‘No matter what happened, no matter what she did,’ Hunter pressed, ‘you wouldn’t hurt her, in any way?’

The confusion stamped across Garcia’s face intensified. ‘Have you lost your mind? Listen to me. No matter what she does, no matter what she says, no matter what anything – I would never hurt Anna. She’s everything to me. Without her, I don’t exist. Now what in the world are you trying to say, Robert?’

‘Why?’ Hunter’s voice sounded even. ‘Why wouldn’t you ever hurt her? No matter what she did . . . or said . . . or anything . . .’

Garcia had been Hunter’s partner for almost four years, since he had joined the RHD. He knew Hunter wasn’t a conventional detective. He could figure things out faster than anyone Garcia had ever met. Most of the time, no one even understood how he did it until he explained, and then it all seemed so simple. Hunter listened a lot more than he spoke. When he did speak, not everything he said made sense at first, but in the end, everything always slotted into place like a jigsaw puzzle. But sometimes Garcia had to admit Hunter seemed to inhabit a different dimension to everyone on this planet. This was one of those times.

‘Because I love her.’ Unconsciously, Garcia’s words came out coated in tenderness. ‘More than anyone or anything in this world.’

‘Exactly.’ A smile stretched across Hunter’s lips. ‘And, I think, so does our killer.’

Sixty-Three

The traffic began to unclog, but Garcia was still anesthetized by Hunter’s words. Anxious drivers started sounding their horns behind them. The more impatient ones were already shouting abuse out of their windows. Garcia disregarded them and edged forward slowly in his own time. His attention was still on Hunter.

‘Please tell me there’s sense behind the madness. What are you saying, Robert? That the killer is in love with my wife?’

‘No, not with Anna,’ Hunter replied. ‘But what if the killer thinks he’s in love with all his victims.’

Garcia’s eyes narrowed as he thought about it. ‘What, both of them?’

‘Yes.’

‘At the same time?’

‘Yes.’

‘And we’re not talking obsessed fan love?’

‘No.’

His eyes narrowed further. ‘If he’s really in love with them, why would he kill them in such a brutal way?’

‘I didn’t say he was in love with them,’ Hunter clarified. ‘I said he thinks he’s in love with them. But what he’s really in love with is their image. Who they represent, not who they are.’

Silence.

Realization came seconds later.

‘Sonofabitch! Both of the victims remind him of someone else,’ Garcia finally caught on. ‘Someone he loved. That’s why they look so alike.’

Hunter nodded. ‘It’s not them he wants. It’s who they remind him of.’ He watched the convertible BMW pull away. ‘The lack of bruising prior to the stitching on both victims has been bothering me from the start. I kept thinking: since he doesn’t kidnap them for ransom, there’s gotta be a reason why he keeps them instead of killing them straight away, but more importantly, there’s gotta be a reason why he never touches them until the last minute. It didn’t make any sense. No matter which path I followed, I couldn’t see how there’d be no bruising. If the killer was keeping these women to satisfy his sexual needs, there’d be bruising . . . For revenge, there’d be bruising . . . Generalized hate against women, or even brunette painters induced by some past trauma, there’d be bruising . . . If he were an obsessed fan, there’d be bruising . . . Sadistic paranoia, there’d be bruising . . . Pure homicidal mania, there’d be bruising . . . Nothing fitted.’

Garcia raised his eyebrows.

‘I heard it first a few days ago, when we were interviewing Patrick Barlett, but I guess it just got filed away in my subconscious.’

‘Patrick Barlett?’ Garcia frowned. ‘Laura Mitchell’s ex-fiancé?’

Hunter nodded as he watched the traffic flow. A black woman driving a white Peugeot to their right was shaking her head and gesticulating while apparently singing along to something. She noticed Hunter looking at her and smiled, embarrassed. He smiled back before continuing.

‘Patrick said that he’d never hurt Laura, no matter what. He loved her too much.’

‘Yeah, I remember that.’

‘Unfortunately, that day I was more worried about observing Patrick’s reactions than anything else. It just escaped me. But it happens more often than you think. It’s a spin-off of the combination of two conditions known as transference and projection.’

Garcia frowned.

‘Some husbands look for prostitutes that remind them of their own wives,’ Hunter explained. ‘Some people look for girlfriends or boyfriends that look like an old high-school sweetheart or a teacher, or even their own mothers or fathers.’

Garcia thought back to a childhood school friend who, in fourth grade, had fallen in love with his history teacher. When he was old enough to date, every girlfriend he had was the spitting image of that teacher, including the one he’d gone on to marry years later.

‘Anyway,’ Hunter moved on, ‘it wasn’t until a moment ago that the idea of resembling someone paired up with transference and projection came into my head.’

‘Shit!’ Garcia let out a slow breath through clenched teeth, the confusion finally starting to clear in his mind. ‘When he looks at the women he’s abducted, his mind sees someone else, because he wants them to be someone else. Someone he was truly in love with. Someone he would never hurt, no matter what. That’s why there’s no bruising.’

A quick nod from Hunter. ‘That’s the projection side.’

‘But wait a second.’ Garcia shook his head. ‘He still kills them . . . very brutally. Doesn’t that go against this theory?’

‘No, it strengthens it. The stronger the transference and projection, the easier it is for the killer to be disappointed. They might have the same looks as the person he wants them to be, but they won’t act, or talk, or do anything else in the same way. No matter how much he wants it, they’ll never be who he wished they were.’

Garcia thought about it for a beat. ‘And as soon as he realizes that, why keep them, right?’

‘That’s right. But he still can’t bring himself to kill them directly. That’s why they’re still alive when he leaves them. That’s why he’s not even there when they are supposed to die. He can’t bear to see them go. And that’s why he created the self-activating trigger mechanism.’

‘So he doesn’t have to be there.’

‘Exactly,’ Hunter agreed.

Garcia remained thoughtful. ‘So this true love of his, is she dead?’

‘Most probably,’ Hunter admitted. ‘And that might be why he cracked. His mind just can’t let go of her.’

Garcia puffed his cheeks out before letting them deflate slowly. ‘Do you think she died in the same way his victims died, stitched up? Do you think he killed her as well?’

Hunter stared out the window at a cloudless, baby blue sky, and wished his thoughts were just as clear. ‘There’s only one way we can find out.’

He reached for his phone.