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feeling a strange detachment as I examined a corpse that had been a friend. When I got to her scalp
wound I paused, something tugging at my memory. Mona had been cut over her ear and around to the
nape of her neck, but though she'd been raped and strangled, she'd had no other blade injuries. Genia
did, but they were all small stab wounds except for the long slice through her scalp. The wound was a
gaping slit perhaps a quarter inch wide. It had been narrower when we'd found her, but skin contracted
after death, so the width of the wound proved nothing. I looked over the edges of the wound with a
magnifier, and after several minutes I found what I was looking for. The two edges of the incision didn't
match, there was a strip of flesh missing.
Genetic evidence. I had a revelation then. The scenario goes like this. A serial sex killer slips into the
colony program with the rest of us whose violence had more correctable roots. Maybe he stays latent
through the whole training regime, maybe he continues to kill and just gets away with it. Then he's on the
ship, and maybe, probably, his lover was one of the ninety percent who died in cold sleep. That's the
precipitating stressor. First he hides on Endeavour , isolating himself from us, watching us, vicariously
living out the horrific fantasy he plans to enact on the community once we're on the ground. He stows on
board one of the shuttles and sets himself up with stolen gear somewhere in the river valley. Cheryl is the
first victim, the murder goes like clockwork, and he makes her body vanish in the river. Mona is the
second, but Vlad interrupts him before he's finished. What Vlad interrupts is the incision around her ear,
which is why it's unfinished. Serial killers collect trophies from their victims, and this one collects hair.
He's caught in the act of scalping her. I remembered Cheryl Teirson's long black tresses. If we ever
found her body, I'd bet a ticket back to Earth that she was scalped as well.
And Genia, she's investigating him, she's getting evidence that points to him. She's a threat, and she's a
woman, and he responds the only way he knows how. He doesn't throw her in the river because this time
he knows we aren't going to blame her disappearance on the native fauna. Instead he leaves her on
display, raped and degraded, a defiant gesture thrown at the rest of us, a warning to stop searching him
out, not that it's going to work, but he isn't acting rationally now, isn't thinking things all the way through.
So he can't scalp her because he doesn't want the rest of us knowing that much about him, he doesn't
want us to know what to look for. But neither can he resist taking a thin strip as a souvenir, and the rest
of the cuts are just window dressing to conceal the one that matters.
Find the evidence, find the killer. I laughed at myself, because it sounded so easy. The harder problem
was find the killer, find the evidence. How he was managing to survive on his own out there, and how
he was getting into our community were the real key questions. And it still didn't explain why he'd
sabotaged the gene sequencer. We wouldn't need DNA to know that some outsider we found in a hut by
the river was the perpetrator. I mused on that, and then it hit me.
We weren't looking for an outsider at all, he was an insider, and a clever one. The killer's trophies would
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be the final evidence, if I could find them. He'd want them close, because they were the reason he did the
crime, his signature as the references called it. He'd be reliving the moments vicariously, over and over. I
shuddered thinking about that. He'd need his trophies nearby, close enough to get at easily, but he'd have
them somewhere they couldn't be pinned on him if anyone found them. There were thousands of such
places in the Town alone, in a wall section, in a supply box, anywhere. It was just a matter of searching
them out, which was possible, and then linking them to him, which might be impossible unless we were
smart about it.
And then I had a better idea. He'd fooled us, but now I knew where to find the evidence that would
catch him. I went to the flexplex that had been Cheryl's, untouched since she'd vanished. A few minutes
later I was back in the greenhouse with a hair sample. I gave it to Claire.
"I need to know whose hair this is."
She spread her hands. "The sequencer isn't working, and isn't going to be working. Horst is going to try
to . . ."
I held up a hand, stopping her in midsentence. "We can do it by eye, under a microscope."
She nodded, picking up on my urgency. We sorted through the box. There were only six samples that
were even close to the black, wavy sample I'd found. I mounted a few strands of each on slides and
Claire inspected them. I didn't trust myself to do the job, I already had a strong conviction about the
results we were going to find.
She looked up from the eyepieces. "It's this one. Tony's."
I bent over and looked for myself. The match was immediately obvious. I stood up again. "He's the
killer."
"Tony?" Claire was surprised, even though she must have figured out what I was doing. "How . . . ?"
"I went through Cheryl's space in her flexplex and got this hair from her comb."
She looked at me uncomprehending.
"Don't you see! It's Cheryl's hair! Psychopaths, they take things from their victims, little trophies, so they
can relive the experience over and over. Clothing, jewelry, sometimes body parts. For Tony it's hair."
"That's incredible!" Her tone was disbelieving.
"Remember he asked if a hair sample was good for the gene scan? He was figuring out how he was
going to beat it as soon as he knew what we were going to do. He was lucky enough to have a hair
sample close enough to his own color that he could get away with it Cheryl's. Once you agreed that
hair was a good sample source, he went and set up another bag with a snip of Cheryl's hair. He kept
control of all the samples as you went around and collected them, it would have been easy to make the
switch before he handed them to you and Genia. You expected thirty-seven hair samples, all labeled, and
that's what you got." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]