Five Days in Summer

Detective.”
    She sloughed off the compliment. “Please continue.”
    Geary looked at his notes. “Why always on September third? That’s hard to say. My guess is that something happened to him when he was seven years old, on the third of September. So every seven years on that date he begins the cycle of his crime. This manis trying very hard to work something out with his mother. Maybe she didn’t love him enough, but he loves her. He doesn’t want to kill her. He killed the first two by mistake, but he’s working on perfecting the pattern, and every time he gets better at it. That’s why the last two mothers survived, at least he didn’t kill them himself. One killed herself, and the other one was committed to Taunton State pretty soon after they found her.”
    Amy nodded and made a note.
    “His goal is to keep the mothers alive, but to leave them destroyed. He always kills the children by dismembering them and presenting one of their body parts for discovery. He’s taunting us, giving us a puzzle in the form of a body, one section at a time. He has two more crimes planned. He’s doing the first of those two right now, but he wants us to stop him. He recognizes what he’s doing is barbaric, but he can’t stop himself.”
    “But he waits seven years between each one,” Amy said. “How does he live with himself if he has any real consciousness of what he’s doing?”
    “That’s the trick,” Geary said. “We call it restitution, psychic erasure.”
    “He actually forgets what he’s done? That’s hard to believe.”
    “Sure is. But so are his actions. The minds of these people swing to wild extremes, Detective. They find a path inside themselves to act on aberrant impulses, and when they’re finished, they shut down that path. For them it’s like taking a vacation to an exotic place, but as soon as they’re home, the experience fades away. During the in-between times, they save up subconsciously for their next trip.”
    Snow, who had been listening quietly, sucked in some air like he’d just remembered to breathe.
    “His personality is organized,” Geary continued, “his life is organized, and his crimes are highly organized. He’s the most organized repeater I’ve ever seen. This man abducts people from common places in broad daylight, and he does not leave a single clue. Except once, in Woods Hole, a footprint. But there must be a hundred thousand brand-new size-twelve Nikes out there. Only if we catch him—”
    “When we catch him,” Amy said firmly.
    “When we catch him, we’ll have the footprint to link him to at least one crime. He’s also repeating his fifth crime in the same state as the last, which breaks his pattern. It puts the two most recent incidents in the same jurisdiction, which makes it easier for us to link them, and once we do that, we can tie up all five, because the pattern fits perfectly.”
    “Bobby Robertson.” Amy shook her head.
    “Do you have a tail on him?” Geary asked.
    “Oh yes.” She turned to Snow. “Al, get Chief Kaminer.”
    Snow took the order and left the room.
    “I see the Sarge partnered you up with the department hotshot.” Geary winked.
    “I can handle it.”
    “Yup. I can see that too.”
    “We need to get the state and the feds in on this,” Amy said in that stiff tone of hers that was starting to sound like good training to Geary’s ears. “We only have two more days.”
    “Maybe,” Geary said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I have a feeling the newspaper might scare him, one way or another, but it’ll have some kind of effect, whether it pushes him down or pulls him out. That means he might not act at all, or he might act sooner.”
    “Dr. Geary, you know as well as I do that once thefeds get here, the media’s going to be all over this. We’ll use it to our advantage.” She nodded decisively. “More witnesses, more leads.”
    “Yes and no, Detective. If it drives him underground, he might not try for the kid, but I’ll wager he’ll kill Mrs. Parker.”
    “It’s a gamble, then,” Amy said. “There isn’t much choice.”
    Snow returned to the room with Kaminer, a small, tight man with curly blond hair that didn’t look fully real. But despite the nonsense on his head, Geary could tell by the way Kaminer looked at him head-on that he meant business.
    “I hear you’ve done some homework, Dr. Geary,” Kaminer said.
    Geary laid it out for Kaminer, who sopped it up like a dry sponge, nodding every few