I Don't Want To Kill You Read Free Page A

back, and the killer disappeared.
     
    The police had yet to find any real evidence of who the killer might be, though they could guess some things just by analysing the crimes themselves. First of all, everyone assumed it was a man, based on two things: the sheer physical strength involved in hacking off the hands, carrying the bodies outside, and driving the wooden poles into the victims’ backs. Also for the simple fact that almost all serial killers were men anyway. Neither of these were especially strong bits of evidence, but psychological profiling is more of an art than a science. They took the information they had and went with the answers that made the most sense.
     
    The other thing the police knew about him was that he was very clean: the sites where the actual deaths took place were always full of plastic, including sheets and garbage bags and even disposable rain ponchos. This was not a person who wanted to get any blood on himself, and the lack of usable exterior blood evidence showed that he was very good at keeping himself clean. That penchant for neatness, plus the use of mops and brooms as poles in his victims’ backs, had earned him the media nickname ‘Handyman’. Well, that and the fact that he cut his victims’ hands off.
     
    I took another mouthful of cereal. The police and the FBI had been hunting the Handyman for years, but I knew they’d never catch him because they were working from flawed assumptions: namely, that he was human, and male. No matter what Mom said, he was most definitely a demon, and almost certainly female. I’d talked to her on the phone, for crying out loud – I think I could tell the difference. And that helped explain everything in vastly different ways.
     
    To begin with, the strength: the demons had all revealed an array of bizarre supernatural powers, and it made perfect sense that the Handyman had above average strength, regardless of gender. Female serial killers were remarkably rare, but they did exist; so why not female demons as well? Assuming they had gender at all, they probably had representatives from both.
     
    As for the cleanliness, a strong attention to detail suggested . . . what? That the demon was neurotic? Cautious? Scared of blood? If I could get on the computer I could look up some of the criminal-profiling websites I liked to read, but Mom kept the computer in her room and I didn’t dare do this kind of research with her looking over my shoulder.
     
    There was so much else this demon was telling us, if only I knew what it meant: things like why she displayed her victims outside, and why she shoved poles into their backs. These were messages directly from her to us – in fact, they might be messages directly to me , since I was the one she was here to find. But what did they say? I’d studied serial killers for years, as a hobby bordering on obsession, but most of my knowledge was trivia about who a killer was, how they did it, and so on. I knew why a killer did what he did, but only after the fact; I didn’t know the steps the police had taken to decipher all of that information in the first place. I needed to do more study, which meant I needed the Internet or the library. I couldn’t get either one until morning.
     
    I finished my cereal and glanced at the clock: ten thirty. Morning was still hours away.
     
    There was one other area where I had a definite leg up on the police, and I didn’t need their studies to help me: the missing body parts. Most serial killers saved souvenirs from their kills because they liked to relive them, or in some cases because they simply wanted to eat them, but demons were different. Mr Crowley, the Clayton Killer, had stolen his victims’ body parts because he needed them to regenerate his own failing limbs and organs. The Handyman – Handywoman? – might be doing the same thing, or something similarly supernatural. What could you do with hands? And what about tongues? What did they represent?
     
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