Kingdom of Strangers by Zoë Ferraris Read Free Book Online Page A

near the doorway. Everyone turned to look. “But that doesn’t mean she would talk back. She probably wouldn’t.”
    “Under what circumstances would she talk back?” Charlie asked.
    “If she knew him.”
    “Most likely, she wouldn’t know him. The killer would want her to be a stranger.”
    “Okay,” Katya said. “She wouldn’t talk to him unless, perhaps, he needed her help.”
    Daher, who had been watching this exchange with a dark look on his face, put in: “Like Ted Bundy.”
    “Good point,” Charlie said, still looking at Katya. “So maybe he lured her with a false vulnerability. Where else could he find a woman?”
    “Well, she could have been his housemaid,” Daher said.
    “She probably wouldn’t have been,” Charlie said, “at least not consistently. In phase two, when he’s trolling for the perfect victim, he’s looking from afar. He’s studying the victim for signs thatshe’ll be like the woman in his fantasy—and the more you get to know someone, the less like fantasy they become. So the killer looks for superficial things, usually physical characteristics. For example, Ted Bundy preferred women with their hair parted in the middle.”
    “Well,” Daher said with a dry laugh, “our killer won’t be looking for a particular hairstyle.”
    Charlie gave him a wry smile and turned back to Katya. “Right. He might be looking for facial features, then?”
    “Maybe,” Katya said. “Or just… a body shape.”
    “Excellent. Maybe she’s always petite. Or skinny.”
    Riyadh, who had been standing to the side, said: “All of the victims were between one point eight and one point nine meters tall. And all of them were immigrants, mostly from Asian countries.”
    “How tall is one point eight meters?” Charlie asked Katya.
    “Just under six feet,” Katya said.
    “Oh, okay. So they’re pretty tall.” Charlie turned back to the room, but not before giving Katya a secretive smile. “It’s not very common to find tall women among certain racial groups, so you already know one thing about him: he likes tall, Asian women. He’s targeting an unusual type. One of your main problems is going to be determining how your killer found and captured his victims. How he won their trust.
    “There’s one more important classification about serial killers that you’re going to want to look at, and that’s organization. How organized is he? Another way to think of this is, how elaborately does he plot and execute his fantasy? Planning a murder takes time and energy. Some murderers kill their victims right away. That’s the disorganized type. They tend to be sloppy. They also tend to be excessively gory and violent. The organized types are different. They make the killing phase—that’s phase five in the sequence—last for days or even weeks. They usually don’t kill the victims right away, and even if they do, they don’t dispose ofthe body right away. They want to keep enjoying the thrill of watching their victim being abused. They want the fantasy to last as long as it can. It only ends when they get sick of it. Our Behavioral Science Unit developed this classification, and it extends to crime scenes as well. The disorganized killer will leave, well, a messy crime scene. But an organized killer is elaborate and has usually planned out exactly how to hide every trace of his crime. Except for one thing: the totem.”
    “What’s that?” This was Kazaz, the translator.
    “A totem is something he’s saved from the kill—usually a body part, but it can be anything. It’s something like a trophy. It reminds him of the experience, and he can go back to it with pleasure or pride.”
    “The hands,” Ibrahim said.
    Charlie looked at him, her attention like a spotlight. “Yes, he removed the victims’ hands. Both of them, right?”
    “That’s right,” Ibrahim replied. “He cut off all of the women’s hands, but just yesterday we found three of them buried by the bodies.”
    “Only