Sidney Sheldon's Chasing Tomorrow (Tracy Whitney #2)(32)

“Maman said you were in Paris.”


“That’s right, chéri.”

“Did you catch the bad guy?” his daughter asked.

Jean avoided Sylvie’s eye.

“Not yet.”

“But you came back to see me?”

“Of course I did. Well, more to see your appendix really,” Jean joked. “Did they give it to you in a jar?”

“Eeeew. No!” Clémence giggled, then winced.

“Don’t make her laugh, you idiot,” said Sylvie.

“Sorry. When I was a kid they used to give it to you in a jar to take home.”

“In Canada?”

“Uh-huh.

“In the olden days?”

Sylvie grinned. “As you can see, she’s making a quick recovery.”

After a few minutes a nurse came in and ordered rest. Jean and Sylvie slipped outside into the corridor.

“Thank you for coming.”

“Of course,” said Jean. “You don’t have to thank me. She’s my daughter, I love her to death.”

“I know you do, darling. I didn’t mean that. How’s the case going?”

Jean groaned. “It isn’t. Paris was awful. This girl, the way she lived. You should have seen it.”

His gray eyes were alight with emotion. Sylvie put a hand on his arm.

“You can’t save them all, you know,” she said kindly.

“Apparently I can’t save any of them,” Jean said bitterly. “Call me when you take her home.”

BACK IN HIS SERVICED apartment a stone’s throw from Interpol’s General Secretariat at Quai Charles de Gaulle, Jean Rizzo switched on his computer. He typed in his user name, password and encryption code and watched as a cascade of windows opened relating to the Bible Killer murders.

Each of the victims had a serial number, under which local police had filed evidence. Or rather, where they’d bemoaned their lack of evidence before closing the cases, one after another. Internally, Interpol listed the girls simply as BK1, BK2 and so on. When Jean left for Paris, the file had ended with BK10, a Spanish redhead named Izia Moreno. Tomorrow, Jean Rizzo would add Alissa Armand’s name and image. BK11. That’s all she is now.

In addition to the official files, Jean had created his own, a much more visual affair that he thought of as a computerized whiteboard, like an online incident room. Pictures of the victims made up a montage in the center. To Jean Rizzo, these women would never be numbers. From this hub of faces, ideas fanned out like the spokes of a wheel: lines of inquiry, witnesses, common factors, forensic data, anything that seemed significant, or interesting.

Clicking open this personal file, Jean stared at it for a long time.

Nothing. We’ve got nothing.

A line one of his college professors used to use came back to him:

“In police work, what you don’t know is as valuable as what you do.”

If only that were true, Jean thought wryly.

The truth was, he didn’t know an awful lot. But the clues must be there. They must. No one was that smart, all of the time. He had to start looking at things differently.

The crime scenes were all clean as a whistle. Barring a miracle, they weren’t going to nail this guy on forensics. But there must be something else, some other link among the murders. I’m missing the bigger picture. I need to zoom out.

The concept of zooming out immediately made Jean think of Google Maps.

Maps. Geography.

He tapped the locations of the murders into the computer and brought them up on a map. Madrid, Lima, London, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, New York, Mumbai . . . For twenty minutes he played around, drawing lines between the map dots, rotating the shape, looking for a pattern. Nothing leaped out at him.

If not place, maybe time . . .

For the next two hours, Jean analyzed the dates, days and times of each murder. Was there a message in the numbers? He painstakingly cross-referenced every version of the figures with the biblical verses left at each crime scene. Did Genesis, chapter 2, verse 18, have anything to do with February 18, for example?

Of course it doesn’t. He rubbed his temples wearily. I’m losing my mind.

He poured himself a whiskey and was about to call it a night when a final thought occurred to him. Maybe our killer’s not a mathematical genius. Maybe it’s way simpler than that.

Logging in to the central Interpol database, the unimaginatively named I–24/7 Network, he typed in the date of each murder, then pulled up a list of all the violent crimes committed in the same city on the same day.

Nothing obvious came up.

Jean widened the search criteria to a week before and a week after the murder dates.

A smattering of other unsolved homicides popped up, along with rapes and serious sexual assaults. But there was nothing that looked like a pattern as such. Nothing that linked the Bible Killer’s work to any other crime.


On a whim, Jean deleted the word “violent” from the dialogue box. Now he was looking only for “serious crime” within a week either side of the BK murders, in the same locations.

One by one, they appeared on the screen.

Madrid: THEFT. $1m plus. Fine art. ANNTA Gallery.



Lima: THEFT. $2m plus. Fine art. Galería Municipal de Arte Pancho Fierro.