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if the perp turned out to be insane. It was far easier, and cheaper, to set the shrinks on him and have him locked away in a secure mental institution and throw away the key rather than trying to pin down a motive and opportunity and all that sort of stuff they do on television. And if the perp wasn't mad then it was important to get a psychologist's report on him in the file right from the start of the investigation, so that when the Homicide detectives had finally put a case together the defence didn't simply try to con the jury into believing that the perp had been temporarily a few sandwiches short of a picnic. It used to happen a lot, the perp would sit in his cell and wait until the Homicide boys had put together a watertight case and then they'd start talking to themselves and rolling their eyes or claim to have amnesia or any one of a dozen tricks that they thought would get them out of prison and into a mental hospital where they'd stay until they could either persuade the authorities they were cured or they could manage to escape. And the waiting was a hell of lot more comfortable in a hospital than it was in a high security prison.

Once Bitten
    What the department needed was someone who could make a snap, but accurate, decision on the mental stability or otherwise of suspects which would tell the detectives the best way of proceeding with the case. They'd headhunted from England me to set up the system and recruit the three psychologists who worked with me on a consultancy basis. I'd been working at the University of London on a computer system which could assess a person's sanity and compare it with models of various mental disorders. I'd first got interested in the field after following the work of Professor David Carter at the University of Sussex who the British police called up whenever they had a serial killer or multiple rapist they couldn't catch. He'd come up with a way of drawing psychological profiles on computers based on the clues found by police. By giving the police the profile of the man they should be looking for, he made their job a hell of a lot easier. I started to get interested in what happened at the other end of the investigation, after they'd been caught. For my doctorate I developed computer models of various mental disorders and criminal tendencies based on the better part of a thousand interviews I carried out in prisons and mental hospitals in the United Kingdom and then I began working on a computer program which from simple questions and answers could be used to ascertain a person's mental state. It took many years of work, but eventually I worked it up to the point where it could be used with a considerable degree of accuracy. I produced several well-received scientific papers and went on a couple of lecture tours and then one day I got a phone call from the London office of an American headhunting firm and three months later I was in Los Angeles earning five times what I had been paid as a post-doctorate researcher.
    The move to Los Angeles made a lot of sense, both from a personal point of view - I'd always been an Americophile - but also because it was the perfect place to research into sociopaths and psychopaths and a host of other mental abnormalities. Put simply, there were more lunatics per square mile in Los Angeles than anywhere else on God's green earth, and I reckoned that while drawing an obscenely high salary I'd also be able to churn out a fair number of research papers.
    That's the way it worked out, too. Mind you, there was a downside. My wife left me and I lost my daughter and she set a lawyer on me who had all the sympathy of a Rotweiler with an exceptionally low IQ. And I picked up a nickname. Jamie D. Beaverbrook, the Vampire Hunter. Don't you just love America?
    I did the Kipp report first and printed it out on the laser printer. I slotted the sheets into a blue cardboard folder and wrote Kipp, H, on it and then went and got another cup of coffee from the