Kellerman, Jonathan - The Theatre

Did U.N. clinics, he wondered, see epilepsy patients? He was almost certain they had to-the disorder was common. Those files would be off-limits to his men. Unless he wanted to make a stink about it, get embroiled with Sorrel Baldwin and others like him. All that U.N. bureaucracy.

Baldwin-now there was something interesting. Before coming to Jerusalem, the American had lived in Beirut, Juliet's former home base. He'd earned a degree from the American University-sociology; Daniel remembered the diploma. According to the tank captain Cohen had interviewed, Juliet's brothel had catered to foreigners. American University personnel-Yalom had mentioned that specifically. A coincidence? Probably. The university was a breeding ground for Arabists; lots of them ended up working for the U.N. Still, it would have been interesting to talk to Baldwin in depth. Impossible without going through the brass.

Evidence, Laufer would bark at him. What evidence do you have for me to get my hands dirty, Sharavi? Challenging their diplomatic immunity? Stick with the case and don't run off on another tangent, Sharavi.

Since the discovery of Juliet's body, the deputy commander was in foul spirits. Pickled by his own press release, fermenting in ruined optimism. Firing off memos that inquired shrilly about progress. Or the lack of it.

Evidence. Daniel knew he had none. There was nothing to tie Juliet in with Baldwin or anyone else at the Amelia Catherine. Her body had been dumped clear across town, in the pine forest near Ein Qerem, on the southwest side of town. About as far from Scopus as you could get.

A Jewish National Fund forest, financed by the penny-in-a-blue-box donations of schoolchildren. The corpse wrapped in white sheeting, just like Fatma's. Discovered by a pair of early morning hikers, teenage boys, who'd run from the sight, goggle-eyed with fear. The Russian nuns who lived nearby at the Ein Qerem Convent had seen and heard nothing.

Then there was the matter of Brother Joseph Roselli. Daniel had dropped by Saint Saviour's hours after the discovery of the second body, found the monk on his rooftop, and showed him Juliet's death picture. Roselli had exclaimed: "She could be Fatma's sister!" Then his face had seemed to collapse, features falling, restructuring suddenly in a tight-lipped mask. His demeanor from that point had been hard and cold, taut with outrage. A completely different side of the man. Daniel supposed he couldn't be faulted for his indignation: Men of God weren't accustomed to being considered murder suspects. But the shift was sudden. Strange.

He couldn't shake the feeling that Roselli was harboring some secret, struggling with something… but the resumption of Daoud's nighttime surveillance had turned up nothing so far.

No evidence and two dead girls.

He thought about Fatma and Juliet for a while, tried to establish some kind of connection between the runaway from Silwan and the whore from Beirut, then scolded himself for going off on tangents. Obsessing about the victims instead of trying to understand the killer, because the victims had names, identities, and the killer was an enigma.

Seven days had separated the two murders. Now, a week had passed since Juliet had been found.

Was something happening right now? Another helpless woman seduced into endless sleep?

And if so, what was there to do?

He kept thinking about it-cursing his helplessness-until his belly filled with fire and his head felt ready to burst.

After a Shabbat supper during which he nodded and smiled at Laura and the children, hearing them but not listening, he went into the laundry room that Laura had converted to a studio, carrying an armful of books and monographs checked out of the library at National Headquarters. The room was bright-he'd left the light on before Sabbath, stacked Laura's stretched canvases neatly on the floor. Sitting among rolls of fabrics and tins of wax, jars filled with brushes and paint-encrusted palettes, he began to read.

Case histories of serial killers: Landru; Herman Mudgett; Albert Fish, who murdered and ate little children; Peter Kurten, a nauseating excuse for a human being who had well earned the nickname Dusseldorf Monster. According to one expert, the Germans produced a disproportionate number of sex murders-something to do with an impoverished collective unconscious.

