The Profile of Ghosts

Adrian Lynch is the best profiler Halden City ever produced, and his gift has a price listed in no textbook. To reconstruct an offender, Lynch must briefly become him, evidence first, then posture, grammar, appetite, until the profile writes itself in the other man's hand. It worked. It closed cases. It also left residue: after every deep profile he caught himself borrowing the subject's habits, and after three serial cases the habit his wife caught was his absence, and she left the divorce papers folded in a drawer and walked out of a marriage to the filing system.

Then a map librarian is found posed in the Ashfield Branch Library exactly like a murder Lynch profiled twenty years ago, a shard of mirror glass over her eye and a card on the reading table in drawn capitals. QUESTION TWO. ANSWER WITH YOUR ORIGINAL PROFILE, MR. LYNCH. FULL MARKS BUYS A LIFE. A PASSING GRADE KEEPS YOU BREATHING. And when Lynch opens his own twenty-year-old report, the copy the killer has left him, he finds an annotation on the last page in a stranger's hand: THIS TIME, DO NOT GET IT WRONG.

Because twenty years ago Lynch profiled the Ashfield murders, and the profile was wrong in one load-bearing detail. The knots at every scene read left-handed. The file says right-handed. The file also says the mirror glass sat over the right eye, when Lynch's own pinned photographs say left. Somewhere between the scenes and the evidence vault, the record was re-photographed by someone with the standing to sign replacements in, and an innocent night custodian went to prison on a profile and a pane of glass. The Mirror Killer is not replicating the old crimes. He is re-asking the questions Lynch's reports answered wrong, grading each answer, and every wrong grade costs a life.

Working the case with him is Detective Maya Reyes, a procedure loyalist who calls profiling horoscopes and carries the open file of her own mentor, the task-force detective who died asking about the knots. Reyes counts every one of Lynch's claims against a document, and the documents keep lying, and the two of them have to learn each other's trade before the trade gets either of them killed.

Then Lynch stands in an interrogation room and states a detail no released file contains, and Internal Affairs starts a file of its own, because a consultant whose old cases are being recreated around him, who predicts the killer's cards before envelopes open, and whose handwriting is drifting minute by minute into another man's posture, is either the best witness alive or the killer the city deserves. The evidence chain that could clear him runs through one building, and the man who directs that building signs everything twice.

Part cat-and-mouse, part public examination, The Profile of Ghosts is a procedural about the most dangerous sentence in detection: I understand you. Every clue is planted where the reader can find it. Every profile cuts both ways. And at the end of the syllabus waits the final exam, where the only accepted currency is a confession, given freely, in Lynch's own hand.