is bound to make a mistake. That’s when you’ll nab them both.”
“Yesterday I might’ve believed that. Today I’m as far from a solution as I was last March when I first started. Just when I figure I’ve got hold of something tangible, it all goes up in smoke. Tonight we pulled this kid out of a sewer. Now that’s outdoors. That’s not indoors. That’s never happened before. That’s a whole new wrinkle. That’s not a detached or semi-detached dwelling. But it sure looks like one of our two guys again. There was the usual sex stuff, and the naughty little boy scribblings on the walls. There were the bite marks on the body, too. That’s consistent. But this little girl was younger than any of the previous victims. Early twenties. The others run from the late twenties on up into the fifties and sometimes the sixties. You see, it’s like that. Consistent, but not consistent. I don’t know who I’m looking for anymore. One description has him medium height, dark hair, with a crooked smile. Another has him fair-haired and above average height, with a sweet baby face.”
“So you know you’ve got two different guys,” Fritzi mumbled sleepily.
“Sure. Classic copycat situation. That’s easy.” Mooney huffed. “The tough part is trying to tell the one from the other. I keep confusing them. I used to think I could tell the styles apart. Now I can’t anymore.”
Outside on the street below an ambulance whooped like a stricken creature, beating its way up into some troubled northern precinct.
“What these two guys do is probably ninety-five, ninety-six percent identical.” Mooney fretted. “But then there’s those two or three few percentage points of deviation where the copycat guy goes off and does his own little number.”
“You always do everything one hundred percent the same?” Fritzi asked drowsily. “Brush your teeth the same every morning? Sign your name the same?” Fritzi gathered the blankets up around her shoulders. “You know any horse that runs the same race twice?”
“Sure. They do all the time. Just check the P.P.‘s.”
“You think you can tell what a horse will do one day just from looking at his P.P.‘s? If that were true, how come you’re not a millionaire?”
Lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, Mooney grew indignant. “Well, you can damn well pretty much tell how a horse is gonna run if you’ve got his past performance charts in front of you.”
“P.P.‘s are just numbers. Weight of horse. Weight of jockey. Speed over a given distance. Where the horse finished last three times out. Numbers. Just numbers.” Mooney flung his hands up in despair. “How did we get into this? Weren’t we just talking homicide a minute ago?”
“Same thing. You’re giving me M.O.‘s and I say they’re just P. P.‘s. You need something more. For the full story, you need the IP’s.”
That brought the detective to an abrupt stop. “IP’s?”
“The Imponderables. The stuff you can’t describe with numbers. How does the horse feel? Is he rested? Does he hurt anywhere? Does he like his jockey? What’s his mental attitude? Don’t you think that goes into the equation too?”
“Okay. Okay. I get your point,” Mooney grumbled. “But how does all this apply to the matter at hand?”
“I’m coming to that.” Fritzi lay with a coyly angelic smile on her face. “All I’m asking you now is to acknowledge the fact that you have an incomplete picture with these eleven M.O.‘s because they don’t take into consideration the little normal variations in human behavior from one day to the next.”
“Granted. Okay? Granted.” Mooney had started to swell dangerously. “But that’s all I have to go on. I don’t have the luxury of sitting down with these two nut cases and asking them if they slept well last night and if everything is all perky and rosy with them today.”
“Right. That’s what separates the truly great handicapper from the merely good one.
Diane Capri, Christine Kling