City of Silence (City of Mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page A

attacked her second piece of tart.  Trevor was not sure where he
himself stood on the matter.  As methods went, criminal profiling appeared to
be the proverbial double edged sword, as capable as sending detectives down the
wrong path as the right one.
    “Yes
please, give us the particulars,” said Emma and there was a synchronized
turning of chairs.
    “The
case originates from Scotland,” Trevor said. “Three separate rapes, committed
over a four month span of time all taking place near a railway depot in a small
rural town. The assaults occurred in the afternoon, each within a hour of the
time when the train is scheduled to pass through – twice just after and the
last just before.”
    “What
sort of train?” Rayley asked.  “A commuter train which makes many stops or a
direct route train, which does not?”
    “Please
explain for us all why you are asking that question,” Trevor gently reminded
him.  The goal of the Tuesday Night games was for the thought processes of each
member to become utterly transparent to the others, and then use the subsequent
analysis to illustrate to the volunteers how the mind of a trained detective
might work.
    “When
you said that the rapes were occurring near a depot,” Rayley said, “my first
thought was that the attacker was either arriving or departing by train, or
both.  That he wasn’t a recognizable local citizen, in other words, but rather
using the railway to assault women who would be unable to identify him to the
district police.”
    “Perhaps
someone who rides the trains on a regular basis,” Davy added.  “It is a pity
that trains do not keep registers of their passengers as ships do.”
    “Indeed,”
said Trevor.  The ability to correlate suspects with the dates of their channel
crossings had been an enormous benefit in the Parisian case they had just
concluded.  But trains kept no such records. 
    “We
could begin with eyewitness accounts,” said Davy.  “Conductors or regular
commuters might recall who traveled that route on a consistent basis, perhaps
even on the dates in question.   Did we ascertain if the train was a local or
an express?” 
    “Ascertain”
was rapidly becoming one of Davy’s favorite words, Trevor noted with amused
approval, and he had finally learned to put the emphasis on the last syllable.
    “No,
we did not,” Trevor said.  “But our conversation has run off the rails rather
early this time, if you’ll all pardon the pun, and the full ramifications of
Rayley’s question have thus remained unexplored.”  He squinted down at his
papers.  “This train was a local, the route running between Aberdeen to
Edinburgh with seven stops, three of them very close to the small town where
the attacks occurred.”
    “So
the man could have boarded the train at any point along the route,” Rayley
said.  “And gotten off at any of the stops as well.”
    “I
find it most interesting that he must have for some reason changed his
methodology,” Emma said.  “You said the first two times the rapes occurred
shortly after the train had passed through the depot.  This seems to me quite
the logical sequence.  A man disembarks from a train in a small town and
commits a crime.  But then the last time the rape occurs just before the train
is scheduled to leave, which implies that he was already in the town.  In this final
instance he was more concerned with using the train as a means of departure
rather than arrival and timed his attack accordingly.”
    “How
often do trains pass through?”  Tom asked.
    “And
would you explain to us exactly why you raise that question?” Trevor asked in
turn.  He disliked his role as the stern schoolmaster of the group but if the
games were to maximize their usefulness, he could not indulge great vaulting
leaps of speculation in any of his team members, no matter how apt they might
be. They must march together, step by step, through the entire bloody process
if they were to emerge as a