Spider

'This is interesting,' said Howie, ignoring her pet rant about Bundy. 'There's a bullet-point summary. It says necrophiles are usually fearful of rejection by women they sexually desire. Can you imagine what a necrophile would do in the kind of situation where he feels rejected?'

Fernandez was in step with his thoughts. 'You mean he'd kill her to keep her?'

'Exactly!'

Fernandez mused on it. 'Maybe BRK got badly jilted once, and he just couldn't bear the idea of anyone else walking out on him.'

'Once bitten twice shy,' said Howie.

'He couldn't face the idea of being on his own? Maybe he was just shit-scared of the whole thought of being lonely. A kind of lonelyphobia?'

'I think that's it,' said Howie. 'Death is the way he ensures that they never jilt him, that they stay with him, devoted to him, for ever.'

'Hmm,' said Fernandez. 'I'll remember that next time I give some Brad Pitt lookalike my number in a bar.'

50

Marine Park, Brooklyn, New York It has been more than fifty hours since any food or liquid has passed the parched and blistered lips of Ludmila Zagalsky.

As she slips in and out of delirium, her mind is constantly tormented by the knowledge that she is involved in a unique act of self-cannibalism. As well as the awful stinging in her eyes, a new agony has surfaced, a raw and wretched stabbing pain in her kidneys. Lu doesn't know enough anatomy to be able to even name the organ that's hurting, let alone diagnose that she's rapidly heading towards permanent renal damage. But she knows one thing for sure; something important inside her is screaming for water and without it she is going to die.

Once upon a time, back in the real world where people weren't kidnapped, stripped naked and tortured to death, she'd been eating pizza with an old boyfriend; they'd watched Scream, or was it Scream 2 or 3? Anyway, they'd jokingly discussed what would be the worst way to be killed – the bullet, the blade, drowning or maybe fire. Her friend had said he'd hate to be burned alive at the stake, like they used to do in France with chicks such as Joan of Arc. Lu had confessed she couldn't swim, had never been in the sea or a swimming pool in her life and was shit-scared of drowning. As they'd finished off the deep pan and thought about making out, neither of them had considered that probably the worst way to die was to be deliberately starved to death.

Right now, Lu reckons drowning might not be such a bad way to go after all. A girl she used to work a corner of the Beach with once told her that she should drink about half a gallon of water every day to stay healthy. Half a gallon a day! She'd nearly wet herself laughing. The kid had said she'd been balling some kind of health freak, a gym monster who had muscles like the Incredible Hulk, and he'd told her that more than eighty per cent of blood is made up of water so you've got to keep topping up the fluid level. It had sounded like bullshit. Until now. For the first time in her life, she understood every word of it.

In the last hour or so, she's noticed that her mouth isn't only painfully dry, her tongue has started to taste bitter and almost poisonous. Were the gym monster around, he could have explained that her electrolyte balance is badly screwed, or, to be technical, critically destabilized. Her body cells are under fatal attack and her blood plasma is already seriously damaged.

Ludmila Zagalsky doesn't believe in God. She's never been in a church or, for that matter, anywhere holy in her entire twenty-five years. Her mother didn't even bother to have her birth registered, let alone have her baptized. But this very second she is praying. She is telling the God of her own special Darkness, whatever religion he is, that she is sorry for everything bad that she has ever done in her stinking, miserable, worthless life. She's telling him that she forgives her stepfather for all those things that he did to her; that she hopes he's fine and happy and healthy and that she didn't mean it when she told him that she wanted him to rot in hell while devil dogs chewed his bollocks off. She's asking for forgiveness for blaming her parents for her anger and for hating her mother for the beatings that she got. And she's confessing to all the sins she's committed and all the sinful thoughts she's ever had. And in return, she's asking God for only one thing.

Not to save her, but just to let her die quickly.

51

Rome Roberto returned to the Incident Room with four coffees and a mouthful of bad news.

He put the tray of drinks down on a table and politely waited until a conversation between Jack and Benito finished.

'I am sorry,' he said, 'but while I was making coffees, I got a call from my contact in Milano.'

'About the courier?' asked Orsetta.

'Yes,' confirmed Roberto. 'They are now sure there is no such courier company as Volante Milano. It does not exist.'

Jack lifted a coffee from the tray and accepted he was hooked again on caffeine. 'So how did BRK get the package here, if not through a courier?'

Orsetta was thinking the unthinkable. 'In person? You think he delivered it in person?'

Benito nodded. 'Something like that.'

'Please,' interrupted Roberto. 'My contact had an idea what might have happened. Right now, there are many students looking to earn some extra money. It seems in Milano they stand as advertisements outside airports and railway stations, offering to do anything.'

'Anything? What do you mean?' asked Orsetta.

'I am sorry, maybe I don't explain properly,' said Roberto. 'They hold up the card, saying they will carry things anywhere for you. They stand near the parcel offices and offer to take things anywhere on a train, even on planes. The courier companies they do not like this, they find this very bad.'

'I bet they do,' said Jack. 'So what you're saying is that BRK may have given the package to a student at the railway station, and had it delivered here?'

'Si, yes, that is what I am trying to say,' said Roberto, relieved finally to be understood.

'He's taking a bit of a risk, isn't he?' said Orsetta. 'I wouldn't trust a student to deliver something valuable for me.'

'How do these student couriers get paid?' asked Benito.

'It is cash, I think,' said Roberto.

Benito played with his goatee beard, thinking hard. 'BRK will have bought a return ticket for the courier, maybe rail, maybe air. He'll have paid cash, so we'll have problems tracing it. He may have given the courier some money upfront and then promised to pay him much more when he returned.'

'Doesn't work for me,' said Jack.

Orsetta was growing frustrated. She ran her fingers through her hair. 'This is just messing up my mind.'

'That's it!'Jack snapped his fingers. 'That's exactly what he's trying to do. Confuse us. Have us chasing shadows. There is no Volante Milano. Yet he went to enormous trouble to make it look as though he was there in Milan and used the company. He did this to make us think he had been there so that we would divert our resources to searching in Milan.'

'So he was never in Milan?' asked Orsetta, still struggling to make complete sense of it all.

'No, not at all,' explained Jack. 'I think you'll find that the Volante courier label was made on his own computer, and that the cardboard box and bubble wrap packaging will match the box from UMail2Anywhere sent to the FBI.'

'And the black felt-pen too,' said Orsetta.

'That too,' added Jack.

'He's pulling us all over the place,' conceded Benito.

'He's trying to,' said Jack. 'The courier story Roberto told us is probably old news and common knowledge. I've heard about students being used as couriers, it's been going on for a few years in the States. Like Roberto said, kids even get free holidays by babysitting boxes on flights all over the world. I think BRK will have wanted us to think our package was delivered by a real courier company in Milan, hence the label. If we got through that test, then I reckon he was sure we'd come across the widespread use of Milanese students as couriers and would have wasted even more time chasing that dead end.'