Free Assassin by Tara Moss Page A

nightcap then,’ Jimmy suggested. Before Andy could protest, Jimmy left him to cross to the liquor cabinet in the living room, where he poured them both a Johnnie Walker. He knew Andy would be unlikely to resist his favourite drop.
    It would be rude to say no, Andy supposed. He hadn’t seen his closest friend in a while.
    ‘Get you anything, hon?’ Jimmy asked his wife as he walked past her, balancing the overfilled drinks. Angie shook her head and continued to run delicate fingers over their youngest child’s hair as Jimmy bent to kiss her on the forehead. Andy watched the exchange with a flicker of sadness. The breakdown of his own brief marriage to Cassandra didn’t have to taint his relationships forever. Some people simply were not suited. He could have tried harder with Mak. He could have been more open. He could have taken a real chance. She wouldn’t have left him then. She wouldn’t have gone to Paris …
    Jimmy returned to the kitchen and closed the door for privacy, clearly relishing the chance to talk. ‘I thought you’d never come by again, you dick. How about my boy?! Beautiful kid, isn’t he? You haven’t seen him since he was, what? Six months?’ Jimmy had sent photos, but Andy hadn’t found time to visit. ‘He just had his first birthday. They grow so fast.’
    ‘You do have a great family,’ Andy told him sincerely.
    ‘Four sons!’ he exclaimed and flexed a flabby bicep. ‘Who’d have thought?’
    They clinked their glasses, brought them to their lips and tipped them back. As ever, the whisky tasted good. Possibly a little too good. Andy felt his shoulders drop. This was a good idea, he decided. He’d been too tightly wound.
    ‘So how are things with the … S-C-V-P?’
    ‘SVCP,’ Andy corrected him.
    Jimmy made a face. ‘Sorry.’
    ‘It’s fine. Unless you factor in that I trained in an area that’s rapidly losing credibility.’
    ‘ Skata. Is it that bad?’ He’d obviously heard some recent controversy.
    ‘Depends on who you ask, I guess,’ Andy replied. ‘Criminal profiling has taken a public beating lately. It hasn’t helped my case, that much is certain.’
    Over the years Andy had strongly associated himself with the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) and Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU). He’d spent a lot of time in Quantico, learning the FBI methods of profiling pioneered by Robert K Ressler and John Douglas in the seventies. It wasn’t what he’d joined the police force to do, all those years earlier, but it was what unfolded for him, especially after apprehending the Stiletto Killer. Andy proved adept at homing in on the hardest killers to catch — the loners, the ones who killed randomly, who killed strangers, the sadistic ones or the psychopathic ones or the crazy ones who kept on killing until they were stopped. And the FBI program was the most promising. Now, years on, he’d staked his career on it and he could see those foundations crumbling before his eyes. There’d been some damning research released, most notably by a team of psychologists at the University of Liverpool, concluding that the FBI’s celebrated methods were worthless or worse, in some cases actually impeding investigations by sending officers after the wrong suspects. And there’d been a big piece in The New Yorker recently, criticising John Douglas, and James Brussel before him, essentially comparing the famed profilers to astrologers and psychics. Charlatans even.
    Twenty odd years after the FBI’s criminal profiling methods reached critical popularity with The Silence of the Lambs , Andy had finally established himself as Australia’s top profiler exactly when the world decided they didn’t want one. What were the chances?
    ‘Fuck, man, I’m sorry,’ Jimmy said and meant it. ‘It’s not like anyone can fault what you’ve done, however you did it.’He might not understand Andy’s process, exactly, but he was sincere. Jimmy knew how much his friend had sacrificed,