Closed off in their own giant tomb with their cases—the worst of the worst murders and sexual assaults the country had to offer—the agents joked (in the gallows humor that kept them for what passed as sane) that they lived and worked ten times deeper than the dead.
Leone stepped off the elevator.
“Vince!”
He glanced up at his colleague, wearily amused by the expression on his face. “Bob. I’m not a ghost.”
“Geez, no. Not at all. I’m just surprised to see you, that’s all. What are you doing here?”
“Last I knew, I worked here,” Vince said, turning in the opposite direction.
He went into the men’s room, went into a stall, and puked, a wave of heat sweeping over him. The meds or maybe nerves, he admitted to himself. He’d been gone six months.
A couple of stalls down, someone else vomited.
They came out of the stalls and went to the sinks together.
“Vince!”
“Got a bad one, Ken?” Leone asked. He ran the faucet, scooped water into his hand, and rinsed his mouth.
Ken’s face was gray and drawn, his eyes haunted. “Three little kids, sexually assaulted, their faces blown off with a shotgun.
“We don’t know who they are, where they came from. We can’t compare dental records to missing kids’ because they don’t have any teeth left. We keep hearing about DNA profiling as the coming thing, but it can’t come fast enough for these kids.”
“It’s years out,” Vince said. It would be a miracle for law enforcement when the technology came, but as Ken had said, it couldn’t come fast enough.
Ken shook his head as if he were trying to shake the images from his brain. Ken was a top profiler, but he had never quite mastered the ability to close the door between analysis and sympathy. Therein lay the road to an ulcer, at the very least.
“It’s always worse when it’s kids,” Vince said.
“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” he admitted. “The vics were about the same ages as my boys. I go home at night . . . You know how it is.”
“Yep.”
Vince went home at night to a big-screen TV. He’d been divorced seven years. His oldest was in college now. But he remembered how it had been to try to leave cases at the office so he could go home and pretend to be normal.
“I played golf with Howard on the weekend,” Ken said. “IRDU is looking pretty good to me.”
“Research and Development. Hmmm . . .” Vince would have sooner stayed home and hit his thumb with a hammer over and over, but that was him.
“Hey,” Ken said, as if he had only just realized. “What are you doing here?”
Vince shrugged. “It’s Wednesday.”
All of the profilers also taught about fifteen hours a week, both in the FBI Academy and the National Academy for law enforcement officers. But they didn’t teach on Wednesday mornings. For those not out in the field on assignments, Wednesday mornings were spent in the conference room, going over case facts, picking one another’s brains, bouncing ideas off one another.
BSU had grown over the ten years of its existence to include six full-time profilers, working to assist local law enforcement in solving tough cases. When John Douglas had been made chief of the operational side of BSU, the profilers had been given their own acronym—ISU, Investigative Support Unit—within the BSU. Douglas had wanted to take the BS out of what they did. Ironically, the agents in the unit continued to call themselves BSUers.
BSU. ISU. Another three letters added into the giant vat of alphabet soup that was the Bureau. Unit names seemed to change with every new unit chief, and every new chief seemed to have some pet subgroup to create. IRDU (Institutional Research and Development Unit). SOARU (Special Operations and Research Unit). NCAVC (National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime). NCIC (National Crime Information Center). VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program).
Despite John’s best hope, BS was the Bureau’s specialty.
Vince went into the conference room, turning his back to the long table as he poured himself a cup of coffee to burn the taste of vomit out of his mouth.
The discussion of Ken’s case was already under way. Crime scene photos were being passed around and remarked upon. What did this mean? What did that mean? If the children were related, it meant this. If the children had been abducted individually, it meant that. How would authorities go about the task of identifying the bodies? How many children had been reported missing in a two-hundred-mile radius in the past year?
Vince slipped into a chair, reserving comment on any of it. He needed a few minutes to regroup, to build up another charge of energy. The coffee was bitter and acidic, and his stomach lining felt raw.
“There’s an NCIC search under way for reports of missing children in the age groups of the victims,” Ken said.
“Once VICAP is totally operational, we’ll be able to search the database based on the perp’s MO,” another agent said.
“And once the technology is developed I’ll be able to watch the World Series on my wristwatch,” said another. “Someday isn’t going to help us today.”
Had anybody ever heard of anything on a violent child predator with a similar MO? Why a shotgun? Why obliterate the faces? Did that point to murder by a relative or someone else who knew the children? Or was the shotgun a signature meant to make a statement as to the psychological state of the UNSUB (unknown subject)?
Ken stood at the gigantic whiteboard, jotting down ideas being thrown at him on one part of the board and noting pertinent questions on another.
Vince took it all in, his mind half on the case details, half on his colleagues. They were all in shirtsleeves, but the day was young, and all neckties were still neatly in place.
He had known most of these guys a long time. They had worked a lot of cases together and they had a lot in common in addition to backgrounds in law enforcement and years in the Bureau. Three of the five guys in the room right now—including Vince—had been in the marines. John had served in the air force. They had the common experiences of trying to juggle marriage and family with the job—and in several cases the common experience of marriages falling apart because of the job.
“You’re quiet, Vince.” The voice came from the head of the table.
Vince met eyes with his old friend—who seemed not the least bit surprised to see him. Vince spread his hands and shrugged.
“Sorry, Ken,” he said to the agent at the board. “But we’re just spinning our wheels until they figure out who these kids are. Unless you want to do two profiles: one for a stranger as the UNSUB, one for a person known to the kids. That’s a hell of a lot of work when you’ve got how many other cases ongoing? Ten? Twelve?”
Ken looked at the end of his rope.
“But hey,” Vince said. “What do I know? I’m just an old cop from Chicago. I can reach out to a gal I know at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They’re only up and running for a year, but they get a lot of anecdotal information we don’t. I can go make the call right now.”
Ken nodded. “Thanks, Vince. I appreciate it.”
Vince got up and left the room, going directly back to the men’s room where he puked up the coffee. He rinsed his mouth out and stood for a moment, assessing himself in the mirror, seeing what his colleagues were seeing.
He had always been a big, good-looking guy: six three, two hundred pounds, built to play football. Now he was a tall, raw-boned man, twenty pounds underweight. He hadn’t lost the chiseled bone structure of his face, or his large dark eyes, or his wide white smile, thank God. He had something to fall back on. And there was color in his face at the moment, but when his blood pressure returned to pre-puking normal, his complexion would be a pale
