his ears. “I don’t understand. Martin Lenx is a perfect fit for the profile you’ve been building!”
“I don’t yet have sufficient evidence to confirm that,” she replied, avoiding his challenge.
“This is incredible,” Johnson muttered loud enough for Dupree to hear his dissatisfaction.
Frowning and annoyed, Dupree studied her.
“My opinion?” she responded, looking at the attachment from Tucker matching passages from the Lenx letter to Bible verses. “I grant you this could be Lenx. There’s another verse that says, ‘Seest thou these great buildings? There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.’ One of many characteristics of an evangelical killer is an obsession with scripture, or with mysterious messages thought to be from some kind of sacred source. In his confession, Lenx mentioned how he had to strive to maintain the household and how crushed he felt. Killing a family after their home is destroyed by a catastrophe symbolizes the perdition of his own family. He selects families he thinks are as sinful as his own. He saves them from damnation, just as he redeemed his own family—by sending them straight to heaven.”
Johnson and Dupree had nodded along with her reasoning. Tucker’s voice rattled from the speaker. “So, Assistant Inspector Salazar, are you trying to tell me you have problems with your own theory? What bothers you?”
“The problem is that Martin Lenx killed his family, his own people.” She enumerated them. “His wife, his own mother, his sons, his daughter. He’s a textbook annihilator. The four categories characteristic of family annihilators are belief in one’s own moral superiority, anomie or alienation, deception, and paranoia. He fits at least two of those. Four out of five killers of this type commit suicide afterward; the exceptions are those convinced of their superiority. That would be Lenx. But even though he remained alive, what would trigger him, eighteen years later, to set out on this murder spree? Granted, the families share some characteristics with the Lenx family, but why those exact families? They’re different from one another, in different parts of the country, with no apparent links between them.
“And the big question is, what has Martin Lenx been doing for the last eighteen years? The murder of an entire family is striking enough for someone, especially the press, to notice, even if it occurred in the remotest region of the country. But no; there was no word of a murder of this type until eight months ago. Two possibilities: Martin Lenx murdered his family, fled, and has nothing to do with the Composer’s murders, or he’s the Composer. In which case, how could he have controlled such powerful impulses for so long? If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that when a lunatic is convinced that God, or the devil, or whatever, is telling him what to do, he has to be tracked down because he’ll never stop. So how did Martin Lenx go underground and suppress those urges for so long?”
Tucker went down the list. “Typical reasons for the interruption of serial killings are death, a long illness, absence abroad, or imprisonment for some other crime. If we start by assuming he’s alive, it’s hard to believe someone who suffered from an illness that kept him sidelined for eighteen years would be physically able to confront and kill whole families. Repeatedly. And let’s not forget some of the fathers were strong, as were some of the teenage sons.
“Martin Lenx, who presented himself as a model citizen, probably wouldn’t have wound up in jail, and his fingerprints haven’t been connected to another crime.
“At first, the idea that he left the country might seem plausible, but—and I don’t know why—I just can’t imagine Martin Lenx living abroad. His exalted opinion of himself doesn’t square with a fugitive’s life. The original investigating team decided the car being abandoned at the airport was a ploy, though they looked into the possibility he might have gone back to his parents’ place of origin. It turned out Lenx had no remaining family in Austria. My bet is that he set himself up somewhere else in the United States with a new identity and a different way of life. That’s hard, but not impossible. It’s what he’d aspired to do, and what, in his opinion, his family was preventing him from doing.”
Dupree watched Amaia during Tucker’s analysis. He saw her mouth twitch discontentedly. She clearly didn’t agree with Tucker, but she said nothing.
“Let’s recap,” Johnson said, losing patience. “Lots of elements fit: the