The Maze

between what the killer does and the Theseus legend, it won't tell us anything about the man's identity, about how to find him. Do you know that he used the same abandoned building for two of his victims in San Francisco? It was down in the China Basin. The very same building! Then the police put a watch on it, but it was too late. He was surely laughing at them, at all of us, because we were helpless."

    "It surprises me that no one saw anything. There are usually lots of homeless around those abandoned buildings. And cops do patrol. To set up all the props, he would have had to carry stuff in and out of the buildings, yet no one appeared to see anything. He would have had to transport his props. A truck? He had to make them himself or buy them somewhere."

    "Yes, but only once. He took away most of his props after he killed each woman. He left just enough so the police would know what he'd done."

    "And still no one saw anything. That boggles the mind."

    "Evidently one old man saw him, because he was found strangled near one of the abandoned buildings. It was the same kind of string used to get to the center of the maze. He wanted the cops to know it had been him."

    "What did you mean that he was laughing at us?" She had been nineteen years old at the time her sister was murdered. How was she involved? He would find out later. She was just shaking her head at him as he said, very quietly, "You're on a cycle too, Sherlock. A seven-year cycle. He's done nothing for seven years, just gone about his business, probably stewing inside but not enough to make him snap. As for you, you've given the last seven years of your life to him."

    She was stiff, her eyes colder than the ice frozen over her windshield the previous winter. It was what Douglas had said to her, wnat her father had said: "It's none of your business."

    "I suppose your family has told you it isn't very healthy."

    "It's none of your business."

    "I imagine you couldn't bear it, that you couldn't bear to let your sister go, not the way she was removed, like the pawn in a game that she had to lose."

    She swallowed. "Yes, that's close enough."

    "There's more, isn't there? A whole lot more."

    She was very pale, her fingers clutched around the paper coffee cup. "No, there's nothing more."

    "You're lying. I wish you wouldn't, but you've lied for a very long time, haven't you?"

    "There's nothing more. Please, stop."

    "All right. Do you want to shoot this guy once we nab him? You want to put your gun to his head and pull the trigger? Do you want to tell him who you are before you kill him? Do you think killing him will free you?''

    "Yes. But that's unlikely to happen. If I can't shoot him then I want him to go to the gas chamber, not be committed the way Russell Bent will be. At least that's what my brother-in-law, Douglas Madigan, told me."

    "No one knows yet if Russell Bent will be judged incompetent to stand trial. Don't jump the gun. Life imprisonment without parole isn't good enough?"

    "No. I want him dead. I don't want to worry about him escaping and killing more women. I don't want to worry that he might be committed to an institution, then fool the shrinks and be let loose. I don't want him still breathing after he killed seven-no, eight-people. He doesn't deserve to breathe my air. He doesn't deserve to breathe any air."

    "I've heard the opinion that since killing a murderer doesn't bring back the victim, then as a society we shouldn't impose the death penalty, that it brings us down to the murderer's level, that it's nothing but institutional revenge and destructive to our values."

    "No, of course it doesn't bring the victim back. It's a ridiculous argument. It makes no sense at all. It should be very straightforward: If you take another human life, you don't deserve to go on living. It's society's punishment, it's society's revenge against a person who rips apart society's rules, who tries himself to destroy who we are and what we are. What sort of values do we have if we don't value a life enough to eradicate the one who wantonly takes it?"

    "We do condemn, we do imprison, we just don't necessarily believe in killing the killer."

    "We should. It's justice for the victim and revenge as well. Both are necessary to protect a society from predators."

    "What about the argument that capital punishment isn't a deterrent at all, thus why have it?"

    "It certainly wouldn't be a deterrent to me, the way the appeals process works now. The