same scenario. The Scalper taskforce reached a similar position to the one we’re in with the Hacker - four attacks over a few weeks with two fatalities, a load of forensic evidence, eyewitness descriptions - and then nothing. With no more attacks, the case just drifted away from us, though of course the file is still open. But frankly I don’t see any link. How could there be? The methods are different, the types of victim are different and, most significantly, the DNA is different.’

‘Yes, different crime signature completely,’ Rita agreed. ‘But from a profiling perspective, the similarities are uncanny. Both killers are well-dressed and articulate. They seem to be
organised
attackers who leave
sloppy
crime scenes with plenty of evidence, fingerprints, DNA.

They both inflict mutilations as part of their sexual violence. And weirder still, they’re both reported as driving the same type of car, a black Mazda MX-5.’

That made him stop and think. ‘A copycat?’ he asked. ‘If that’s what you’re getting at, it seems to be stretching a point.’

‘I don’t know if I’m making any point at all. Just kicking ideas around. Thinking the unthinkable.’ She bent over and picked up her shoulder bag. ‘But I won’t make any progress without the mindset.’

‘And where do you get that?’

‘Same place as always. The crime scene.’

Rita was now familiar with the drive towards Monash University, but when she left the freeway she had trouble finding her first point of reference. The Scholar’s Tavern turned out to be a low breeze-block building with a corrugated-iron roof tucked away in a back street behind the broad, windswept campus. She parked and went inside. It was hardly the classic Australian pub - more a glorified shed serving cheap meals and booze to students. It wasn’t crowded.

Just a few dozen sat at tables eating an early lunch, their textbooks and lecture notes stacked alongside the plates and beer glasses. She went up to the counter, ordered a lime and soda and showed her police ID to the young barman. He was a student himself, doing the job part-time.

Rita told him she was investigating the murder of Cathy Lentz.

‘I was working the bar Friday night when she was in here,’ he volunteered. ‘Served her the usual - a couple of Bacardi and Cokes.’

‘You knew her?’

‘Oh yeah. She was a regular. Mostly at weekends.’

‘How well did you know her?’

He caught the undertone in her question and hunched forward, lowering his voice. ‘D’ya mean did I pay her for sex?’

‘Did you?’

‘Yeah, once. Last semester. She was a real babe. Worth the eighty bucks.’

‘You went back to her place?’

‘Nah. We did it in my room at the hall of residence.’

‘On Friday night, did you notice the man she went off with?’

‘Too right. But like I told the cops this morning, I’d never seen him before.’ He ran a damp cloth over the surface in front of him.

‘I assumed he was a tutor.’

‘Why?’

‘He was about ten years older than most of the kids in here, and his manner was different.’

‘In what way, what was he like?’

‘I only saw him from a distance but he was slick-looking, you know - good haircut, jeans, denim shirt, black leather jacket, designer shades. And the way he sat there, you know, a cool type of guy, confident.’

Rita nodded, then asked, ‘What makes you think he was from the university?’

‘That’s all we get in here. Undergrads, mostly - and faculty staff when they’re slumming it.’

‘What about the neighbours? Local residents?’

‘Avoid it like the plague. Think all students are fuckwits.’

As he slid off along the bar to serve some fresh customers, Rita realised something about the killer’s background. He was familiar with this backstreet pub. It wasn’t a place you found by cruising for a pick-up, because you didn’t know about it unless you had a connection with the university. That tied in with the geographic profile as well. The first three attacks fell within a six-kilometre radius from the city centre, indicating he worked and lived within that area. But this last one was nearly twenty k out. What was his link with the campus?

She finished her drink, thanked the barman and left.

The crime scene was a five-minute drive from the Scholar’s Tavern.

As she homed in on it she could feel her pulse quickening and her lungs tightening. No surprise there. Her plan of action had worked.

The mindset was returning, along with the adrenalin rush.

