Coop shook his head. ‘Mineral spirits,’ he said. ‘There’s no way to identify the brand. But the duct tape? The samples will arrive tomorrow morning no later than 9.30 a.m. Second the package arrives our guys are going to get to work comparing them to those in our duct tape library. They’ll be able to identify the brand. We might get lucky.’ Coop instantly regretted his last words.

‘The Red Hill Ripper is already focused on Darby,’ Hoder said. ‘That’s not going to change. I didn’t make that happen, by the way. He did that all by himself. If we can get him to watch the interview, we may be able to locate him and save the next family.’

‘Or maybe he’ll decide to stay in the shadows. He knows we’re not going to be here forever, so he can afford to wait us out. After we leave, maybe he’ll decide to visit Darby next month, a year later, break into her home in the middle of the night and do that.’ Coop jerked his thumb at the whiteboards holding the crime scene photographs of the strangled women.

Hoder studied his hands. ‘Your anger is misdirected,’ he said. ‘You should be having this conversation with Darby.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m planning to.’

‘Good. Because if she doesn’t want to do this, she doesn’t have to.’ Hoder seemed disappointed, almost sad, when he said it.

40

Darby insisted on doing the interview. She stood in the hall outside the squad room and listened to Coop rattle off his objections for about half a minute before she broke in and politely but firmly told him she was going through with it.

‘This isn’t just about your safety,’ Coop said. ‘What happens if this plan of yours backfires and you rile this guy and he decides to go after another family?’

‘He’s going to do that anyway.’

‘And what if this interview makes him decide to move up his timetable? Have you stopped to consider that?’

‘I have, which is why I’m doing the interview. I want him to focus his attention on me – and he will. The Red Hill Evening Item has been promoting my name all day, this exclusive interview with me. They’ve sent out Twitter and Facebook messages announcing it. He’s going to watch it, Coop, and we’re going to find him.’

‘You’re taking a baseball bat to a hornet’s nest.’

Darby made fists by her sides, wincing slightly. Her right hand was swollen, covered by a glove; the abrasions along the knuckles rubbed against the stiff leather. She turned slightly, looked down the hall and saw Ray Williams standing in front of the police chief’s desk through the office-door glass. Hoder sat in the chair, his face solemn and downcast as he listened. She couldn’t hear what Williams was saying. She didn’t need to.

Williams had torn a strip out of her when he discovered that she had sucker-punched Deputy Sheriff Lancaster – in an autopsy room, no less. His rage momentarily extinguished, he stopped speaking, and the silence inside the cruiser had felt like a dirge for the remainder of the ride. She didn’t blame him. She’d let her anger get away from her. Not only had she given Lancaster sufficient ammo to take the investigation away from Red Hill, but her actions had most likely killed Williams’s employment chances in the new law enforcement regime.

‘I saw the list of questions and answers the two of you came up with,’ Coop said, struggling to remain calm. ‘You go on the record saying those things, you might as well be jamming a stick of dynamite up this guy’s ass. Once you light the fuse, who the hell knows how he’s going to react? Maybe he’ll decide to take his aggression out on someone else instead of you.’

Darby couldn’t hide her irritation. ‘So what do you suggest we do, then? Cross our fingers and hope for a stroke of luck?’

‘We keep working the evidence. That’s what you and I do best. The lab’s running with the things we took from the Downes –’

‘This guy is too goddamn careful, Coop. It’s not like he’s left us a lot to work with.’

‘You haven’t had time to fully study the other case files. Let’s go over each one together, now, and maybe we’ll find something that was overlooked, a piece of evidence that –’

‘We need to be proactive here. We can’t stay on this investigation forever. At some point we’re going to have to pack up and leave, and if we haven’t found him by then, guess what happens next? Right now we have a tremendous opportunity to trap him, and you’re asking me to ignore it?’

‘You can’t orchestrate the behaviour of a psychopath. You told me that, remember?’

Darby said nothing.

Coop put a hand on the wall and leaned in closer. ‘This is about you wanting this guy to come after you,’ he said in a low voice. ‘That way you’ll have an excuse to blow him out of his socks.’

Darby brushed past him and entered the squad room. She was glad to see someone had hung sheets over the whiteboards to hide the grisly crime scene photos from the reporter and cameraman.

Hoder excused himself from the group and motioned for Darby to join him in the corner. He handed her two sheets of paper: they held the questions and her scripted answers.

‘A sexual sadist like the Red Hill Ripper thinks he’s intellectually superior to you, me, the Bureau, everyone,’ Hoder said. ‘The questions I wrote down are going to highlight your intellectual superiority. The answers are designed to make you come across as some sort of super-cop, make him feel that he has a self-inflated sense of his own importance and prowess. Leave the leather jacket on, by the way. It’ll help sell the image. And unzip it so he can see your shoulder holster.’

And my chest, Darby added privately.

Again, Hoder seemed to sense her thoughts. ‘He despises women. All sadists do,’ he said. ‘His hatred is already locked on you, and you’re going to channel it by driving home the point that you’ve solved all the serial cases you’ve worked on, that the Red Hill Ripper isn’t going to be an exception because he’s nowhere near as smart or as cunning as the others. You’ll go to the ends of the earth to find him, crawl under every rock – that sort of thing. I wrote some things down right there on the first page, the part marked “statement”. We want to trigger the guy’s deep-seated feelings of self-hatred and inferiority and, hopefully, keep him logged on to his computer.

‘Look relaxed and speak confidently, maybe even with contempt. I wrote everything down for you, but the important thing here is for you to say it in your own voice. Do whatever feels natural. Go with your gut.’

Then Hoder put a fatherly hand on her shoulder. ‘I can’t stress this next point enough,’ he said. ‘If at any time you feel uncomfortable or uncertain about this, if you change your mind about wanting to go through with the interview, you end it. You’re the one in charge.’

‘Let’s do this.’

The reporter, Chad Levine, was an affable, pudgy man with a handlebar moustache and a bad comb-over. He wore a corduroy sports coat with a pair of pressed Dockers khakis and suede chukka boots, and he radiated the excitement of a child whose long-held secret wish had suddenly been granted.

‘Do you need to read these?’ he asked, holding up the pages containing Hoder’s scripted questions and answers.

Darby shook her head and took the seat across from the reporter. She couldn’t see the cameraman behind the hot, white lights aimed on her. She took off her gloves and covered her right hand with her left so the camera wouldn’t see the split skin and the swelling.

‘We can do as many takes as you like,’ Levine said, pinning the microphone to her leather jacket.

Darby pointed behind her, to the poster advertising the reward and hotline. ‘Make sure that’s in every shot.’

‘It will be. We’ll also have the number posted on the bottom of the interview. Agent Hoder said you have a statement you’d like to make. Do you want to read it now or at the end of the interview?’