She laughs. The sad girl laughs too. The policeman passes by without noticing him. He's been told to look out for men in their forties with slightly graying hair, but for men on their own.
9:20 P.M.
Doctors look at test results which are completely at odds with what they believe the actual illness to be, and must then decide whether to trust science or their heart. They learn, with time and experience, to give more weight to their instincts and they find that the outcomes for their patients improve.
Successful businessmen pore over graphs and diagrams, then go completely against the market trend and grow still richer.
Artists write books or films about which everyone says: "That won't work. No one's interested in things like that," and end up becoming icons of popular culture.
Religious leaders preach fear and guilt rather than love, which should, in theory, be the most important thing in the world, and their congregations swell.
Only one group consistently fail to go against the current trend: politicians. They want to please everyone and stick rigidly to the rules of political correctness. They end up having to resign, apologize, or contradict themselves.
MORRIS KEEPS OPENING ONE WINDOW after another on his computer. This has nothing to do with technology, but with intuition. He's tried distracting himself with the Dow Jones Index, but wasn't pleased with the results. It would be best to focus a little on some of the characters he's lived with for much of his life.
He looks again at the video in which Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, is describing in a calm voice how he killed forty-eight women, most of them prostitutes. Ridgway is doing this not because he wants absolution for his sins or to relieve his conscience; the public prosecutor has offered to commute his death sentence to life imprisonment if he confesses, for despite having acted with impunity for a long time, Ridgway had left insufficient evidence to convict him. Or perhaps he had just grown weary of the macabre task he had set himself.
Ridgway had a steady job spraying trucks and could only remember his victims by relating them to whether he had been working that day. For twenty years, sometimes with more than fifty detectives on his trail, he managed to commit murder after murder without ever leaving any kind of signature or clue. One of the detectives on the tape comments that Ridgway wasn't very bright, wasn't too good at his job or very educated, but was a perfect killer.
In short, he was born to be a killer, even though he had always lived in the same place. His case, at one point, was even filed away as insoluble.
Morris has watched this same video hundreds of times. It has, in the past, given him the necessary inspiration to solve other cases, but not today. He closes down that window and opens another, which shows a letter written by the father of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal, who was responsible for killing and dismembering seventeen men between 1978 and 1991:
Initially, of course, I couldn't believe
that it was really Jeff who had done the things the police had accused him of. How could anyone believe that his son could do such things? I had been in the actual places where they said he had done them. I had been in rooms and basements which at other moments, according to the police, had been nothing less than a slaughterhouse. I had looked in my son's refrigerator and seen only a scattering of milk cartons and soda cans. I had leaned casually on the black table they claimed my son had used both as a dissecting table and a bizarre satanic altar. How was it possible that all of this had been hidden from me--not only the horrible physical evidence of my son's crimes, but the dark nature of the man who had committed them, this child I had held in my arms a thousand times, and whose face, when I glimpsed it in the newspapers, looked like mine? If the police had told me that my son was dead, I would have thought differently about him. If they'd told me that a strange man had lured him to a seedy apartment, and a few minutes later, drugged, strangled, then sexually assaulted and mutilated his dead body--in other words, if they'd told me the same horrible things that they had to tell so many other fathers and mothers in July of 1991--then I would have done what they have done. I would have mourned my son and demanded that the man who'd killed him be profoundly punished. If not executed, then separated forever from the rest of us. After that, I would have tried to think of my son warmly. I would, I hope, have visited his grave from time to time, spoken of him with loss and affection, continued, as much as possible, to be the custodian of his memory. But I wasn't told what these other mothers and fathers were told, that their sons were dead at the hands of a murderer. Instead, I was told that my son was the one who had murdered their sons.
A satanic altar. Charles Manson and his "family." In 1969, three people burst into a house occupied by a film star and killed everyone there, including a young man who happened to be driving away from the house. Two more murders followed on the next day: a married couple, both of whom were businesspeople. Manson claimed to be capable of killing the whole of humanity.
For the thousandth time, Morris looks at the photo of the man behind those crimes, smiling at the camera, surrounded by hippie friends, including a famous pop musician of the day. They all seem perfectly harmless, talking about peace and love.
HE CLOSES DOWN ALL THE windows. Manson is the closest thing to what is happening now, involving as it does the cinema and well-known victims. A kind of political manifesto against luxury, consumerism, and celebrity. Manson, however, was only the brains behind the killings; he didn't actually murder anyone himself; he left that to his acolytes.
No, that's not it. And despite the e-mails he has sent, explaining that he can't provide answers in such a short space of time, Morris is beginning to experience what all detectives always feel about serial killers: it's becoming a personal matter.
On the one hand, there's a man, doubtless with some other profession, who, given the weapons he uses, has clearly planned the murders in advance, but who is on entirely unfamiliar territory, where he has no knowledge of the competence or otherwise of the local police force. He is, therefore, a vulnerable man. On the other hand, there's the accumulated experience of all kinds of security organizations accustomed to dealing with society's aberrants, but apparently incapable of stopping the bloody trail left by this rank amateur.
He should never have responded to the commissioner's call. He had decided to live in the South of France because the climate was better, the people more amusing, the sea close at hand, and because he hoped that he still had many years ahead of him in which to be able to enjoy life's pleasures.
He had left his job in London with a reputation for being the best. And now this one failure would be sure to reach the ears of his colleagues, and he would lose that reputation earned through hard work and great dedication. They'll say: "He was the first person to insist that modern computers be installed in our department, but despite all the technology at his disposal, he's simply too old to keep up with challenges of a new age."
He presses the off button. The software logo comes up and then the screen goes blank. Inside the machine, the electronic impulses disappear from the fixed memory and leave no feeling of guilt, remorse, or impotence.
His body has no off buttons. The circuits in his brain keep working, always arriving at the same conclusions, trying to justify the unjustifiable, bruising his self-esteem, telling him that his colleagues are right: perhaps his instincts and his capacity for analysis have been affected by age.
He goes into the kitchen, turns on the espresso machine, which has been giving him problems lately. As with any modern domestic appliance, it's usually cheaper to throw the old one out and buy a new one. Fortunately, the machine decides to work this time, and he sips the resulting cup of coffee unhurriedly. A large part of his day involves pressing buttons: computer, printer, phone, lights, stove, coffeemaker, fax machine.
Now, though, he needs to press the right button in his brain. There's no point in rereading the documents sent through by the police. He needs to think laterally and make a list, however repetitive.
(a) The murderer is fairly well educated and sophisticated, at least as regards the weapons he uses. And he knows how to use them.
(b) He's not from the area; if he was, he would have chosen a better time to come, when there were fewer police around.
(c) He doesn't leave any clear signature, so he obviously has no desire to be identified. This may seem self-evident, but such "signatures" are often a desperate way of the Doctor trying to put a stop to the evils committed by the Monster, as if Dr. Jekyll were saying: "Please arrest me. I'm a danger to society, and I can't control myself."
(d) The fact that he was able to approach at least two of his victims, look them in the eye, and find out a little about them, means that he's used to killing without remorse. Therefore, he must, at some time, have fought in a war.
(e) He must have money, a lot of money, not just because Cannes is a very expensive place to stay during the Festival, but because of the high cost of producing the envelope containing the hydrogen cyanide. He must have paid around $5,000 in all--$40 for the poison and $4,460 for the packaging.