Here is an extract of Snakes and Ladders.
EXTRACT
CHAPTER 1
Dr Vernon Sange, killer of twelve, lies on his bunk. His hands are interlaced behind his head, his film-star face white as butcher’s paper from being inside so long. On his chest, a portable CD player moves up and down in time with his measured breaths. The ‘Queen of the Night’ aria plays through his earbuds.
His eyes move around the room but his head stays still on its stalk. Every so often he flicks the tip of his tongue over his teeth, tapping the sharp point of his canine then drawing it back into his mouth.
He glances at the small table bolted to the floor. On it, a stack of Penguin Classics and fat history paperbacks are arranged alphabetically, each annotated with comments, quotes and corrections in Crayola felt-tip pen.
Dr Sange isn’t allowed ballpoints or pencils. He’s not allowed anything with a hard cover either.
The Daily Telegraph is on the table beside the books. It’s been quartered precisely. Seven pages in, a man’s name has been circled. The ink has bled through seven sheets.
There is no noise in here apart from Dr Sange’s slow, rhythmic breathing. His cell is the only one in the corridor. Six by nine by twelve feet. Windowless. The walls grey up to head height.
As Dr Sange’s thoughts coalesce, his pupils contract into pinhole points of black. His thumbs cruise his occipital bone.
‘The husband!’ he whispers, his voice hoarse from lack of use.
His lips curl into a smile. He’ll make the call tomorrow.
‘My move,’ he says.
CHAPTER 2
FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia
‘What makes a person murder someone they’ve never met? What makes them kill stranger after stranger until they’re stopped? What makes a monster?’
I surveyed the packed auditorium. Hundreds of NATs, New Agent Trainees, all wearing blue polo shirts and khakis. All with the same bright-faced focus.
I’d been scheduled to give this lecture series two years ago, right after Duncan was shot.
We’d been approaching our first wedding anniversary. He’d been invited to run a set of FBI National Academy Associates classes at the same time as I’d be giving my talks. The plan was to travel up to Shenandoah afterwards, take some time out together. We’d been drooling over national park brochures for weeks: waterfalls, wooded hollows, mountain vistas. So damn beautiful you could hardly believe the place was real.
‘I can’t wait. Just you and me, hen,’ he’d said, pulling me in for a kiss. ‘A break from our lives.’
Though it turned out we didn’t need a holiday for that. Not with an assassin aiming his rifle at my husband’s head.
This was the first time I’d been back to Quantico since the shooting. And despite the intervening period, standing at the podium now, where I should have been then, I felt the familiar squeeze in my throat and tightening in my chest.
There’s always a trigger involved before a serial killer hunts for the first time. My black dog, the spectre that haunts my days and nights, is a killer too. It doesn’t take much to draw him out of the dark.
I swallowed hard and ploughed on. No way was I going to get all dewy-eyed in front of these guys.
‘Why does it matter?’ I said, looking at their expectant faces. ‘Why do we care what makes murderers?’
A beefy bloke who looked like he’d have done well on the Yellow Brick Road run, the final part of the Academy’s gruelling fitness challenge, raised an arm as thick as my thigh.
‘The more we understand them, the more likely we are to catch them, ma’am.’
I smiled, and not just because of the military-style ‘ma’am’, which always reminds me of my army days.
No one appreciates the benefits of criminal profiling better than the FBI. Quantico’s the birthplace of behavioural analysis. It’s where the magic started.
I was just about to quote Robert Ressler at them – that line about how understanding one killer gives us the ammo we need to track the next one – when the door opened. An agent I recognised from Behavioral Analysis ushered in a man in a wrinkled suit, slept in by the looks of it.
I could tell the guy was a Brit before he even opened his mouth. Something about the way he carried himself.
‘Mrs MacKenzie,’ he said, his voice, all boarding-school plum, carrying across the lecture hall as he walked up the centre aisle. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt. I’ve been sent by Scotland Yard. We need your help.’
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