Yvonne Eve Walus

            When I tell people I'm a criminal profiler, respectful silence falls on the conversation. I know what they're thinking: Sherlock Holmes, challenging cases, complex scientific methods.

That image is about as close to the truth as prostitution is to a glam way of spending your evenings with cocktails and distinguished gentlemen.

            Speaking of prostitution, there’s been another killing. That’s why they called me in. I was shuffling my usual load of dusty files, with trails as cold as winter sand, when the boss stuck his head into my cubicle.

            “F--- all that, Cupcake,” he said. “We have a live one here.”

An ironic choice of words, given the state the victim was in.

   It’s difficult to be a woman in this job. “You won’t have the stomach,” they’d said when I applied. What they’d meant was, I wouldn’t have the imagination. Getting into the mind of a serial killer (and I’m not being sexist here when I say they’re all male) is difficult enough for any so-called normal person, but for a woman to try to get inside such a man’s head… that’s next to impossible.

Up till now, the only head I’d needed to get into was my boss’s when I wanted a raise - which I managed; and my ex boyfriend’s - which I did not. Profiling the home invaders, the restaurant arsonists and the small-scale extortionists didn’t require a lot of imagination. I would study the crime scenes (mostly from photographs) and the statistics (mostly from tedious reports), I would pore over the evidence and produce profiles good enough for positive id.

Up till now.

            “That’s the third one this year and it follows the pattern,” I heard moments later in the emergency meeting. “A prostitute on her night off, a back street, a strike to the head hard enough to stun, followed by strangulation. In each case, autopsy revealed a first class dinner eaten a few hours beforehand. As to sexual activity -”