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“I already went by the spot and it didn’t work for me.” He leans back and gazes at the river below us. “If it wasn’t so turbulent, we could get on one of those riverboat bars and ride it from one end to the other. It would save us a lot of walking.”
"Do you know when the riverboats will start running again?" I ask the waiter as I pay for the drinks.
“Soon, I'd say,” he says as he hands me my change. “This lousy weather and rain can’t last much longer, can it?”
“We can hope,” I say and he grins because I think all three of us know very well that it can, in fact, last longer. Ljubljana sometimes doesn’t get any sun for weeks on end in the winter and that gloominess sometimes persists into early spring too.
“Let’s hope he’s right, because that was a really good idea, Novak,” I say as he offers me his hand to help me stand up. “I think some lunch and a nap would be nice right now.”
I continue holding onto his arm as we walk across the bridge and towards the office and I can just feel how happy he is that I’m not pushing on with my original plan of walking around some more.
“That’s a great idea too, Lah,” he says. “Then we’ll head over to Ana’s apartment this evening.”
I didn’t suggest taking a break because I’m too tired and weak to continue. I suggested it because we have a clearer connection between the victims now and I want to scour the files and see if they’ll tell me how solid it is. And it will give me a better idea of what questions to ask the victims’ family members. Plus, a slight icy cold drizzle is starting to fall, each drop feeling like a tiny paper cut as it hits my overheated face.
“You’d have to be pretty disconnected or riled-up to enjoy walking out here at night during the winter,” I say. “I’m already freezing and it’s not even dark yet.”
“It’s also kind of creepy to be out here at night, in the fog and the dark, isn’t it?” Mark says.
“They were trying to get away from themselves, I think,” I say. “And what better place than the dark?”
He makes a sound of agreement, the kind he always resorts to when I go off on one of my more figurative trains of thought.
“Maybe that’s what draws this killer and his victims together,” I say. “Maybe he sees himself as the ultimate dark for them, the end of all their troubles.”
He makes another agreeing sound, lower this time. Probably thinking what I am too: how far does that line of thinking get us?
This killer does not pick his victims randomly, I am almost certain of that. He might even observe them for a long time before he kills them.
Most people these days are troubled. Some for a week, some for a season, and some for their whole lives. A lot of them take nighttime walks when they can’t sleep.
For a predatory killer such as this, the fire is in the search, not the finding. In the hunt, not the catch. That’s also why serial killers never stop with just one victim. And why they need to kill again and again, and sometimes more and more as the years go by. This one is showing great restraint just sticking to three victims for all these years.
I wish knowing all that would also tell us where to look for him. But, as usual, it doesn’t.
