Before he could even contemplate a profile of the killer, he first had to profile the victims. They might apparently be selected at random, but there was rhyme and reason behind their deaths. To the outside world, egged on by hysterical headlines, people who preyed on stranger after stranger were insane maniacs. But Tony knew otherwise. Organized serial killers operated to their own logic, men with a mission marching to a drum only they could hear. It was Tony’s job to worm his way inside the victims’ lives in the hope that he would then start to hear the faint reverberations of that beat. Only by uncovering that secret rhythm of the killer’s progress could he start to understand why these crimes had meaning for the murderer. If he could put himself inside the killer’s head and rearrange the world in terms that made sense to him, Tony could hope to reach out and grasp enough key elements of the killer’s life to make it possible to track him down.

One of the first things he always did was to give the killer a nickname, to personalize him. It was one step along the road to giving him a human face, behind which there existed a psyche that functioned according to its own particular rules. ‘You’re killing people who are obsessed with the workings of the mind,’ Tony said softly. ‘This is about mind games. You’re drowning them. Is that literal or metaphorical? You’re scalping their pubic area, but leaving their genitals alone. You think this isn’t about sex. But of course it is. You’re just in denial about it. You think there’s some higher purpose here. You’re waging a war. You’re leading the battle. You’re Geronimo, aren’t you?’ He remembered a curiously apposite echo of a line from Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. ‘Hieronimo’s mad againe.’

‘Geronimo it is,’ Tony said. Now he had a name, he could build a dialogue between them. He could ease into his target’s shoes, working out his steps and learning his gait. He could chart his progress and explore his fantasies. For this type of killing was always about fantasies. Geronimo, like so many others before him, could find no satisfaction in reality. For whatever reason, he had never learned to fit in. He had never matured into a rounded individual, however dysfunctional. He had become stuck at the point where the universe revolved around him and where fantasies could fulfil the desires that the real world refused to.