The Wire in the Blood by Val McDermid Read Free Book Online Page B

I’ve seen the way you run your operation, I can’t believe the idea of a serial arsonist hasn’t already crossed your mind.’
    He tugged at the lobe of one ear, sizing her up. Finally, he said, ‘I was wondering when one of your lot would notice.’
    Carol breathed out hard through her nose. ‘It might have been helpful if we’d been given a nudge in the right direction. You are the experts, after all.’
    ‘Your predecessor didn’t think so,’ Pendlebury said. He might as well have been commenting on the price of fish. All of the enthusiasm he’d shown earlier for his job had vanished behind an impassive mask, leaving Carol to draw her own conclusions. They didn’t make a pretty picture.
    She placed the file on Pendlebury’s desk and flipped it open. ‘That was then. This is now. Are you telling me you’ve got query arsons that predate this one?’
    He glanced down at the top sheet in the file and snorted. ‘How far back would you like to start?’
    Tony Hill sat alone at his desk, ostensibly preparing for the following day’s seminar with the task force officers. But his thoughts were far away from those details. He was thinking about the psychopathic minds out there, already set in the moulds that would generate pain and misery for people they didn’t even know yet.
    There had long been a theory among psychologists that discounted the existence of evil, ascribing the worst excesses of the most sociopathic abductors, torturers and killers to a linked series of circumstances and events in their past that culminated in one final stress-laden event that catapulted them over the edge of what civilized society would tolerate. But that had never entirely satisfied Tony. It begged the question of why some people with almost identical backgrounds of abuse and deprivation went on not to become psychopaths but to lead useful, fruitful lives, integrated into society.
    Now the scientists were talking about a genetic answer, a fracture in the DNA code that might explain this divergence. Somehow, Tony found that answer too pat. It seemed as much of a cop-out as the old-fashioned notion that some men were simply evil and that was that. It evaded responsibility in a way he found repugnant.
    It was an issue that had always held particular resonance for him. He knew the reason he was so good at what he did. It was because for so many of the steps down the road that his prey had taken, he had walked in their footprints. But at some point he could never quite identify there had come a parting of the ways. Where they became hunters at first hand, he became a hunter at second hand, tracking them down once they had crossed the line. Yet his life still held echoes of theirs. The fantasies that drove them were about sex and death; his fantasies about sex and death were called profiling. They were chillingly close.
    It sometimes seemed chicken and egg to Tony. Had his impotence started because he was afraid the unfettered expression of his sexuality might lead him to violence and death? Or had his knowledge of how often the sexual urge led to killing worked on his body to make him sexually inadequate? He doubted he would ever know. However the circuit worked, it was undeniable that his work had profoundly affected his life.
    For no apparent reason, he recalled the spark of uncomplicated enthusiasm he’d seen in Shaz Bowman’s eyes. He could remember feeling that way too, before his fascination had been tempered by exposure to the horrors humans could inflict upon each other. Maybe he could use what he knew to give his team better armour than he’d had. If he achieved nothing else with them, that alone would be worthwhile.
    In another part of the city, Shaz clicked her mouse button and closed down her software. On autopilot, she switched off her computer and stared unseeingly as the screen faded to black. When she’d decided to explore the resources of the Internet as her first stop on the road to disinterring Tony Hill’s