The Last Temptation by Val McDermid

admission first thing in the morning.
    Eventually, she grudgingly accepted there was nothing more for her to do. Her team was busy with the tedious routine of sifting material and information that would probably prove useless. They didn’t need her. The best way she could serve the inquiry now was to go home and let her mind turn over what little they knew. Sleep, she always found, was the best possible state in which to uncover new angles of approach.
    But sleep wasn’t going to come any time soon, Marijke knew. She poured herself a glass of wine and settled herself down in front of her computer. Some months previously, she’d
     
    81
     
    become a subscriber to an on-line newsgroup for gay police officers. Not that there was any problem with being a lesbian and a Dutch police officer, nor did she have a ghetto mentality. But sometimes it was helpful to have what she thought of as a room of one’s own and, via the newsgroup, she’d developed close friendships with a handful of other officers whose take on the world chimed comfortingly with her own. More than that, she’d formed a bond of particular intimacy with a German colleague. Petra Becker was a criminal intelligence officer in Berlin and, like Marijke, senior enough not to be entirely comfortable with close confiding relationships with her colleagues. Like Marijke, Petra was also single, another damaged survivor of the attrition of their career on relationships. They’d been cautious with each other at first, escaping from the newsgroup into private live chat rooms where they could write more openly about thoughts and feelings. They were both aware that each had found some special connection to the other, but they were equally reluctant to 1 push for a face-to-face encounter in case it shattered what I they valued.
    And so they had developed the habit of spending an hour or so in each other’s virtual company several nights a week. Tonight there was no prior arrangement in place, but Marijke knew that if Petra was at home and awake, she’d be in one of the public chat rooms on the gay police site, and that she’d be able to tempt her away from the crowd into private discussion.
    She connected to the website and clicked on the icon. There was a list of public discussion areas, and she went straight to the Debating Forum, a room where people tended to talk about policy and its impact on their work. Half a dozen people were engaged in a heated argument about undercover operations, opinions flying as fast as fingers could type, but Petra wasn’t one of them. Marijke exited and entered the
     
    82
     
    Lesbian Issues area. This time, she was lucky. Petra was one of three women rehashing a recent Danish case of alleged lesbian rape, but as soon as she saw Marijke’s name on her screen, she escaped and took her into a private area where they could exchange on-screen messages without anyone eavesdropping.
     
    Petra: hello, love, how are you tonight?
    Marijke: I just got in. We caught a murder today.
    P: that’s never fun.
    M: No. And this was a really nasty one.
    P: domestic? street?
     
    M: Neither. The worst kind. Ritualistic, organized, no obvious suspects. Clearly personal, but in an impersonal sort of way, if you see what I mean.
     
    P: who’s the victim?
     
    M: A professor at the university in Leiden. Pieter de Groot. His cleaner found the body. He was in his study at home, staked out naked on his desk. He’d been drowned by having a funnel or a pipe shoved down his throat, then water poured through it.
     
    P: very nasty, was he one of those scientists who do animal experiments?
     
    M: He was an experimental psychologist. I don’t know much detail about what he did. But I don’t think this is about animal rights. I think this was a one on-one. There’s more, you see. Whoever did this, they didn’t stop at killing. There’s mutilation as well.
     
    P: genital?
     
    83
     
    M: Yes and no. The killer left his prick and balls intact, but