Williams took a sip from his coffee cup and frowned deeply. "An "ex-military?"

Elizabeth took a deep breath and nodded slowly. It was the morning after the family dinner that had brought the breakthrough.

Nick licked his lips and furrowed his brows. "After it ..." He paused after almost saying, his niece. He wanted as much as anyone to keep Ashlyn and Nikki out of the ongoing investigation. "After our source mentioned it, it strikes me, too. Those cuts remind me of rank insignia in the military, don't they? I remember that from my childhood. A sergeant in the Army has three marks on top of each other; a corporal has two, and a Private only one."

"Private E2," Williams said slowly. "That one has a sign, and private E1 doesn't have one at all."

Brooks leaned back in his chair. "Interesting. Some award, a promotion for lower rank. At the time --" He seemed to be sorting out his thoughts. "How back then we had investigated all these right-wing groups. Arian Brotherhood, White Supremacists, and what they're all called. They are powerful in Miami and control the drug trade there. They have these rune-like marks as tattoos. But we didn't think of the military insignia at the time. Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees."

Elizabeth took a deep breath and ran her hands over her mouth. "Let's look at the ranks of elite units," she suggested. "And if this guy is an Arian Brotherhood Nazi ... Maybe he's borrowed from there somehow."

"And if he's not Arian Brotherhood?" asked Katherine with furrowed brows. "Then could he be from some elite unit?"

"Maybe not directly from the Army," Williams replied, "but from a special unit. After all, there are soldiers with enhanced basic skills, as they're called. In Afghanistan, for example, or Somalia. Meanwhile, again, heavily around Iraq."

"The so-called high-value targets," Brooks added.

Katherine looked closely at her mentor. "You're alluding to this private mercenary group?"

Williams nodded slowly. "Yes. They probably keep changing their names to improve their image or start over marketing-wise. The former members of a special forces founded the troupe. The man was an ardent supporter of Catholicism. He viewed his private Army's activities in the Middle East as a continuation of the Crusades. He also instituted the superimposition of temple symbols on the uniforms of his men, who were nothing more than mercenaries. We once did exercises with them at the Academy and Marine Base. It was about domestic crisis management. The company employs thousands of people worldwide. Which doesn't change the fact that it operates legally in a gray area."

"And our killer could be part of that force?"

Williams pulled the corners of his mouth down and shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. We didn't find his data anywhere at the time, so we went back off that trail."

Elizabeth listened intently. What could this entity be? And had this unit influenced the man to become a murderer? Shell shocked was what it was called when soldiers couldn't cope in real life. Elizabeth had once had a relationship with a soldier who had been in Afghanistan. What does war do to people? the detective had asked at the time.

War was often a means to achieve political goals; at the same time, it allowed the dark side of the human soul to enter. Elizabeth's girlfriend at the time had returned from deployment in Afghanistan, a broken woman. The soldier bought an old-fashioned tape recorder and listened to stories from her childhood in the evenings because she could fall asleep better. One was shaken at night by such nightmares that she flailed wildly in her sleep, breaking her girlfriend's nose.

First in the war, then again at home.

Gradually it dawned on the detective. "The man had been out of the picture all these years, hadn't he?"

Everyone nodded.

"And during that time, everything was quiet?"

Nodding again.

"What did we say again in a meeting a few days ago? In wartime --"

"In wartime, there are no serial killers," Katherine said slowly.

Elizabeth looked at her sister long and hard. "Because in wartime, they can let off steam. In wartime, they can indulge their inclinations undisturbed. That's the main reason there were no serial killers on record during the First and Second World Wars. As we have already said, these murderers associate killing with an element of control. And they can live out these inclinations much better in war. Unless it's peacetime --"

"And when he's not at war --" began Williams.

"... he's playing war in civil society," Katherine added.

The murderer is constantly at war, the detective thought. He brings the war home with him. And these signs ...

In the Army, these signs represented hierarchy. The power of command. The bravery. Is that what the killer wanted? Did he decorate his victims differently? Did some rank higher than others?

