Death in the Black Wood, Oliver Davies [short story to read TXT] 📗

killer had been watching us, had he seen us visit the old man? Thinking back, I couldn’t remember seeing anyone lurking around down there, not even sitting in any nearby cars. Would our killer even remember Eric?

He would, I decided.

Back when our man had been stalking Dominic, he’d have had far more reason to notice anyone keeping company with his target than Eric had to notice him. I hadn’t heard anything from Captain Thorne yet but there were other people I wanted our composite shown to too. Debbie and Sharon, Dominic’s housemates, and the people who’d been working on that construction project he’d been employed by. Technically, the Black Wood case belonged to Philips now, but as the Arnold case was related, there was no reason for my team not to follow up with those two.

I sent Mills and Bryce to check on Eric.

“If he doesn’t answer the door, give the niece a call. Her number’s in the case folder. See if he was with her yesterday or if she knows of any friends he may have been with. Chase those up too, if you need to. Alright?”

They got it. I wanted him found, and quickly. Shay’s work with that composite was currently our strongest chance of identifying our killer. His first nine ‘possibles’ had all turned out to be dead ends. He’d been able to tell me that much yesterday evening.

“None of them have moved. They’re all exactly where they’re supposed to be, still living at the addresses on their driving licences. No unexplained disappearances last month or this month either. I can’t put any of them anywhere near here at the right times.”

We urgently needed Eric to look at those nine faces and give us some indication of which were the closest matches. Once Shay knew that, he could make some better directed alterations and see what his next tries turned up for us.

Walker and Collins, I sent off to Merkinch to show our composite to Debbie and Sharon.

“Try the building site afterwards too. The boss there said that Dominic didn’t work weekends, but that doesn’t mean a lot of the others won’t be there today.”

I didn’t want to leave Caitlin sitting alone in the main office, so once my DCs had all left, I logged in at Collins’ desk to keep working through the transcripts from there. There was a growing backlog of those piling up for our attention but the most promising ones had been coming in at the top of the queue, in bold type, so they didn’t get overlooked. Those were already becoming a little scarce.

We hadn’t been doing that for long when the updated profile that McKinnon had mentioned came in, and we both stopped to read it.

The physical description in there was detailed but not new. We already knew what our suspect looked like. Nor was the opinion that he almost certainly lived alone, did not work elsewhere and did not socialise. It was the psychological profile that had been updated.

The psychotic, delusional, ‘Visionary’ category of serial killers committed their crimes because they believed they were being instructed to, by God or by some other entity. This was the category which, up until today, we had thought it most likely that our man belonged to, perhaps with some overlap into the ‘Hedonistic’ category. The semen stains on those jeans the killer had left behind had indicated a strong possibility that they were stimulated by the act of causing suffering and by killing, which certainly fitted the Hedonistic type.

The ‘Thrill Killers’ subcategory of the Hedonistic class killed purely for their own pleasure, feeding off the terror and suffering of their victims. They liked to both mentally and physically torture their prey, taunt them verbally to heighten their fear, sometimes even let them go just so they could chase them and create a whole new cycle of terror. They might sometimes choose to use the act of rape to degrade their victims and to inflict further physical pain on them but their primary motivator was not sexual. The ‘Lust Killers’ had a different subcategory all of their own. Post mortem mutilations were rare with ‘Thrill Killers’ because a dead body could not feed their desire to evoke fear and it could not feel pain. A corpse held no further interest for them at all. It was incapable of exciting them. The murder of Jackie Gibson held all the indicators of a ‘Thrill Killer.’

Because of this, Shay now speculated that our psychotic subject was also suffering from some form of DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder. The difference in methodology, he argued, was too great to attribute to the same personality as the earlier murders.

Roughly ninety per cent of cases of DID, he explained, were a result of childhood abuse and trauma. The splitting off a second personality was a psychological defence mechanism, the new alter ego usually containing all the pain, rage and hatred caused by whatever deep trauma the original personality had suffered and shielding it from any memory of the event. The original ANP, or apparently normal part of the personality, could then continue to function unburdened by the emotional overload. People with DID often suffered from dissociative amnesia, periods of time of which they could recall absolutely nothing, with no sense of self or consciousness.

Shay now hypothesised that our original psychotic subject, the ANP, had committed the first two murders and that a second, different personality had been in control last night. He also speculated on the possibility of the second personality actually feeding the ANP the delusions they were suffering under and coercing it into committing the abductions and murders. Like many mental disorders, there was much yet to be discovered about DID but, he claimed, there was enough accumulated evidence to satisfy him that ‘Alters’ could and did sometimes communicate with each other.

Caitlin finished reading through it and looked over at me. “So let me get this straight. Your cousin now thinks that a sadistic ‘Thrill Killer’ type alter-ego has been