condition, which was possibly the result of weight training. He would be known to the victims, but not well known. He would be of high intelligence but low achievement, a man with a decent school record but with disciplinary problems stemming from a chronic failure to obey. He would likely possess a history of job losses, and while he would probably be working at this time, it would be in employment below his capabilities. They would find criminal behaviour in his childhood and adolescence: possibly petty arson or cruelty to animals. He would be at this time unmarried and living either alone or with a dominant parent.
Despite what he already knew about profiling, Lynley felt doubtful about the number of details Robson had provided. He said, "How can you know all this, Dr. Robson?"
Robson's lips moved in a smile that tried-and failed-not to look satisfied. He said, "I do assume you know what profilers do, Superintendent, but do you know how and why profiling actually works? It's rarely inaccurate, and it's nothing to do with crystal balls, tarot cards, or the entrails of sacrificed animals."
At this, smacking of the gentle correction a parent gives to a wayward child, Lynley considered half a dozen ways to regain dominance. They were all a waste of time, he concluded. So he said, "Should we begin again with each other?"
Robson smiled, genuinely this time. "Thank you," he said. He went on to tell Lynley that to know a killer, one merely had to look at the crime committed, which was what the Americans had begun doing when the FBI had developed their Behavioural Science Unit. By gathering information over the decades of pursuing serial killers and by actually interviewing incarcerated serial killers by the dozens, they'd discovered there were certain commonalities that could be depended upon to be present in the profile of the perpetrator of a certain kind of crime. In this particular crime, for example, they could rely upon the fact that the killings were bids for power although their killer would tell himself that the killings had another reason entirely.
"Not just killing for the thrill of it?"
"Not at all," Robson answered. "This actually has nothing to do with thrill. This man's striking out because he's been frustrated, contradicted, or thwarted. Whatever thrill there is, is secondary."
"Thwarted by the victim?"
"No. A stressor has set him on this course, but its source isn't the victim."
"Who is it, then? What?"
"A recent job loss that the killer thinks is unfair. The breakup of a marriage or another amorous relationship. The death of a loved one. The rejection of a proposal of marriage. A court injunction. A sudden loss of money. The destruction of a home by fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane. Think of something that would put your world or anyone's world into chaos and you'll have a stressor."
"We all have them in our lives," Lynley said.
"But not all of us are psychopaths. It's the combination of the psychopathic personality and the stressor that's deadly, not the stressor alone." Robson fanned out the crime-scene photographs.
Despite the aspects of the crime suggesting sadism-the burnt hands, for example-their killer felt a certain amount of remorse for what he'd done once he'd done it, Robson said. The body in each case told them that: its position traditional to corpses placed in coffins prior to burial, not to mention the fact that the final victim wore what amounted to a loincloth. This, he said, was called psychic erasure or psychic restitution.
"It's as if the killing were a sad duty that the perpetrator believes and tells himself he must perform."
Lynley felt this was going too far. The rest he could swallow; there was sense to it. But this...restitution? Penance? Sorrow? Why do it four times if he felt remorse afterwards?
"The conflict for him," Robson said, as if in reply to the questions Lynley hadn't asked, "is the compulsion to kill, which has been triggered by the stressor and can only be relieved by the act of killing itself, versus the knowledge that what he's doing is wrong. And he does know that, even as he is driven to do it again and again."
"So you believe he'll strike another time," Lynley said.
"There's no question about it. This is going to escalate. It's actually escalated from the first. You can see that in how he's been upping the stakes. Not only in where he's put the bodies-taking bigger risks of discovery every time he positions one-but also in what he's done to the