She pulled up outside an ordinary-looking cream brick house in a dull suburban street. No one was around. No pedestrians, no traffic. Just a few cars parked at the kerb. The sun, at its zenith, laid a scorching light and heat on road, pavement, yards and roofs, wilting the shrubbery and filling the air with a burning lethargy.

The house looked like a place where only mundane things could happen, its blandness seeming to defy any notion of horrific violence.

It was semi-detached, with a low brick fence, a short driveway and a front yard with nothing in it but lank, dry grass. The only sign of something sinister was the yellow crime scene tape.

Rita crossed the narrow porch, let herself in with the key and closed the door behind her. The stifling heat and pungent air inside the house enclosed her. It was heavy with something like a barnyard smell and the rooms were buzzing with flies. As Mace had said, there was mess everywhere. The lounge carpet was covered in broken china, overturned lamps, chewed-up magazines and dry rabbit droppings. The furniture upholstery was bursting through rips and claw marks.

The front bedroom had less wreckage. It had been cleared of personal items. This had been the housemate’s room. She’d packed her belongings, collected the one surviving rabbit and moved back to her family home in Bundoora. Like Cathy Lentz, she would never come back here. The horror of finding the brutalised corpse would stay with her for the rest of her life.

The worst mess and the worst smells were in the kitchen. It looked like the work of mindless vandals. Smashed crockery and shards of glass seemed to litter every surface, mixed in with droppings and paw prints and spilt liquid. The room was thick with flies, and maggots crawled over rotting food. A pool of congealed blood lay beneath the knife rack where the hapless rabbit had skewered itself.

The bathroom was still intact because the killer had closed the door. The knobs were grimy with dust from where the crime scene detectives had collected more of his prints. There was only one bit of slight damage. A wall bracket was dislodged where the towel rail had been removed. Surfaces here were also smudged with fingerprint dust, along with the bathroom mirror and cabinet.

The last room she entered was the back bedroom. This was where Cathy Lentz had been murdered. The floor was bare. Sheets, mattress, bed and carpet had all been shipped off to the crime lab.

But her business studies books still lined the shelves, her clothes still hung forlornly in the wardrobe and the ashes from the killer’s fire still lay in the hearth. Despite the heat, Rita shuddered as she relived in her mind what had happened here. The sequence was becoming clearer.

She took the mini-disc recorder from her bag but decided it was too stuffy in here to record her impressions, so she unlocked the back door and went out. The yard had been converted into an oversized rabbit hutch with wire mesh coating the side gate and fences. There was a shed, a stack of packing crates, a lemon tree and the mauled remains of a garden plot. What had once been a lawn was now more dirt than grass, and it was pockmarked with holes and burrows.

Watching carefully where she walked, Rita took a plastic crate and set it down in the shade of the lemon tree. She sat there quietly for a few minutes, calming her breathing and letting her thoughts drift. This was something else she’d picked up from a profiler at the FBI - the value of meditation. The house and yard seemed to exhale an unnatural hush. Few sounds reached her through the torpid midday heat. No human voices. No traffic noise. It was as if the surroundings were deserted - like an outpost on an abandoned planet. Overhead a hostile sun blazed in an empty sky. Its fierce light glinted on the shed roof. The distant hum of an airliner vibrated through the air. Then, as if to reassure her of normality, the sound of a blackbird singing came from the branches of a gum tree in the garden next door. She held the microphone to her mouth, pressed Record and started speaking.

‘Naked apart from your bronze mask, which is your other face, and brandishing the metal rail as a weapon, you go into her bedroom.

You see her naked body in the firelight, the prisoner restraints on the bed, the flames casting shadows around the room, just as you require because these are the rules of the cave. If she screams or pleads or tries to win you over, you are implacable, you are on a mission. But your aim is not to kill her. It’s to render her unconscious for sex. That makes it rape, which is what you need. Then you inflict the mutilation. Why? To punish her? Disable her? Disarm her? In a way, you’re branding her. And there’s nothing new in that.