And, of course, Jack the Ripper. Rereading a book on the Ripper case give him pause, because some experts were convinced the scourge of Whitechapel had been a Jew-a shohet whose experience as a ritual slaughterer made him an expert in anatomy. He remembered what Dr. Levi had said, and he thought of the shohtim he knew: Mori Gerafi, a tiny, kind Yemenite who seemed too gentle for the job. Rabbi Landau, who worked out of the Mehane Yehuda market. Learned men, pious and scholarly. The thought of them carving up women was absurd.

He put the Ripper book aside and forged onward.

Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis-people chasing pleasure in hideous ways. Interpol and FBI reports-the German theory notwithstanding, America seemed to have more serial killers than any other country. One estimate said there were forty or forty of them doing their dirty work at any given time, more than five hundred unresolved serial murders. The FBI had begun to program a computer in order to catalog all of it.

Thirty roving monsters. Such cruelty, such evil.

Street-corner Mengeles. Why had God created them?

He finished at two in the morning, dry-mouthed and heavy-lidded, Laura's drawing lamp the sole illumination in the silent, dark apartment.

Was it happening right now? The ritual, the outrage-an inert body laid out for dissection?

Knowing his dreams would be polluted, he went to sleep.

He awoke at dawn, expecting bad news. None came and he faked his way through Shabbat.

At nine on Sunday morning he filled an attache case with papers and went to see Dr. Ben David. The psychologist's main office was at Hebrew University but he kept a suite for private consultations in the front rooms of his flat on Rehov Ramban.

Daniel arrived early and shared the claustrophobic waiting room with a tired-looking woman who hid from eye contact behind the international edition of Time magazine. Ten minutes before the hour, Ben David came out of the treatment room with a skinny, large-eyed boy of about five. The boy looked at Daniel and smiled shyly. The detective smiled back and wondered what could trouble such a young child so deeply that he needed a psychologist.

The woman put the Time into her purse and stood.

"All right," said Ben David heartily, in English. "I'll see Ronny the same time next week."

"Thank you, Doctor." She took her son by the hand and the two of them left quickly.

"Daniel," said Ben David, taking the detective's hand in both of his and shaking it energetically. He was a young man, in his early thirties, medium-sized and heavyset, with bushy black hair, a full dark beard, light-blue eyes that never rested, and a fitful nature that had taken Daniel by surprise the first time they'd met. He'd always thought of psychotherapists as passive, quiet. Listening and nodding, waiting for you to talk so they could pounce with interpretations. The one he'd seen at the rehab center had certainly fit the stereotype.

"Hello, Eli. Thank you for seeing me."

"Come in."

Ben David ushered him into the treatment room, a smallish, untidy office lined with bookshelves and furnished with a small desk, three sturdy chairs, and a low circular table upon which sat a dollhouse in the shape of a Swiss chalet, doll furniture, and half a dozen miniature human figurines. Behind the desk was a credenza piled high with papers and toys. Next to the papers were an aluminium coffepot, cups, and a sugar bowl. No couch, no inkblots. A single Renoir print on the wall. The room smelled pleasantly of modeling clay.

Daniel sat on one of the chairs. The psychologist went to the crcdenza.

"Coffee?"

"Please."

Ben David prepared two cups, gave Daniel his, and sat down opposite him, sipping. He was wearing a faded burgundy polo shirt that exposed a hard, protuberant belly, baggy dark-green corduroy trousers, and scuffed loafers without socks. His hair looked disheveled; his beard needed trimming. Casual, careless even, like a graduate student on holiday. Not like a doctor at all, but such were the perquisites of status. Ben David had been an academic prodigy, chief of the army's psychological service at twenty-seven, a full professor two years later. Daniel supposed he could dress any way he pleased.

"So, my friend." The psychologist smiled cursorily, then shifted in the chair, moving his shoulders with almost tic-like abruptness. "I don't know what I can tell you that we haven't covered on Gray Man."

"I'm not sure, myself." Daniel pulled the forensic reports and crime summaries out of his case and handed them over. He drank coffee and waited as the psychologist read.

"Okay," said Ben David, scanning quickly and looking up after a few moments. "What do you want to know, specifically?"

"What do you think about the washing of the bodies? What's the meaning of it?"

Ben David sat back in his chair, flipped one leg over the other, and ran his fingers through his hair.

