Free 88 Killer by Oliver Stark

and an absconded husband to track down.’
    Detective Gauge left the room and Denise was alone. A research psychologist by training, she had worked for years on the relationships between behavior and personality types, comparing these to criminal profiles and then analyzing where FBI and police profiles had gone wrong. It had drawn her into contact with killers across America, but always from a safe distance.
    She took the job at the NYPD to get closer to the action and in a very short time, she was too close altogether.
    Her research had shown her that inductive profiling worked in less than fifty per cent of cases. Human beings were not entirely predictable and Denise was interested in the fifty per cent who were more difficult to profile simply by using statistics. These were difficult because they were not normal. They were the criminals with psychologies so distorted and perverse that basic models and types didn’t help. They needed individual attention.
    On the piece of paper in front of her, she started to analyze the victim. It was often the biggest part of the profile, trying to understand why the killer was motivated to take this particular girl and for what particular reason. Denise wrote down everything she could about the kind of girl that Abby was.
    The facts were simple. The last thing they knew about Abby was that she left home just before 5.15 p.m. and was last seen leaving the house by her father. A driver spotted her crossing Parkway, but didn’t see anyone following her. There was a report that a truck nearly knocked her over. So presumably Abby was preoccupied. She was going somewhere secretive and she changed her clothes, so it would be something to do with a boy or a band. Denise couldn’t really see another reason for her to deceive her father. And this was to protect him, not harm him.
    Denise concluded that Abby was someone who was willing to listen to her own feelings and not be swayed by others. It seemed unlikely then, that she would have been seduced into a car, as some girls were by clever kidnappers who appeared injured, or seemed to need help or offer some inducement. She would also have had a high degree of self-confidence.
    Abby was sixteen, pretty, adventurous and slim. A sexual motive was certainly possible, if not probable. She was also Jewish and Denise couldn’t rule out that this might have been important to the killer in some way. There had been no contact with the family – no ransom request, and the family was not wealthy. Kidnapping for monetary gain seemed implausible. It was more probable, therefore, that it was someone she knew or who knew her family.
    A personal motive seemed likely. It might well have been someone who had become obsessed with her. But the cops had exhausted that train of enquiry and found nothing. If it was a relative, a friend or a stalker, they’d kept their interests well hidden.
    Abby had left the house in the dark just before it started to rain. It was not even a predictable event, as Abby rarely went out on a school night and this seemed to be a plan that she told no one about.
    An opportunist would more likely be trawling in a car and would take someone waiting or in need of help, not someone rushing to meet up with the new man in her life.
    No, Denise thought, Abby wasn’t just unlucky – someone had targeted her specifically and either knew she was heading out that night or was following her. For that reason, Denise thought that the killer was likely to be known to the suspect and to live close. It might have even been a neighbor who saw her pass and decided to follow.
    If someone had planned to kidnap the girl, it was likely that they would scope the victim’s movements and choose a place and time that was part of the girl’s normal routine. But this wasn’t part of her normal routine and yet they somehow knew she was heading out and knew to be there. The perpetrator had to be very confident and very proficient to take someone and leave no