We had to get our man to talk. He was not doing well, slept short and uneasy. Those are things that are really hard to fake, and it was chipping away at the mental picture I had, we all had. The man in our cell was not some stone-cold killer with a method we couldn’t figure out.

We went through the list of family and contacts we knew and finally found someone who felt like helping him out. Strange how few of his folks were close enough to him to care. But a phone call later, Robert finally had a lawyer.

We connected a few more dots while we waited. We had a fairly good picture of the victims now, and their relations to Robert. Many we could place, but in a few cases we had to guess because there was nothing except a shared activity or location. One guy had nothing at all in common with our killer except some distance of the same commute and no matter how hard we looked, no common friends, acquaintances, not even friends-of-friends.

It all made no sense. The only thing all our victims shared is that there was a reasonable chance that they met our guy at least once in their life. We held a brainstorming session to explore fringe ideas of what’s going on, and here is the best theory that explains all the facts. It is silly on the edge of madness, but again, like Arthur C. Doyle wrote in his Sherlock Holmes: „Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.“

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So our working theory number two was that Robert was a genius-level contract killer, everything we saw about him was a persona, and he killed every victim on our list because they came too close to discovering the truth, or watched him doing something they shouldn’t have seen. Making their deaths appear as suicides or sleep-walking was just a modus operandi.

A ridiculous theory. No better than mind control. Just crazy on a different level. It made some of us feel better, so we kept it around. But we didn’t go out looking for his actual contract targets because it was so flimsy.

Me, I was scared. There is fear and then there is terror. You can be afraid of many things, and if you are smart, you go and do something about them. But this feeling of abject terror, when you are facing something you barely understand and that is completely out of your control, when you feel not just afraid but also helpless, entirely powerless, that drives you insane.