Pop Goes the Weasel

thinking about these kinky bastards as much as you do?”
    I shrugged. “It’s what I do best. I’ve analyzed all the Jane Does,” I said. “It took me weeks working on my own. Just me and the kinky bastard.”
    “Plus, he studies rodent droppings,” said Sampson. “I saw him bagging the little turds. That’s his real secret.”
    I grinned and told them what I had so far. “I think one male is responsible for at least some of the killings. Maybe as many as a dozen murders. I don’t think he’s a brilliant killer, like Gary Soneji or Mr. Smith, but he’s clever enough not to be caught. He’s organized, reasonably careful. I don’t think we’ll find he has any prior record. He probably has a decent job. Maybe even a family. My FBI friends at Quantico agree with that.
    “He’s almost definitely caught up in an escalating fantasy cycle. I think he’s into his fantasies big-time. Maybe he’s in the process of becoming someone or something new. He might be forming a new personality for himself. He isn’t finished with the killing, not by any means.
    “I’ll make some educated guesses. He hates his old self, though the people closest to him probably don’t realize it. He might be ready to abandon his family, job, any friends he has. At one time he probably had very strong feelings and beliefs about something — law and order, religion, the government — but not anymore. He kills in different ways; there’s no set formula. He knows a lot about killing people. He’s used different kinds of weapons. He may have traveled overseas. Or maybe he’s spent time in Asia. I think it’s very possible he’s a black man. He’s killed several times in Southeast — no one’s noticed him.”
    “Fuck me,” Jerome Thurman said to that. “Any good news, Alex?”
    “One thing, and this is a long shot. But it feels right to me. I think he might be suicidal. It fits the profile I’m working on. He’s living dangerously, taking a lot of chances. He might just blow himself up.”
    “Pop goes the weasel,” Sampson said.
    That was how we came to name the killer: the Weasel.

Chapter 13
    GEOFFREY SHAFER looked forward to playing the Four Horsemen every Thursday night from nine until about one in the morning.
    The fantasy game was everything to him. There were three other master players around the world. The players were the Rider on the White Horse, Conqueror; the Rider on the Red Horse, War; the Rider on the Black Horse, Famine; and himself, the Rider on the Pale Horse, Death.
    Lucy and the children knew they were forbidden to disturb him for any reason once he locked himself into the library on the second floor. On one wall was his collection of ceremonial daggers, nearly all of them purchased in Hong Kong and Bangkok. Also on the wall was the rowing oar from the year his college team had won the “Bumps.” Shafer nearly always won the games he played.
    He had been using the Internet to communicate with the other players for years, long before the rest of the world caught on. Conqueror played from the town of Dorking, in Surrey, outside London; Famine traveled back and forth between Bangkok, Sydney, Melbourne, and Manila; and War usually played out of Jamaica, where he had a large estate on the sea. They had been playing Horsemen for seven years.
    Rather than becoming repetitive, the fantasy game had expanded itself. It had grown every year, becoming something new and even more challenging. The object was to create the most delicious and unusual fantasy or adventure. Violence was almost always part of the game, but not necessarily murder. Shafer had been the first to claim that his stories weren’t fantasies at all, that he lived them in the real world. Now the others would do so as well from time to time. Whether they really lived their fantasies, Shafer couldn’t tell. The object was to create the evening’s most startling fantasy, to get a rise out of the other players.
    At nine o’clock his time, Shafer was on his laptop. So were the others. It was rare for one of them to miss a session, but if he did, he left lengthy messages and sometimes drawings or even photographs of supposed lovers or victims. Films were occasionally used, and the other players then had to decide whether the scenes were stage-acted or cinema verité.
    Shafer couldn’t imagine missing a chapter of the game himself. Death was by far the most interesting character, the most powerful and original. He had missed important social