"Let me start with the same warning I gave you before. Everything I tell you is pure speculation. It could be wrong. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Given that, my best guess is that the pathologist may very well be right-the killer was attempting to avoid leaving physical evidence. Something else to consider-and the two notions aren't "mutually exclusive-would be a power play, playing God by preparing and manipulating the body. Were the corpses positioned in any way? Posed?'

Daniel thought about that.

"They looked as if they were set down neatly," he said. "With care."

"When you saw the first body what was your initial impression?"

"A doll. A damaged doll."

Ben David nodded enthusiastically. "Yes, I like that. The victims may very well have been used as dolls."

He turned and pointed to the miniature chalet. "Children engage in doll-play in order to achieve a sense of mastery over their conflicts and fantasies. Artists and writers and composers are driven to produce out of similar motivations. The creative urge-everyone wants to be godlike. Sex killers do it by destroying life. Gray Man tossed his victims aside. This one's more creative."

It sounded blasphemous to Daniel. He said nothing.

"Collecting accurate data on sex killers is difficult, because we have access only to the ones who get caught-which may be a biased sample. And all of them are liars, so their interview data are suspect. Nevertheless, the Americans have done some good research, and a few patterns seem to hold- the things I told you about Gray Man. Your man's an exceptionally immature psychopath. He's grown up with a chronic and overwhelming sense of powerlessness and helplessness-a creative blockage, if you will. He's been constructing power fantasies since early childhood and building his life around them. His family was intact. His family life was a mess but may have appeared outwardly normal to the casual observer. Normal sex doesn't work for him. He needs violence and domination-helplessness of the victim-to get aroused. In the beginning, violent fantasies were enough to satisfy him. Then, while still a child, he moved on to torturing and possibly having sex with animals. As an adolescent, he may have progressed to human rapec. When that no longer fulfilled his power needs, he began killing. Murder serves as a substitute for intercourse: beginning with some sort of subjugation and following in with stabbing and hacking-the exaggerated sexual metaphor, the literal piercing and entry of the body. He chooses women as victims but may be latently homosexual."

Thinking of the rumour about Dr. Darousha, Daniel asked, "What about an active homosexual?"

"No," said Ben David. "The key word is latent. He's fighting to suppress those impulses, may even be hypermasculine-a real law-and-order type. There are homosexual sex killers, of course, but they usually murder men." Ben David thought for a moment. "There are records of a few pansexual murderers-Kurten, the Dusseldorf Monster, did away with men, women, children. But unless you start tuning up male victims, I'd concentrate on latent homosexuals."

"How can a latent homosexual be spotted?"

"He can't."

Daniel waited for more. When it didn't come, he asked, "What about the earrings? Gray Man didn't take anything."

"Gray Man was crude, scared-slash and run. The earrings are trophies, as was the uterus taken from your second victim. Other killers take underwear, clothing. Your corpses.were found naked, so your killer may have taken clothing as well. The trophies are a temporary substitute for killing again. Mementoes, similar to the heads collected by hunters. They're used for masturbation, to retrigger the power fantasies."

Ben David glanced at the reports again. The ultimate power play is necrophilia. No mention is made of rape. Did your killer have post-mortem intercourse with the victims?"

"The pathologist found no semen," said Daniel. "It may have been washed away."

"Possible impotence," said the psychologist, "or he could have masturbated away from the body. It would make serum typing impossible-more avoidance of physical evidence. Not a stupid murderer, Dani. Definitely smarter than Gray Man."

Daniel thought: Stupid, "crude" Gray Man had eluded capture.

Ben David raised his cup and emptied it, then dried his beard with the back of one hand. "In order to dominate, you need subjugation. Some killers tie up their victims. Yours used heroin to subjugate, but it amounts to the same thing. Total control."

"Do you attach any significance to the use of drugs?"

The psychologist got up, walked to the credenza, and poured a second cup of coffee. "I don't know," he said, upon return. "Perhaps he'd experienced some sort of peak sexual experience related to drug use. A lot of what turns people on is the result of chance associations-the coupling of some random but significant event with sexual arousal."