Korridorium

♫ Hunt­ing Spree ♫

158/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor of the precinct and close the door to the john behind me. Every now and then a good idea hits me while sit­ting on the throne, but this time, my mind is a blank slate. I’ve been holed up with Albo for way too many hours, going through the killer’s hun­dred and fifty texts with him like we’re piec­ing together a puz­zle. Some­where in there, a clue has to be hid­den about who he is and why he carves the hearts out of inno­cent triplets.

Albo is on the phone when I get back. This late at night? It seems true that the homi­cide squad never sleeps. Albo hangs up and stares at me with blood­shot eyes. “The con­verted dou­ble-decker bus that tours through the back­wa­ters at night…” I resist the urge to grab another cof­fee and sit down instead. “With chill-out music and philo­soph­i­cal self-dis­cov­ery.” Albo holds up the page in ques­tion. “Made it up. Does­n’t exist in real­ity. I had my guys check.”

Fig­ured as much. It started with the fifty type­writ­ers. The guy who sup­pos­edly bought them one by one, sec­ond­hand, only exists as a for­mer eBay han­dle, “SpellingError68,” with a Berlin address and a Pay­Pal account. He’s since deleted all the accounts, and no one’s lived at that address for years. Every trace has been metic­u­lously erased; all inquiries lead to dead ends, just like in the texts: as far as we know, hotel chef Pas­cal is just as fic­tional as house­boat dweller Norbu or some Cory d’Or, male or female.

“A rid­dle wrapped in a mys­tery inside an enigma,” I’d mut­tered ear­lier in the evening.

“Hape Ker­kel­ing,” Albo had offered with a nod, but I shook my head. “Win­ston Churchill.” Albo smirked crookedly. “Either way, all clues lead nowhere.” Which holds true for me, too, as a psy­chol­o­gist and—as Albo likes to ele­vate me—a pro­filer. Even the “KISTe,” the Fed­eral Crim­i­nal Police Office’s text analy­sis data­base used to eval­u­ate writ­ten state­ments by criminals—confession let­ters and ran­som notes—couldn’t get us any fur­ther.

We’d last been debat­ing the alien. “I would have so liked to speak with him about God. Then it must be done this way,” it reads in Num­ber 106, right as the alien kills the human astro­naut with whom com­mu­ni­ca­tion seems impos­si­ble. Crazy story. Who comes up with this stuff? A reli­gious fanatic?

I step over to the win­dow. The city is silent. Even if Berlin never truly sleeps, around 3:30 in the morn­ing it at least drifts into a brief half-slum­ber. “Maybe he thinks he’s doing some­thing good,” I say. “There’s a movie where a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor fakes a mur­der that turns out to be a sui­cide at the last second—but as a cri­tique of the death penalty and the Amer­i­can jus­tice sys­tem, he waives his appeal and goes to the exe­cu­tion cham­ber as the alleged killer.”

Albo stretches his back with a groan. “How do you pic­ture that? The triplets were in cahoots with him? He bred clones of him­self, breath­ing husks with­out feel­ing, and he’s cut­ting them open to cri­tique the moral­ity of our sci­en­tists?”

I tug at the win­dow, try­ing to pop it open. It’s been stick­ing for years. “I’ll get it fixed,” Albo says, and for a sec­ond I feel like I’m trapped in a time loop, hav­ing heard him say that at least a dozen times. “I say that every time, don’t I?” Albo asks, clearly hav­ing the exact same thought.

“If he were a psy­chopath, he could­n’t put him­self in other peo­ple’s shoes the way he con­stantly does in these texts.” I real­ize I’m start­ing to lec­ture as I pace back and forth. “Of course, we’re still not sure if the texts even came from the killer. Maybe they came from the triplets. But assum­ing the mur­derer wrote them: then the texts point to the murders—and the mur­ders, in turn, point to the texts.”

“We’ve cov­ered that ground. We’re going in cir­cles, pal,” Albo grunts sul­lenly.

“No,” I say, “because your flash of bril­liance about a cri­tique of the sci­en­tific estab­lish­ment is the best idea we’ve had so far. Mur­ders that aren’t really murders—meant to raise ques­tions and shake peo­ple up.”

“Switch­ing sides now? Plan­ning to cozy up to him, grab a drink, be his buddy?”

I stop pac­ing. Albo’s sore. No wonder—the case is tak­ing a nasty bite out of his pro­fes­sional pride.

“I wouldn’t be sur­prised,” I say, “if it was his own heart. Sym­bol­i­cally, I mean—that he’s tear­ing it out as the author of these texts because some­thing in them cuts him to the quick, because one of these texts is gen­uinely real and he’s reveal­ing him­self to us. Maybe with what­ever he’s stor­ing behind the black door? Or the busi­ness with the shat­ter­ing world­views?”

Albo looks at me, tired but with a slight provoca­tive edge. “In a case like that, you look at the sus­pects and cross off every­thing until only the most likely ones are left, right? So go home, man, and do your home­work.”

Dawn is already break­ing when I step out of the precinct. The crisp air feels good. The Life of David Gale sud­denly pops into my head—with Kevin Spacey. That was the title of the movie about the phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor. But how did Cory d’Or man­age to tear their own heart out three times and plant it at three dif­fer­ent Berlin land­marks? My thoughts haven’t made sense for a long time. High time to get some sleep.