Five Days in Summer

he had their attention; their eyes froze as he brought to life a killer they now knew would undermine their lives until they found him.
    “September third, 1987, Fleetwood, New York. Marjorie Lipnor leaves her two kids alone in her apartment for five minutes so she can go three flights down to the laundry room in the basement of her building. The wet clothes never make it into the dryer. Five days later, the torso of Daniel Lipnor, age six, is found in a toddler swing in a playground two towns away. Dead three hours at most. Chest covered in fresh pinpricks. The next day, Mrs. Lipnor is found wandering around Bronxville Village, naked, disoriented. She can’t remember anything that happened and never recovers her memory. Fingers point at the ex-husband but he clears. Two years later, she hangs herself while her older son is at school. Case never solved.”
    Snow looked only mildly interested, but Geary could see the freeze in Amy’s eyes.
    “I’m into this twelve minutes now, Detective Cardoza,” Geary said.
    “Continue.”
    Geary picked up the fourth pile and leaned slightly forward.
    “September third, 1994, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Janice Winfrey disappears from Race Point Beach where she’s spending the day with her husband and son, Chance, age seven. She goes to the ladies’ room and doesn’t come back. Five days later, Chance vanishes while his father’s back is turned so he can use a urinal in the men’s room at Bradlees at the FalmouthMall. Winfrey alerts store security, the store shuts down in forty seconds flat, and the boy is never found.”
    “I remember that.” Snow leaned forward. “Every station on the Cape worked it.”
    “You worked on it?” Amy asked him.
    Snow nodded.
    “On September twelfth,” Geary continued, “Chance’s left arm turns up under a wharf in Woods Hole. Janice Winfrey turns up—”
    “Naked,” Snow said, “on a bench at the aquarium. I’ll never forget it.”
    “Alive,” Amy said.
    “Sort of.” Snow shook his head.
    Geary put back the fourth pile, and picked up the fifth.
    “September third, 2001,” he said.
    Amy closed her eyes. “Emily Parker disappears from the parking lot in front of Stop and Shop.” She opened her eyes and looked at Geary. “This is the third day.”
    “That’s right. She’s got three children, Detective. The boys are seven and eleven.”
    Amy pressed the heels of her hands against her forehead. Then she looked back over at Geary. She kept her voice nice and cool. “What’s on that pad of paper you’re holding?”
    Geary’s hand flattened a crease out of the top page. “Thank you for asking, Detective Cardoza.” It was the snapshot he’d formulated after his lunch with Bell and his conversations with Tom at VICAP. He’d stayed up most of the night working on it. He’d hand over the case as complete as possible, and meet Roger Bell for that game of golf later in the afternoon; he’d win that dollar bet and have the last laugh for once.
    “Please, Dr. Geary, read me the profile.”
    Geary cleared his throat and read from the scrawl on his yellow pages. “Male, aged middle-fifties, white, educated, keeps his mind sharp with games and books, lives alone, works alone or in a field where he can call his own shots, no family or estranged from family, a psychopath with psychotic tendencies but not a full-blown psychosis. That means he can function in the world. Anal-compulsive, plans and schedules everything, keeps his appointments, probably complicates his life with more scheduling than he needs. In fact this man can’t breathe if his life doesn’t work like clockwork. Some kind of mother fixation, probably based on childhood abuse, probably at the hands of his mother. Why every seven years? I’m going to guess that the abuse either started or seriously escalated when he was seven years old. I’m going to guess that he committed his first crime when he was twenty-eight years old. Psychosis in white males usually blossoms into violent behavior, if it’s going to at all, when they’re in their late twenties. And seven factors right into twenty-eight, so I button his starting age right there. Jump up seven years, four more times, to this week, and we have a man who is now fifty-six years old. That’s about the age of our Mr. White from the grocery store on Monday—”
    “Bobby Robertson,” Amy interrupted.
    Geary’s eyes riveted to her face. “You found him?”
    She nodded slowly. “Go on.”
    “Good work,