Acceleration by Graham McNamee

Author:Graham McNamee
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307510228
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2003-01-20T22:00:00+00:00

We’re having fries and shakes under an umbrella table outside the Barn. Vinny's filling me in on what he's found out.

“The FBI profilers say serial killers, you know, when they’re starting out, aren’t real sophisticated. Their first murders are done on impulse, not thought out all the way. And…” He pauses to chew a fry. “They’re done close to home.”

“How does that help?” I ask. “I can’t just wait till he offs one of these women to track him down.”

A lot of what the books talk about deals with using crime-scene evidence and the state of the corpse to profile the killer. Right now, there is no crime scene. And I want to keep it that way.

“Yeah,” Vinny says. “But look at the pets he tortured, and the fires. Those are like his warm-ups for the big show. They cover a span of about ten years. The earliest ones would have been done close to home, in what the pros call the comfort zone.”

“Okay. So?”

“So we’ve got the newspaper clippings from his little scrapbook.”

I pull the straw from my shake and lick it clean, thinking. Then I use it to point at Vinny.

“What about those cats he killed and strung up? Did they give addresses where that happened?”

“They name a few streets up in Wilson Heights,” Vin says. “There was a string of animal mutilations in the same area during the same time period. Busy guy.”

Somewhere close by a heat bug starts up its electric whine. I stir my shake, staring off down the street to where the heat rising from the tar makes the air all wavy.

“And we’ve also got the diary entries about the fires he set,” Vinny says. “He kept all the details: dates, addresses. Everything.”

“How close do you think that'll get us to him?”

“Hopefully we can narrow him down to a few blocks. Maybe a neighborhood.”

“Mr. Psycho's neighborhood,” I say. “Where exactly does that get us, though? I mean, we can’t really go canvassing house to house.”

“Hey, man. Baby steps. I’ve only been working on this a day and a half. This is some crazy crap, eh?”

“Yeah. A big steaming pile of it,” I say.

“Me and you going after this guy—it's like the Hardy Boys meet Hannibal Lecter.”

Wayne walks up to our table, off work now and out of uniform.

“Right,” I tell Vin. “Just so long as I’m the Hardy who gets to do the forbidden dance with Nancy Drew.”

Wayne grabs a seat with us. “The only dance you'll be doing is the one-handed mambo.” He pulls a wad of Dairy Barn scratch-and-win tickets out of his pocket.

“Start scratching, boys,” he tells us. “We’re going to be millionaires. Get me out of this grease pit.”

We start scratching.

“Come on, new car,” Vin says to his ticket.

“Come on, new life,” Wayne tells his.

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