Page 105 of Deadly Cry
‘Okay,’ Kim said, understanding the difference.
‘Do you see here where the T and D stems are carefully retraced all the way down?’
Kim nodded.
‘That tells me he possesses a high level of dignity.’
For a reason that Kim couldn’t fathom, this did not surprise her despite the fact he’d murdered three women and abducted a child.
‘His writing is without loops, which often shows a loner. But see here where the lines of writing run into each other. This demonstrates confusion. The absence of figure-eight formations shows there is little fluidity of thought.
‘As I’ve said before, handwriting will show a trait but doesn’t show if you use it.’
Kim nodded.
‘And now, if you look at the lower case m and n, we can determine his thinking style. There are four: logical, investigative, keen comprehension and analytical. Our subject has rounded tops, which would indicate a logical thinking style, with a couple of worry loops on the m and n.’
Kim was captivated by everything he had to say, and a picture was starting to build in her mind.
‘With the time given, that’s all I was able to deduce on stroke formations and individual personality traits.’
Kim hid her disappointment, even though she had a feeling she was getting to know their killer well.
‘The rest of the time was spent gauging his emotional response, which is critical in knowing what kind of person you’re dealing with.’
He produced another sheaf of papers.
‘And this is where it starts to get interesting.’
Eighty-Six
Penn pressed refresh on his email and, just as though he’d wished it, Keats’s name appeared at the top. At 11 a.m. he’d asked for the official post-mortem report to be sent through urgently and it had been the longest fifteen minutes of the day.
He scrolled through to the attachments and stopped at the one marked ‘scratches’.
He enlarged the photo and turned it around, looking at it from all four sides. There were curves and straight lines but nothing obviously legible.
‘There has to be,’ he said out loud. The scratches mattered. He knew it, but how was he to make sense of them?
‘Has to be what?’ Alison asked.
‘Never mind,’ he said, laying all the printed sheets in front of him on the desk.
He moved from one to the other, turning the sheets around. He could feel his frustration growing. He couldn’t do it like this.
Suddenly he had an idea. All the images of the scratches had been saved in the same folder.
He clicked on each image individually, enlarged its size to where it could just fit on an A4 sheet of paper and then stood by the printer, tapping it impatiently as it printed them all one by one.
‘Stace, I’m borrowing the boss’s office for a minute…’
‘Yeah, whatever,’ she said, waving him away dismissively.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, just got the content report in from the network provider for the burner phone.’
‘And?’
