visit to the church had added nothing to her knowledge, but it had given Berrocal the chance to run through the details of the crime scene and smoke another three of his execrable cigarettes. Afterwards, they had walked through the town to the police headquarters where Berrocal had made his base. ‘It’s easier than driving,’ he had pointed out. ‘So, what do you need to do now?’ he asked as they set off.
‘I need to familiarize myself with all the details of the cases. That way I can draw up a full list of the key correspondences between them. There’s no point in trying to do a geographical profile with only two cases. There’s not enough information, particularly since these two sites have been chosen for their historical significance. But what I hope to do is to be able to suggest where you should look in your criminal records for the crimes he has probably committed in the past,’ Fiona explained.
‘That’s easily arranged. All the relevant material is in our incident room. I’ve set aside a desk for you there.’ He took out his mobile phone and dialled. He spoke curtly into it, a brief exchange where he said little. He ended the call with a tight smile. ‘The files will be waiting for you.’
‘Thanks. What I’ll probably do is read through it all, make some notes then go back to my hotel. I like to mull things over for a little while before I write my preliminary report, but I’ll have it ready for you first thing in the morning.’
There was nothing high-tech about the incident room Salvador Berrocal had at his disposal. A dingy windowless room at the end of an airless corridor, the walls were grimy and streaked with stains that Fiona didn’t want to think too closely about. It smelled of cigarette smoke, stale coffee and male sweat. Four desks had been crammed into the space, only one of which held a computer terminal. A couple of large-scale maps of the city and the surrounding suburbs were tacked to the walls, and an easel held a familiar sight—the crime board, complete with photographs of the victims and various scrawled notations. Two of the desks were staffed by harassed-looking detectives who gabbled into phones and barely looked up when Berrocal ushered her in.
He pointed to the farthest desk, where two stacks of files leaned against each other at a precarious angle. ‘I thought you could work over there,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry our accommodation is so poor, but this was the only space available. At least the coffee is drinkable,’ he added with a sardonic smile.
And at least there was a power point nearby, Fiona thought as she squeezed into the tiny gap between the chair and the desk. ‘Are these the murder files?’ she asked.
Berrocal nodded. ‘All ready for you.’
It took her a few hours to plough through dozens of separate reports, stretching her Spanish to the limits of her dictionary and beyond. There had been a couple of occasions when she’d had to concede defeat and ask Berrocal for a translation of passages that baffled her. She had made notes as she’d gone along, working with the database painstakingly evolved by her and one of her PhD students which assigned probabilities to particular features of the two murders. The program then analysed which common features were significant in terms of attributing the crimes to one particular perpetrator. For example, most stranger killings took place after dark; that any two crimes in a series had happened at night was therefore not of much significance when it came to linking them. But it was relatively rare to commit a sexual assault on a dead body with a broken bottle, so the fact that these two crimes exhibited that particular feature was given a much higher significance by the program.
Most of the original data had come from the FBI, who had been remarkably generous with details of past cases once they had realized she was happy to have the information stripped of personal details like names of victims and perpetrators. Fiona recognized that like most statistical analyses produced by psychologists, her database was at best only a partial snapshot of the whole, but it did give her some valuable insights into the nature of the crimes she was dealing with. Perhaps more importantly, it allowed her to say with some degree of certainty whether individual crimes were part of a series or likely to be the work of separate offenders.
By the end of her afternoon’s work, she had demonstrated empirically what the police had already decided on the basis of common sense and experience: the two murders were undoubtedly the work of one man. If that had been the only service she could have provided, there wouldn’t have been much point in her making the trip. But she was convinced that by analysing the data she already had, she could point the police towards other crimes the killer might have committed. With access to that information, she might finally be able to construct a useful geographical profile.
What she needed now was to get out of the police station and let her mind roam free over the nuggets of information she had extracted from the files.
She had got back to the room to find a note from Kit propped up on the desk. ‘Gone down to the bar. Meet me there when you get in, and we’ll have dinner.’ She’d smiled then and crossed to the window to check out the view. It was strange to think that the beauty spread out before her concealed all the normal range of human ugliness. Somewhere in that honeycomb maze of buildings, a killer was probably going about his business, unsuspected by anyone. Fiona hoped that she could point the police in the right direction, so they could find him before he killed again.
But that was for later. Fiona turned away from the window and stripped off her clothes, wrinkling her nose at the smell of smoke that lingered in their fibres. A quick shower, then she changed into jeans and a ribbed silk shirt.
Fiona found Kit at a table in the corner of the bar, hunched over his laptop with a glass of inky red wine to hand and a bowl of olives pushed to one side. She put an arm across his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. ‘Had a good day?’ she asked, settling into the leather chair opposite him.
He looked up, startled. ‘Hi. Just let me save this.’ He finished what he was doing and turned off the computer. Folding it closed, he grinned at her. ‘They let you have an evening off?’
‘Sort of. I’ve got to write a report later, but only a short one. It won’t take long. I’m letting it bed down before I commit myself.’ A waiter appeared and Fiona ordered a chilled manzanilla. ‘What have you been up to?’
Kit looked faintly sheepish. ‘I went for a wander this afternoon. Just to soak up the ambience, you know? This place, it’s steeped in history. You can practically smell it in the air. Every corner you turn, there’s something to see, something to imagine. Anyway, I got to thinking about the Inquisition, about what it must have been like here back then.’
Fiona groaned. ‘Don’t tell me. It gave you the idea for a book.’
Kit smiled. ‘It started the wheels turning.’
‘Is that what you were doing on the laptop?’
He shook his head. ‘No, it’s way too early to be writing stuff down. I was just doing a bit of polishing on what I’ve been writing this last week or so. Tickling and tidying, the boring bollocks. What about you? What kind of day have you had?’
The waiter put Fiona’s drink in front of her and she took a sip. ‘Routine. Going through files by the numbers. Berrocal’s very organized. Very on the ball. You don’t have to explain anything twice to him.’
‘That makes your life a bit easier.’
‘You’re not kidding. The trouble is, there’s not much to go at. Normally, a killer chooses a body dump for reasons that are very personal to him. But because these body dumps have particular historical significance, it complicates things. I’m not sure how much use geographical profiling will be.’
Kit shrugged. ‘You can only
