bent under the tape like a boxer entering the ring and immediately began to walk towards the garage that was now lit by a solitary mini-floodlight. Halfway there he suddenly stopped and turned through three hundred and sixty degrees.
‘Where did you come from?’ he quietly asked the trace of the killer that would forever remain at the scene like an ethereal fingerprint of violence that could never be scrubbed away. ‘Did you walk straight towards it? Did you walk across the same ground I’m walking across now – feeling unstoppable – feeling like a god? Or did you skirt around the outside of the park and come up behind him?’ He waited a few seconds for the answer to come, but he neither heard nor saw anything, so he continued his walk to the garage, trying to feel the killer’s presence, his mind, with every step, until he reached the brick and corrugated-iron shell that William Dalton had called home.
The forensic team had pulled the metal sheet back across the entrance as best they could, but the floodlight penetrated deep inside, illuminating the squalor Dalton had lived in and the violence that had claimed his life. Sean peered through the gap in the makeshift front door. ‘Is this what you did?’ he asked the ghost of Dalton’s killer. ‘Did you move quietly up to the garage and look through the gaps, watching him for a while before you somehow lured him into your trap? And how did you do that?’ He looked down at the floor inside and instantly found what he was looking for: the bloodstains from the crime scene photographs. In real life, they looked far less vivid. There was a small patch of blood at the entrance and then what appeared to be a smear mark for several feet that connected to a much larger bloodstained area where Dalton had his throat and carotid artery sliced wide open, causing him to bleed to death in seconds.
Sean remembered the report said the victim had almost certainly been hit over the back of the head. The photographs of Dalton’s matted, bloody hair around the wound flashed in his mind. He pulled at the sheet of metal that had served as a door, the noise loud and grating – screaming through the stillness of the bitter night. He froze for a few seconds as he looked around. Surely someone would have heard the metal being pulled away? ‘Or at least you must have thought it would have been heard,’ he whispered. ‘You must have thought it would attract unwanted attention, that someone might look out of a window and see you … yet you didn’t walk away. You did what you came here to do.’ He thought silently for a while, seeing the killer standing in the darkness – calm despite the frightful noise. No sense of panic or fear. Just a determination to kill. A shiver ran down his spine, partly because of the cold, but mostly because of the dawning realization of the type of killer he was hunting. This one was as calm and careful as he was vicious. Those were always the most difficult to catch.
Again he pulled at the metal sheet, once more filling the night with that terrible grating sound, until the gap was big enough to fit through. He took a couple of steps back to the floodlight and switched it off, unclipped his mini-Maglite from his belt and clicked it on.
Alarmed by the sounds coming from the scene and the sudden darkness, the constable Sean had spoken with earlier called out, his voice full of concern: ‘You all right there, sir?’
‘I’m fine,’ Sean shouted back. ‘I need to look at something without the light on.’ He headed to the garage entrance and stood peering into the darkness with only his small torch for illumination. He remembered there had been a camping lantern at the scene and figured it would have given off about the same amount of light. Now he was seeing the scene as both killer and victim had seen it.
He shone his torch at the pattern of blood on the ground – the cone of light tracing it from the small stain by the entrance to the larger dried pool deep inside the garage. He walked on, careful to avoid the area where the killing had taken place, while also watching every step he took, shining the light on each area of ground before placing his foot down, until he reached a patch from which he could see everything he wanted. Again he traced the blood smear from the small stain to the large pool and back again as the scene that had played out here became clearer and clearer in his mind.
‘You were hit on the back of the head by the entrance and then dragged inside where he sliced across your trachea and carotid artery. The cut across the throat was survivable, but the cut to the artery was not. The pressure in the artery would have caused death through blood loss, but … Shit,’ he cursed as he lost his way and his thoughts became confused and tangled. He took a few deep breaths to clear his mind, then started again.
‘You’re not thinking like a homeless teenager,’ he reprimanded himself. ‘What was he thinking? What was going through his mind?’ He thought back to the crime scene reports. There was evidence the victim had been preparing his crack pipe, though he never got to use it. ‘What would keep an addict from his drug?’ he asked softly. He took a few more deep breaths while the image of the victim began to form in his mind as if he was watching him on CCTV footage. He could see Dalton, eagerly but carefully preparing to get high and forget the pointlessness of his life.
‘You live your life in fear,’ Sean found himself quietly saying. ‘You don’t feel safe anywhere. You only escape the fear when you get high, which is what you were planning on doing, but something disturbed you. You heard something outside, didn’t you? Something anyone else could have ignored, but because you live in fear you had to be sure it wasn’t a threat – had to make sure no one was waiting for you to pass out stoned when you’d be at your most vulnerable. So you went to take a look outside.’ He walked back to the entrance and looked out into the night just as William Dalton had.
‘It was raining hard that night,’ he reminded himself. ‘It must have been difficult to see properly with the rain driving into your face in the dark. Did you call out – demand to know if someone was there? But no one called back, did they? Did you move further from your shelter to try and see better – playing right into his hands? He used your fear to lure you into his trap, didn’t he? And when you stretched too far into the darkness, he hit you hard – not hard enough to kill you, but enough to knock you down, to leave you confused and disorientated while he dragged you back inside. Did he close the entrance before he did the things he did to you? The report said it was open when the body was found, but he could have left it like that when he went.’ He thought back to the original crime scene report. ‘You had a camping lantern, but there was no mention of any light being on – so it was never turned on or he turned it off when he came in … or when he left. Was that why he wasn’t afraid of being seen – because it was dark in here?’ Another thought crossed his mind as he searched with his torch for the lantern, quickly finding it. He walked carefully towards it and crouched next to it, shining his torch close as he examined the on/off switch. It was set to on. Clearly the batteries had gone flat by the time the body was discovered. Sean nodded as he thought it through. ‘Batteries are expensive. You would have used the lamp sparingly, but you needed light to prepare your drugs and then there was the noise outside. Your fear meant you kept it on when you went to look, but when he dragged you inside he left it on. Because he wanted to see. He had to see everything. And when he left, he left you in light – because he wanted the world to see.’
He remembered the words of the crime scene report and the photographs. There was no evidence of the victim fighting back – no defensive wounds or arterial blood-spray patterns on the walls. ‘So you were too badly injured to fight back, or he was too strong. Strong enough to pin you to the floor while he cut through your throat and carotid artery. Did he hold you still while he watched the life drain from you? And when you were dead or near-dead, he took your teeth and nails – so he could relive killing you over and over again.’
Without realizing it, he suddenly switched point of view from victim to killer, as if in the moment Dalton died he left his dead body and entered the murderer’s very much living body. For a few seconds he was sure he could feel the excitement and power the killer had felt coursing through him, making him feel more alive than he’d ever been.
‘You raped the first victim, but your crimes are not sexually motivated,’ he said, almost too quietly to be audible. ‘Your excitement spread through every inch of your body, didn’t it? You became aroused by this great thing you had just done, but the tension in your body was too much, wasn’t it? You needed a release, so you raped her while she lay dead or dying.’ He closed his eyes for a second and