"Anything else I can look for?" Sam asked, ignoring him--I could see the effort. "Would you say he's got a record?"

"He probably has some kind of criminal experience," I said. "He did a damn good job of cleaning up after himself. There's a good chance he's never got caught, if he's this careful, but maybe he learned the hard way. If you're going through files, you could try looking for stuff like car theft, burglary, arson--something that would take cleanup skills but wouldn't involve any direct contact with victims. No assault, including sexual assault. Judging by how crap he is at killing people, he'd had no practice being violent, or practically none."

"He's not that crap," Sam said quietly. "He got the job done."

"Barely," I said. "Through dumb luck, more than anything. And I don't think that's the job he went there to do. There are elements of this crime that just don't match up. Like I said on Sunday, the stabbing reads as unplanned, spontaneous; but everything around that moment is a whole lot more organized. Your guy knew where to find her--I don't buy the idea that he just happened to wander into her, at midnight on some back lane in the middle of nowhere. Either he knew her routine, or they'd arranged to meet. And after the stabbing, he kept his head and he took his time: tracked her down, searched her, erased his footprints and wiped her stuff clean--and that says he wasn't wearing gloves. Again, he wasn't planning on a murder."

"He was carrying a knife," Frank pointed out. "What was he planning on, whittling?"

I shrugged. "Threatening her, maybe; scaring her, impressing her, I don't know. But someone this thorough, if he'd gone out there intending to kill her, he wouldn't have made such a bollocks of it. The attack came out of the blue, there had to be a moment when she was stunned by what had just happened; if he was aiming to finish her off, he could have done it. Instead, she's the one who reacts first--she takes off running, and gets a good head start, before he can do anything about it. That makes me think he was almost as stunned as she was. I think the meeting was planned for a completely different purpose, and then something went badly wrong."

"Why follow her?" Sam asked. "After the stabbing. Why not leg it out of there?"

"When he caught up with her," I said, "he found out she was dead, moved her and went through her pockets. So I'm betting one of those things was his reason for going after her. He didn't hide or display the body, and you wouldn't spend half an hour looking for someone just to drag her a few yards for the hell of it, so moving her seems more like a side effect: he got her into shelter in order to conceal the light from a torch, or to be out of the rain, while he achieved his real goal--either to find out for sure whether she was dead, or else to search her."