Elizabeth looked at Brooks and Williams. "We need the descriptions of the cuts from Quantico as soon as possible." Then she jumped to her feet.

Katherine's eyebrows drew together in surprise. "Where are you going?"

"I need to talk to Maggie!"

xxx

"You're right," Maggie said, sitting at her desk. "We have three cuts on three different areas of Foreman's body, and we always have three of these arrow runes on top of each other."

Elizabeth sat across from her, looking at the crime scene photos herself.

The fact that the killer incised his victims with different numbers of marks was no coincidence. Why hadn't they noticed that right away?

Maggie looked at her wife with a frown. "In Al Zaid's case, on the other hand, we have four cuts, with three marks on top of each other. I wonder why."

"Because he was a tougher cookie," the detective replied. "Foreman was alone with his dog, and Al Zaid had a bodyguard. And the killer had killed the two women, too."

"Which he probably saw as more of an accessory."

Elizabeth exhaled slowly and nodded. "Possibly," she murmured, comparing the images. "How was that with Cody Wilkins."

"Two cuts total, one mark at a time," the redhead said. "One on the right arm, found at Medic Research, and one on the chest."

"So the man wasn't worth much."

"True enough," Maggie replied tersely, pulling the corners of her mouth down.

Elizabeth rolled her eyes and gave her wife a warning look. "I meant more as a recruit for the Draftsman, Mags, and he hardly decorated him because he wasn't a dangerous opponent."

Maggie again frowned a little. "Surely that supports your thesis that Cody Wilkins was more of an accidental victim of the killer."

Elizabeth ran her fingers along her lower lip, nodding slowly. "Exactly. So can we assume that the more dangerous an opponent was, the more cuts there were?"

"Not only that, the more signs there are, the greater the depth of cut. He cuts more brutally and deeper into the flesh the more signs he applies. And the very deep and, therefore, most painful cuts he invariably made before death. Premortal --"

"That's it, the strongest victims must also suffer the most?"

"And are also the most highly decorated as a reward," Maggie added, leaning back in her chair. "If your theory is correct. And if it's the killer's modus operandi."

Elizabeth looked at her wife long and hard. "Let's assume for the moment that the theory is true, and I don't yet know what it brings in concrete terms." She stood up and took a deep breath. "Thank you, Maggie," she said and left the ME's office.

She hurried up the stairs, back into the conference room, and saw Williams put his cell phone on the table. "So?"

"As far as the Private Mercenary Force and the like, we can't say anything about any memberships of our killer because we don't have any personal data," Brooks explained. "As far as the cuts, there were different numbers and depths at the time. We're just trying to figure out if it has anything to do with the particular victim's rank, position, and dangerousness."

Williams scribbled a few more notes on a piece of paper. Then he looked at Elizabeth. "How about you?"

"Identical," she said tersely. "The more and the deeper the cuts, the more dangerous the victim was."

Katherine looked at the three of them and furrowed her brows. "Is this some kind of award for the dead?"

Elizabeth's gaze brightened. "That's exactly what it is! In his mind, he gives the dead an award. So he doesn't just draw symbols in their skin; he awards his victims. He's a Draftsman of the dead in two ways."

Elizabeth sat down at the conference table and took a deep breath. "When he's not at war, he's building his army. He fights only the strongest opponents because he gets a kick out of it. And he decorates the dead as if they were --"

"As if they were parts of his army," Williams added.

The detective's eyebrows drew together. "What were we saying earlier?" she asked, "about serial killers and war?"

"There are no serial killers in war," Katherine mused. "There's a story by H.P. Lovecraft. The Loved Dead. In this gruesome story, a necrophiliac serial killer is on the loose. He's glad to see that war is finally breaking out. In this case, the First World War. The killer was one of the first to cross the ocean and one of the last to return. Four years of blood-red slaughterhouse hell, sickening rain morass, and foul trenches, the deafening detonation of howling shells. Lovecraft even describes the state of war for the murderer as four years of transcendent satisfaction."

