he accidentally chewed with his aching tooth. It’d been bothering him for a few days now, but he wasn’t about to go to the dentist and check it out. Last time he went, the dentist actually showed him how to brush his teeth, as if he were a child. He came back home furious and sent his bot army to troll the bitch’s Facebook page, sending her threats and sexual propositions until she shut down her profile.
That’d teach her.
Aside from his bots, he had viruses and Trojan horses that did his bidding, replicating through the net with a speed that astounded even him. He had access to computers in China, Russia, France, England, Israel, Australia . . . the list went on. Here, sitting in his chair, his throne, he wasn’t just a man. He was a god.
He browsed to his favorite troll forum. One of the users had cracked the password of his neighbor’s phone and found nude photos on it. Laughing_Irukandji took a few choice photos, entered the girl’s Facebook account, and, through it, sent the pictures to all of her friends. Another glimmer of satisfaction. But just a glimmer. It wasn’t a rush like it used to be.
These days, he needed more.
He checked his finances. He had three strains of ransomware running, and they each provided him with a few hundred dollars a day. He kept them low scale, no need to get greedy. Getting greedy was how people got caught. And Laughing_Irukandji had no intention of getting caught.
He then browsed his preferred websites. Everyday Feminism, ChicagoPride, ThinkProgress . . . he read the articles carefully, feeling the fury rising in him. He cultivated his emotions with care. A gardener, watering and tending his anger, and hate, and venom. Sometimes it was hard to care. But he did his best to keep the fire going.
An alert popped up, and he tensed. A message from him. He felt the rush of anticipation and excitement as he clicked it.
The Twitter comments kept materializing on one of the monitors, unnoticed. He read the message from Jack_the_Ripper over and over again, and in the darkness, he smiled.
CHAPTER 31
Tatum stretched in his seat and rubbed his eyes. For the past hour he’d been studying the two murder case files, trying to outline the similarities and the differences, trying to understand the progression in the minds of the murderers.
Serial killers changed and adapted. They constantly obsessed about their last murder, the things they could do differently next time. They often changed their behavior because their confidence grew. Sometimes they just shifted their behavior as their fantasies and desires became more intricate. If he could figure out why they did things differently this time, perhaps they could predict the changes next time, as well.
But as difficult as it was to do with one murderer, it became infinitely harder with two. For example—Catherine Lamb had been covered, while Henrietta Fishburne had been left on display, posed grotesquely. Was it because Glover didn’t want this victim covered? Was it because neither of the men knew this woman, so they didn’t care? Or maybe it was because the unsub’s fantasy somehow included this abhorrent spectacle? He’d actually listed all the possible reasons as they occurred to him, stopping when he reached ten. This was the opposite of useful. A profiler’s job was to tighten the killer’s characteristics, narrow the pool of suspects. If he explained all the various ways things might have transpired, it would only serve to muddy the waters.
He looked around the situation room. Zoe sat alone at the far end of the large table, looking at crime scene photos, biting her lip. Agent Valentine sat a few feet away from her, typing on his laptop. Koch was working one of the murder boards, painstakingly drawing a timeline of the Henrietta Fishburne murder.
The crime scene photos dominated the murder board. One shot of the entire battered body, framed in the circular pentagram. Then close-ups of the ligature marks, another shot of the bite mark, and a third shot of the knife in the victim’s body.
Above was a photo of Fishburne taken from her Instagram account. She was smiling, leaning back on the railing of a bridge. The scenery seemed European. He hoped it had been taken on a long vacation and that Henrietta had had the time of her life. The contrast between the smiling woman and the mutilated corpse was difficult to stomach.