6

He can’t sleep with the excitement from earlier still coursing through his veins. Mrs Halliburton being the one to find Kira Niemeyer has added a new layer to his project. A layer which adds familiarity.

Since observing her presence at Kangle’s Bluff, strong memories of her lessons have returned after all these years. He remembers the classes more than the tuition for she was a soft teacher. One who preferred to use inspiration rather than discipline or fear as a motivator for teenage minds distracted by the effects of puberty.

As he pads through his home, the Watcher can picture the layout of her classroom just as it was all those years ago. He can even identify who sat in which seat.

With one exception. There was one kid he never got along with. She didn’t deserve his attention. She didn’t deserve attention from anyone.

In his mind’s eye he can see the girl, all hundred and eighty pounds of her. That girl waddled her way through high school lonelier than a desert cactus. Sure, there may have been bigger girls at the school, but they didn’t have the acne, lank hair and suck-up attitude she had. They had fun personalities and more to do with their lives than hang on a teacher’s every word.

It’s just a shame the girl doesn’t fit his pattern. He could have some fun with her.

The pattern is everything though. Having studied many serial killers, he’s never encountered a selection process so simple yet so beautiful.

He wonders if anyone will connect the pattern before he is forced to stop. Or caught. Something deep within him hopes the selection process is worked out. That people learn of his methods while he’s still active.

The challenges presented by such knowledge will make the project even more interesting. He wants his name to go down in history with the greats. Ted Bundy. Jeffery Dahmer. Eileen Wuornos. John Wayne Gacy.

All he has to do is stay alive and free long enough to reach thirty plus victims and he’ll be immortalised.

He walks into the den, boots up his computer and begins to apply the pattern to today’s breakthrough.

Mrs Halliburton isn’t engaged in social media, so he switches to the electoral register and other government sites, which contain endless streams of data about people.

It is there he mines the first nuggets. The primary information needed to carry out the next mission.

After three hours of staring at the screen, tiredness threatens to overwhelm him. Lifting his wife’s picture from the desk he kisses it and tries not to think of what she’d say about the pattern. All those years spent away from her as he toured the world with the Marines now seem wasted. Three years after mustering out she was nothing but memories and worm food.

The essence of his life stolen by an incompetent nurse who used a dirty needle. A needle that held a three-letter virus.

He’d been away at the time. In Afghanistan.

Melanie had undergone a routine procedure to remove a polyp and came out with a death sentence.

Unknowing of the nurse’s stupidity and carelessness they’d lived their lives separately while planning for a future together. A future now denied.

When Melanie had failed to get pregnant they’d looked into IVF. Both had a range of tests. Both had passed every test except the one where a positive result was actually a fail.

A week after Melanie’s funeral he flew to Denver and bought a crummy second-hand pickup. He paid cash and gave the seller a false name. A half day’s effort in the privacy of his garage saw all identifying marks and numbers removed and false plates added.

Three nights later he used the pickup to force the nurse’s car off the road. When the car left the road it rolled down Hilker’s Gulch until it rested on its roof in Marton Creek. There’d been rain. The creek had been in flood, its waters swollen enough to engulf the Chevy.

He’d fled after torching the pickup in the woods.

Three days he’d waited and watched until the waters of Marton Creek shrank and the car was spotted. He saw the person who discovered the car and the pattern was conceived.

He later found out the nurse wasn’t in the car. Her husband had been driving it that night. Watching her grief as she struggled to cope with the loss of her husband was intoxicating.

The ironic symmetry between the nurse’s actions and his own wasn’t lost on him. All things considered, he was now pleased it had been the husband driving that night. Better than killing her, he’d given her years of suffering.

7

I knock on Alfonse’s door with mounting impatience. Just because I am a half hour early doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be ready to let me in. Given the first chance I get, I plan to steal his keys and get myself copies.

When he finally deigns to open the door, he is wrapped in a towel, his hair still wet from the shower.

‘I only got out of the shower because I know you’re enough of an asshole to keep banging on the door until it either breaks or gets answered.’ It’s fair to say Alfonse is not a morning person. ‘Why do you always have to be early?’

I step inside, careful not to slip on one of the wet footprints he’s leaving on the polished floor. ‘Didn’t you get the text I sent last night?’

‘Did I answer it?’

‘I wouldn’t be asking if you had.’

‘Question asked. Question answered.’

I leave Alfonse to get dressed and put my notebook on his kitchen table while I brew some coffee and look for his notes. I don’t find any, which is odd. Of the two of us he is the bigger note taker. Either he’s struck out or hidden his so he can gauge my reaction to his discoveries.

Within five minutes he is sitting opposite me, dressed in his usual attire of combat shorts and polo shirt.

I give him coffee and enough time to read my text then raise an eyebrow at him.

‘Wow! I never saw that coming but it explains a lot.’

‘It does?’

‘Yeah. I ran into a complete brick wall with her iPad and cell last night.’ Defeat shows on his face. I know he’s never before failed to get answers from a digital source, so I soften my expression. ‘She was on Twitter, but rarely used it. Her Facebook account has all the usual selfies and party photos along with mind-numbing posts about what she was having for dinner, where she was having her nails done, and a thousand other waste-of-bytes-worth of drivel.’

‘Anything about a man in her life?’

‘Nada.’ Unlike me, Alfonse fully embraces the American language and its slang forms.

‘Emails? Bank accounts? Apps?’

‘Looked at them all. Nothing untoward or underhand in any of them. Just normal everyday stuff for a girl living off Daddy’s dime.’ He takes a healthy slug of his coffee and grimaces. ‘Her monthly allowance from Daddy would keep you and I for a year, but she didn’t squander it. From what I could gather, she was spending a quarter of it, giving a quarter to some charities and saving the other half.’

‘What about her most recent credit card transactions?’

Alfonse hands me a printout of Kira’s bank and credit card statements. ‘The last ten entries are small beer. Groceries, hair salons and so on. A couple of meals out. Nowhere fancy, the kind of places we take dates.’

‘Were the transactions all here or elsewhere?’

‘Most were local, but there were a couple of things bought online from Amazon and other retailers.’

I stop questioning him while I think about what he’s told me so far. Kira Niemeyer had a privileged life, yet she only spent a quarter of the money she received on herself. That in itself was odd.

There were a number of girls in her position living in Casperton and they all spent money as if it were the last day of the sales. The clothes I’d found in Kira’s master bedroom had all been good quality with decent labels, but looking at her bank statements, I see she could have afforded better.