"Four years of transcendent satisfaction?" asked Elizabeth, her brows drawn together. "I see. Others take club vacations, and this murderer --"

"But for the killer, that's what it could be, right?" wanted Williams to know. "He's at war. Then he's back in the real world, carrying on as if he's at war. He picks the strongest opponents, and he fights his war. And then he is back in the battle. Gone from the scene. Disappeared, just like last time."

"Disappeared for almost six years," Katherine muttered.

Williams pressed his lips together and said nothing in reply for quite a while. Then he said slowly and deliberately, "We did a study at Quantico once where we looked at the psyche of serial killers. What do these people hope to achieve? What drives them? Why do they do what they do?"

"Because they're nuts," Brooks growled.

Williams raised his eyebrows briefly and nodded slowly. "You could call it that, and that's part of the explanation because these perpetrators are psychopaths. But do you know what the Pentagon was thinking then?"

Elizabeth got up from her chair again and looked at him for a long moment. "We fight fire with fire?"

Williams raised his eyebrows briefly. "Right. We fight psychopaths best with other psychopaths." He paused for a moment. "We had an elite fighter at the academy back in the day who had been deployed to the Middle East a lot. He started by bringing up the rear in a jeep for truck convoys in the second Iraq war. You know, one of those jeeps with a steel plate on the back that pretty much intercepts anything that any terrorists can shoot down."

"And what else was that guy?" asked Elizabeth with furrowed brows.

"They called him Iceman," Williams replied, and a smile flitted across his features.

Katherine looked at him for a long moment. "Why?"

"Because he put anyone he had to deal with as an adversary into cold storage as a corpse. This Iceman had worked for a private mercenary force before commanding an elite Pentagon unit."

"What was that unit?"

"In order. The Iceman said at the time that the West must finally act had come. The bad guys come with the simplest of tools, he said. And they are successful with them, too. They hijack airplanes with the help of carpet cutters. They set themselves the goal of beheading passers-by in the middle of the pedestrian zone, just like the jihadi homecomers of the IS. In front of everyone. Quite simple and yet abysmally horrible. And in doing so, they win. They need only one day to destroy our culture and our social order. Because the world, the Iceman said, is full of sheep. Therefore, we, the United States, would have the duty to protect it from wolves. The Iceman needed warriors who would embrace that dirty, naughty word: kill."

Katherine folded her hands on the table before her and gritted her teeth for a moment. "Makes sense, after all. What was he getting at with that?"

"He said that the best way to fight crazy is with crazy." Williams looked at the detective. "Fire with fire, you said it. Now real psychopaths make up only four percent of a regular army. They do, however, and that's where it gets interesting for the Pentagon, provide half the kills for the enemy."

Katherine unconsciously kneaded her hands. "Four percent are responsible for fifty percent?"

Williams gave her a long look and nodded. "Right. In World War II, only one percent of U.S. Air Force pilots scored forty percent of the kills. Anyway, psychopaths are not among the soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade to protect their comrades. That would be counterproductive, too. Because psychopaths kill, and that's crucial in war now. The others, when in doubt, do not kill. Therefore, it would be better for the grenade to kill those who don't kill anyway than for the one who does kill to sacrifice himself."

Elizabeth listened intently. War had never been her great subject, and she thought it richly cynical that a man should be judged by whether and how much he killed. But these were probably the considerations one made when planning major military operations.

"That was the Iceman's selling point to the Pentagon," Williams explained. "It's a lot of effort, unfortunately," he said, "to get other soldiers to aim at people and pull the trigger. Everybody knows that about themselves. You can take all the karate and self-defense classes you want, but the question is: Does that make you able to put your fist in the other guy's face? Most people can't. Psychopaths can. That's why in war, for the most part, there are groups. Peer pressure ensures that even those kill who otherwise wouldn't. But not killing is not an alternative in war. A soldier must kill. Training a soldier costs a lot of money. If a soldier goes to war but doesn't dare to kill and gets shot, his loss means a negative contribution margin for the Pentagon. It sounds inhumane, but that's exactly how it's calculated. Someone who doesn't have this scruple recovers his training costs by killing as many enemies as possible. That's then a positive contribution margin." He paused briefly before continuing. "Now, however, for certain missions, you need people willing to kill without peer pressure. To kill alone. And those people are scarce."

