"All right, all right!" She held up her hands. "I believe that I can trust your reasoning; I am pleased to see that you don't rely on instincts alone."
He flushed; at one point he had waxed eloquent on the subject of "a trained constable's instincts." Perhaps he had been a little too eloquent.
"Never mind," she continued, "I think you are correct and my 'instincts' also agree with yours. I've sent one of the mages to the river to try and find the body, but as we both know, finding it now will probably be of limited use."
"Because it's been in running water." He sighed. "What about the victim?"
She shook her head, sadly. "Useless," she replied. "The poor child was wearing a Gypsy amulet, and the mere presence of that contaminated any slight aura there might have been from her attacker. It would be analogous to looking for a trace of incense smoke in the presence of a smoldering campfire."
"Damn." He bit his lower lip, then hit his fist on his knee, angrily. "We're still reacting after the fact. We have to anticipate him somehow!"
Her face darkened, and she looked away from him for a moment. "I'm sending warnings out, but I can't reach everyone, not even all the Free Bards. Some of them simply won't hear the warnings, especially the ones who are still traveling. Some won't heed them; even if it comes from me, I am still of the Church and they do not trust the Church. And as you yourself discovered, there are many unfortunate women who are not Free Bards who are still street-entertainers, and most of them will never hear anything but the wildest of rumors."
"And most of them can't afford to spend a single day or night off the street, much less weeks or months," he muttered. He thought it was too low to hear, but her ears were better than he thought, and she bowed her head.
"And there, too, the Church has failed." She sighed very, very softly. Her lips moved silently and her eyes remained closed; and he flushed again, feeling as if he was spying on something intensely personal.
She looked up again, her face stony. Evidently God had given her no revelations, not even a hint of what to do.
"We won't be able to prevent him," she said bitterly, her voice steady and calm. "We both know that. And I can't think of any way that we could even catch him in the act, except by accident."
It was unpalatable—but it was truth. He winced, and nodded.
"So we continue to react as quickly as possible, and we pray that he makes a mistake somewhere, sometime."
He nodded again. "I can't think of anything else to do," he replied helplessly. "And he's proven twice that he can act right in the middle of a crowded street at the height of the day and still get away. He doesn't have to wait for the cover of darkness anymore. He has us at a complete disadvantage, because he'll always wear a different face. Witnesses do us no good. I can't think ofanything that will help except to instruct the constables to keep an eye on female entertainers."
"Unfortunately, neither can I." She bit her lip; it was getting a distinctly chewed-on appearance. "I'll—think on this for some time. Perhaps something will occur to me."
Think? She meant that she was going to pray about it. He knew exactly what she was going to do, she was going to spend half the night on her knees, hoping for some divine advice. Maybe she'd get it, but he wasn't going to hold his breath.
Her eyes were focused on something other than him, and he tried to be as quiet as possible to keep from disturbing her. Abruptly, she shook her head and looked at him again.
"You might as well go," she told him. "You go do whatever it is that lets you think; perhaps you can evolve some plan. If anything happens, or if they find the body, I shall have someone fetch you."
He stood up, gave a brief, stiff nod of a salute, and took his leave.
His own form of meditation was to sit and focus his eyes on something inconsequential while his mind worked. When he got back to his room, that was precisely what he did, leaving the door open so that if Kayne came for him, she would know he was waiting for the summons. He sat down on his bed with his back to the wall, and stared at a chipped place on the opposite wall.
This case was precisely like all the rest, with nothing left to tie the murderer to an actual person. Tal had been studying case-histories in the files of the Justiciars with Kayne's help over the last week, and he had found one other murderer like this one—a man who'd been compelled by some demon inside him to kill, over and over again. "Demon" was the word the Church clerk had used, but Tal and Ardis had both been a bit less melodramatic. "I would say,need, rather than 'demon,' " she had commented when he showed her the case. "As you yourself pointed out; domination, manipulation, and control. This man was driven by his own need, not by some other creature's, he was the only director of his actions."
That particular man had taken mementos from each of his victims, some personal trinket from each of them, and once the Justiciar-Mages realized what he was doing it was through those mementos that he was caught. They had done something that allowed them to follow those objects to the place where they were lying—which happened to be the man's apartment, hidden behind a false wall in a closet.
It was obvious to Tal that the missing knife or knives served the same purpose here, but a mage would know better than to leave such a knife uncleansed after the murders, so there was no hope that a trace of the victim's blood would provide the link they needed to find him. Tal was certain—and so was Ardis—that the person they sought was male. The fact that all the people taken over had been male was the telling clue, rather than the fact that all the known victims were female. A woman who hated other women usually felt that way for some other reason than confusion about her gender—in fact, other than women who were of the cutthroat variety of thief, females who murdered other females usually did so out of jealousy or rivalry and considered themselves intensely female. It was Ardis's opinion that in order to control the secondary victims, the murderer would have to identify intensely with them, and it was Tal's opinion that most females, even one with severe mental and emotional warping, would find that distasteful.
They could both be wrong, of course, but again, women who murdered women almost always killed people they knew, and it would simply not have been possible for the murderer to get to know all of the widely disparate victims in the short period of time between murders.
Men kill strangers; women don't, except by accident, or as part of another crime. That was the pattern that had emerged from Tal's study of the records.