the position of having to waste time attempting to excuse the lapse. This served no one and nothing but the coffers of the newspapers, who might be able to increase their sales by fanning the flames of a public indignation that always lay like a dragon in repose.
"All right," Lynley said. "The profiler stays. But I determine what he sees and what he doesn't."
"Agreed," Hillier said.
They returned to the corridor, where Hamish Robson waited for them unaccompanied. The profiler had taken himself down to a notice board some distance from the toilets. Lynley had to admire the man for that.
He said, "Dr. Robson?," to which Robson replied, "Hamish. Please."
Hillier said, "The superintendent will take you in hand at this point, Hamish. Good luck. We're relying on you."
Robson glanced from Hillier to Lynley. Behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes looked wary. The rest of his expression was muted by his greying goatee, and as he nodded, a lock of thinning hair flopped onto his forehead. He brushed it off. The glint of a gold signet ring caught the light. "I'm happy to do what I can," he said. "I'll need the police reports, the crime-scene photos..."
"The superintendent will give you what you need," Hillier said. And to Lynley, "Keep me up to speed." He nodded to Robson and strode off in the direction of the lifts.
As Robson observed Hillier walking off, Lynley observed Robson and decided he looked harmless enough. There was, indeed, something vaguely comforting about his dark green cardigan and his pale yellow shirt. He wore a conservative, solid-brown tie with this, the same colour as his trousers, which were worn and lived in. He was podgy of body and looked like everyone's favourite uncle.
"You work with the criminally insane," Lynley said as he led the other man to the stairwell.
"I work with minds whose only outlet for torment is the commission of a crime."
"Isn't the one the same as the other?" Lynley asked.
Robson smiled sadly. "If that were only the case."
LYNLEY BRIEFLY INTRODUCED Robson to the team before he took him from the incident room to his office. There he gave the psychologist copies of the crime-scene photographs, the police reports, and the preliminary postmortem information from the forensic pathologists who'd examined the bodies at the scene of each crime. He held back the autopsy reports. Robson took a cursory look through the material, then explained that it would take him at least twenty-four hours to evaluate it.
That was no problem, Lynley told him. There was plenty for the team to do while they were waiting for his...Lynley wanted to say performance, as if the man were a psychic come to bend spoons in their presence. He settled on information instead. Report gave Robson too much legitimacy.
"The investigators seemed..." Robson appeared to look for a word. "Rather wary to have me among them."
"They're used to the old-fashioned way of doing things," Lynley told him.
"I believe they'll find what I have to say useful, Superintendent."
"I'm glad to hear that," Lynley said, and he called Dee Harriman to see Dr. Robson on his way.
When the profiler had departed, Lynley returned to the incident room and the work at hand. What did they have? he wanted to know.
DI Stewart was, as ever, ready with his report, which he stood to present like a schoolboy hoping for high marks from the teacher. He announced he'd subdivided his officers into teams, the better to deploy them in different areas. At this, a few eyes rolled heavenward in the incident room. Stewart did most things like a frustrated Wellington.
They were inching forward, engaging in the tedious plodwork of a complicated investigation. Stewart had two officers from team one-"They'll be doing background," he reported-covering the mental hospitals and the prisons. They had unearthed a number of potential leads that they were following up: paedophiles having finished their time in open conditions within the last six months, paroled murderers of adolescents, gang members in remand awaiting trial-
"And from youth offenders?" Lynley asked.
Stewart shook his head. Sod all appeared useful from that end of things. All the youth offenders recently released were accounted for.
"What are we getting from the door-to-doors at the body sites?" Lynley asked.
Little enough. Stewart had constables reinterviewing everyone in those areas, seeking witnesses to anything at all. They knew the drill: It wasn't so much the unusual that they were looking for, but the ordinary that, upon reflection, made one stop and think. Since serial killers by their very nature faded into the