Free The Dead (The Saxon & Fitzgerald Mysteries Book 1) by Ingrid Black Page A

back. And why should they? It was obviously doing good business, though I’d never been to see it myself. I was waiting for the paperback to come out.
    It didn’t take long to find the Psychology building, nor, once inside, to climb the stairs and find the room I was looking for; but once there, my nerve almost failed me. The door had one of those glass panels in it patterned with squares, like the sort of paper on which children do their math homework, and through it I could see Mort Tillman sitting by the window, head framed by darkening sky, legs crossed, hands folded, listening intently as one of the students, an anxious, fidgety young man in John Lennon glasses, made some point.
    Mort looked just as I remembered, with that same air of distracted, shabby grandeur, that same seemingly permanent frown, above all that same inexplicable fondness for overlarge grey corduroys and bright waistcoats, the latter his one concession to style. It was as though he’d once seen a 1940s print showing a caricature of the standard eccentric college professor and the image had become imprinted in his head, unerasable except by invasive surgery.
    His hair was still too long for a man of his age as well, though closer to grey now than the silver he always used to be so proud of, and the goatee looked rather worn. He was the middle son of a grand New England family of attorneys who’d expected better of him and made sure he never forgot it. Grandfather in the Senate; summer house on Martha’s Vineyard; winter ski lodge in Vermont – why wouldn’t they have expected better? Tillman had courage in his own way to defy them. It was just a pity that he couldn’t have defied them that bit more by not sharing their own assessment of his shortcomings.
    A glance up from Tillman showed that he’d seen me as I pushed open the door and entered as unobtrusively as I could manage, but if he was surprised by my appearance he wasn’t showing it. Did that mean Fisher had managed to contact him? Or had he been expecting me to come round ever since he arrived in Dublin?
    A couple of other people near the back of the room looked up too, but most of the other twenty or so students who’d turned up for Tillman’s seminar were too engrossed in the dialogue that was going on between him and the fidgety young student to take any notice of me.
    Theirs was an argument I’d heard many times before. If something was acidic, the relevant test would always show it to be acidic; it couldn’t be mistaken for, or pretend to be, anything else. But if an actual or potential offender knew the parameters of a profiler’s tests, he could subtly change his own behaviour to buck the test, escaping detection to carry on killing.
    ‘You can even download VICAP forms from the Internet now,’ the student insisted, referring to the FBI’s Violent Crime and Apprehension Program analysis reports. ‘I’ve done it myself. You know what the police are looking for. And once you know, you can beat it.’
    ‘In theory, maybe,’ Tillman said when he got the chance. ‘I’ve never claimed that profiling is faultless, I’ve never even used the word science. Offender profiling is a technique, that’s all, an application of psychological principles to the realm of criminology. It’s still up to the police to determine how to use the application of those principles in the solving of a crime.’
    ‘But how can they apply the principles at all if the principles can’t be relied on?’
    ‘It’s more complex than that, Tim,’ Tillman replied. ‘An offender may know the principles involved, but he still won’t alter his behaviour in the most part because what he’s doing has its own compulsion. He is working out, usually, an elaborate ritualistic fantasy of his own, perfecting it each time to make it right. Not only is it not possible for him to change his behaviour, he also wouldn’t want to because that wouldn’t satisfy the urge.’
    ‘But he could, if he chose