"What we call making his signature more apparent. It's as if he believes the police are too stupid to catch him, so he's going to taunt you a bit. He's burned the hands three times, and you've failed to make the connection between the killings. So he's had to do more."
"But why so much more? Wouldn't it have been enough just to slice open the final victim? Why add the mark on the forehead? Why the loincloth? Why take the navel?"
"If we discount the loincloth as psychic restitution, we're left with the slice, the missing navel, and the mark on the forehead. If we see the slice as part of a ritual that we as yet don't understand and the missing navel as a gruesome souvenir that allows him to relive the event, then what we really have is the mark on the forehead to serve as a conscious escalation of the crime."
"What do you make of that mark?" Lynley asked him.
Robson took up one of the photographs that featured it particularly. "It's rather like a cattle brand, isn't it? I mean the mark itself, not how it was made. A circle with two two-headed crosses quadrisecting it. It clearly stands for something."
"So you're saying it's not a signature on the crime like the other indicators?"
"I'm saying it's more than a signature because it's too deliberate a choice to be merely a signature. Why not use a simple X if you just want your mark on the body? Why not a cross? Why not one of your initials? Any of those would be quicker to put on your victim than this. Especially when time is probably of the essence."
"You're saying this mark serves a dual purpose, then?"
"I'd say so. No artist signs a painting till it's done, and the fact that this mark was made with the victim's blood tells us that it was likely put on his forehead after death. So yes, it's a signature, but it's something more. I think it's a direct communication."
"With the police?"
"Or with the victim. Or the victim's family." Robson handed the photographs back to Lynley. "Your killer has an enormous need to be noticed, Superintendent. If it isn't satisfied by the current publicity-which it won't be because his sort of need is never actually satisfied by anything, you see-then he'll strike again."
"Soon?"
"I'd say you can depend upon that." He handed Lynley the reports as well. He included with them his own report, which he took from the manila folder, neatly typed and official, with a cover sheet on the letterhead of Fischer Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Lynley added the reports to the photographs Robson had already handed over, along with his card. He thought about everything the profiler had said. He knew other officers who believed completely in the art-or perhaps it was a real science based on irrefutable empirical evidence-of psychological profiling, but he had never been one of them. Put to the test, he'd always preferred his own mind and a sifting through concrete facts to trying to take those same facts and from them create a portrait of someone utterly unknown to him. Besides, he couldn't see how it actually helped the situation. At the end of the day, they still had to locate a killer among the ten million people who lived in Greater London, and he wasn't clear on how the profile Robson had provided was going to help do that. The psychologist appeared to know this, however. He added a final detail, as if to put a full stop to his report.
"You also need to prepare yourself for contact," he said.
"What sort?" Lynley asked.
"From the killer himself."
ALONE, He was Fu, Creature Divine, eternal Deity of what must be. He was the truth and His was the way, but the knowledge of this was no longer enough.
The need was upon Him again. It had come far sooner than He had expected. It had come in days instead of in weeks, possessing Him with the call to act. Yet despite the pressure to judge and avenge, to redeem and release, He still moved with care. It was essential He choose correctly. A sign would tell, and so He waited. For there had always been a sign.
A loner was best. He knew that much. And naturally, there were loners aplenty to choose from in a city like London, but following one of them was the only way to confirm His selection as right and apt.