"My grandfather told me a story like that once," Nick spoke up, and Elizabeth and Katherine looked at him in surprise. "There was a Viet Cong guy in a hospital in Vietnam. Even though he had no legs left, he got up and broke a glass bottle on his nightstand. He used a piece of glass to cut the throat of an Australian lying next to him." He looked into space as if he needed to let this story sink in with him. "The doctor, who had previously invested twenty hours to patch up the Australian, took a shotgun and shot the Viet Cong in the mouth. Then he went insane."

Elizabeth swallowed hard. "This Viet Cong, was he a psychopath?"

Williams pursed his lips and nodded. "From the description, yes. Because what kind of effort is that? To stand up with no legs, smash the bottle, and kill the Australian. That's much more extreme than the four percent psychos normally found in the Army. This Viet Cong was a highly aggressive psychopath. These aggressive psychopaths only make up two percent of the Army. The vast majority are men. So the military is an ideal lightning rod for people like that because they can legally kill here." He looked at Katherine. "Like the serial killer in H.P. Lovecraft's The Loved Dead."

Elizabeth looked at Williams long and piercingly. "And what was the Iceman getting at?"

Williams raised a hand. "I'll get to that in a minute. The background in Iraq at the time was that there were more psychopathic attacks. Al-Qaeda groups around Iraq were attaching butcher knives to large pickup trucks and driving them through densely populated, narrow alleys so that people would get caught between the knives and the walls. This was intended to wear down the population. Some hardliners in the Pentagon have always wanted the U.S. to fight harder. It started by persuading former terrorists to defect by paying them a lot. The CIA first prohibited recruiting terrorists as informers. But Paul Bremer, the administrator around Iraq, demanded that the CIA be given every opportunity. That's probably why bin Laden offered ten kilograms of gold on Bremer's capture."

Katherine's eyebrows drew together. "Bremer was keen to take a harder line. And the opponents knew that?"

"Yes. After all, he was already protected by various private security services, the Control Risk Group, DynCorp, Steel Foundation, you name it. All the other special forces were in Iraq, too: Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Green Berets, Rangers, Marines, SAS units, and so on. Even though George W. Bush was keen on the oil in Iraq to be independent of Iran and Russia, all the wars broke out. The big business in Iraq after the war was not oil; it was security."

"And then?"

"And then Bremer met the Iceman. And the story so convinced him that he got him an appointment at the Pentagon."

"And what did the Iceman do that was so glorious? What was his story?"

"He showed Bremer his digital camera. With a video he had posted on YouTube that had been viewed more than six hundred thousand times."

"And what was on that video?" the detective asked, sitting down again, already suspecting it was nothing pleasant.

"He flattened the head of a camp leader in the Iraqi borderlands who was training terrorists for deployment in Europe with his jeep. He then filmed the burst head from all sides and posted it on the Internet."

"Was the man suspended?"

"Exactly not. He killed far too many enemies of the United States for that."

"And what did the Iceman now say to the Pentagon?"

"That the United States is fighting terrorists. And thus against psychopaths. And that the best way to fight psychopaths is with psychopaths."

"Like fire with fire," Elizabeth said.

Williams nodded slowly and loosened his tie, "The Iceman always used a quote from Hitler's Mein Kampf to do that. The terror that reaches for power will always succeed with it, as long as it is not opposed by a terror at least as strong."

"Hitler as an instruction manual," Katherine muttered with furrowed brows.

Brooks' mouth was open as well.

Williams took a deep breath. "Exactly. Only you shouldn't hope, the Iceman said, that you've already got the four percent psychopaths or two percent aggressive psychopaths in your army. You'd have to organize and institutionalize the whole thing."

Elizabeth's eyes widened. "So, form a unit made up only of psychopaths?"

Williams nodded again. "The Iceman wouldn't call it that, but that's what he had in mind: warfare with resounding success. More effective and more ruthless than any other army unit. And where no one knows why, except a few insiders." He looked at the others with a deep frown. "The Iceman called it Unknown Warfare."