Read Online The Wire in the Blood by Val McDermid - Free Book Online

easily be two, three or even four attackers. In which case, bringing in a profiler is going to be a total waste of time.’
    Shaz shook her head. ‘It’s not just the victims,’ she stated firmly. ‘If you read their evidence, in each case their eyes were covered during the attack. In each case, they mention that their assailant verbally abused them continually while he was actually assaulting them. That’s more than sheer coincidence.’
    Simon wasn’t ready to give up. ‘Come on, Shaz,’ he protested. ‘Any bloke who’s so powerless he needs to resort to rape to feel good about himself is going to need to talk himself up to it. And as for their eyes being covered—there’s nothing in common there except with the first and third where he used their own headbands. Look-’ he waved the papers—‘case number two, he pulled her T-shirt over her head and tied a knot in it. Case number four, the rapist had a roll of packing tape that he wound round her head. Way different.’ He sat back, a good-natured grin defusing the force of his words.
    Tony grinned. ‘The perfectly contrived lead into the next subject. Thanks, Simon. Today, I’m going to hand out your first assignment, the preamble to which is the beginner’s guide to signature versus MO. Anybody know what I’m talking about?’
    Kay Hallam, the other woman on the team, raised her hand half a dozen inches and looked questioningly at Tony. He nodded. She tucked her light brown hair behind her ears in a gesture he’d come to recognize as Kay’s keynote mechanism for looking feminine and vulnerable to defuse criticism, particularly when she was about to make a point she was absolutely sure of. ‘MO is dynamic, signature is static,’ she said.
    ‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Tony said. ‘However, it’s probably a bit too technical for the plods among us,’ he added with a grin, pointing his finger one by one at the other five. He pushed back his chair and started moving restlessly round the room as he talked. ’MO means modus operandi . Latin. The way of doing. When we use it in a criminal context, we mean the series of actions that the perpetrator committed in the process of achieving his goal, the crime. In the early days of profiling, police officers, and to a large degree psychologists, were very literal about their idea of a serial offender. It was somebody who did pretty much the same things every time to achieve pretty much the same results. Except that they usually showed escalation, moving, say, from assaulting a prostitute to beating a woman’s brains out with a hammer.
    ’As we discovered more, though, we realized we weren’t the only ones capable of learning from our mistakes. We were dealing with criminals who were intelligent and imaginative enough to do exactly the same. That meant we had to get our heads round the idea that the MO was something that could change quite drastically from one offence to the next because the offender found that a particular course of action wasn’t very effective. So he’d adapt. His first murder could be a strangulation, but maybe our killer feels that took too long, was too noisy, frightened him too much, stressed him rather than allowing him to enjoy his fulfilment. Next time out, he smashes her skull in with a crowbar. Too messy. So number three, he stabs. And the investigators write them off as three separate killings because the MO looks so different.
    ‘What doesn’t change is what we call, for the sake of giving it a name, the signature. The sig, for short.’ Tony stopped pacing and leaned against the window sill. ’The sig doesn’t change because it’s the raison d’être of the offence. It’s what gives the perpetrator his sense of satisfaction.
    ‘So what does this signature consist of? Well, it’s all the bits of behaviour that exceed what is actually necessary to commit the crime. The ritual of the offence. To satisfy the perpetrator, the signature elements have to be acted