He made a mental note to look into visiting a tanning parlor to get some of the gray out of his skin. He was in California, after all. Cali fornians loved their tans. He had no doubt that he would feel like an idiot doing it, but if it kept people from thinking he had one foot in the grave, it was probably worth it.
Room service brought a basket of muffins and toast. He ate what he could just to put a layer of something in his stomach before the first round of pills. The brown prescription bottles were arrayed on the dresser. Painkillers, antiseizure medication, antinausea medication, antipsychotic meds to ward off the paranoia sometimes brought on by pressure against some crucial part of his brain of which he couldn’t remember the name.
He had yet to take that one. So far he had managed to fend off the anxiety himself. He looked at the prescription bottle and wondered if he really needed it, would he be sane enough to take it.
As he picked at the food, he listened to his tape of the conversation in the car from the night before. Mendez had given him an overview of what had happened so far. Three probable victims and one woman missing. He made notes as he listened and mulled over the notes when the tape clicked off. He studied the Polaroids he had taken at the autopsy, particularly intrigued by the cutting wounds that seemed so deliberate and symmetrically placed on the limbs—where there was a vertical cut on one arm there was a corresponding cut in exactly the same place on the other arm. The same with the legs.
He pulled a paper from his briefcase that depicted a simple line drawing of the female human form, front and back, and drew in the marks on Lisa Warwick’s body. He would fax the form to Quantico later to find out if anyone in ISU had come across this pattern before.
He would go in to the sheriff’s office this morning and go over the particulars of all three cases, with a particular eye out for any similar marks on the previous victims, and begin work on the profile in earnest.
Not that he didn’t already have some strong ideas. He had worked enough cases, interviewed enough killers to have the checklist ingrained in his brain. There were maybe nine people on the planet who knew as much about the minds of murderers as he did. They were a small club. Too small for the ever-growing ranks of serial predators.
He picked up the phone and called the sheriff’s office.
“Detective Mendez, please.”
“What do you know today you didn’t know last night?”
“Not much,” Mendez said.
“Not much?” Vince said. “What have you been doing all morning? Golfing? And why wasn’t I invited?”
“We searched the home of the missing girl, Karly Vickers, and found nothing of significance.”
“And
Mendez conceded the point. “No signs of forced entry. No signs of a struggle. No indication she was involved with a man. So far, we haven’t found anyone who saw anything happen anywhere.”
“What does that tell you?”
“He’s careful.”
They sat in a nice white conference room with big windows looking out on huge, spreading oak trees and green grass. Nice.
“This beats the hell out of the basement at Quantico,” he said, getting up from his chair and going to the window.
“You work in the basement?” Detective Hicks asked.
“Deeper than the dead,” he said. “I think the Bureau should put that on T-shirts and sell them. BSU could be the next big thing in pop culture.”
“Yeah,” Mendez said, chuckling. “Behavioral Sciences could be the next
Vince gave his lopsided grin and shrugged. “Move over, Don Johnson.
“What about your murder victim?” he asked.
“A coworker felt like maybe Lisa Warwick was having an affair, but she never confided in anyone about it,” Mendez said. “We found semen on her sheets, and a photograph that may or may not lead us to the guy who left it there.”
“Did her neighbors have anything to say about a boyfriend?”
“Not so far,” Hicks said. “She lived in a duplex, but her neighbor never saw or heard anything going on next door.”
“She was discreet,” Vince said.
“Or secretive,” Hicks offered. “The guy might be married.”
“The guy might be a killer,” Vince said.
He went to the long chalkboard that took up most of one wall.
“This is how you build a profile, kids.”
He took a piece of chalk and wrote
“We don’t have a crime scene,” Detective Hicks pointed out. “We have dump sites.”
“Make the same notes for dump sites,” Vince said. “And the fact that you don’t have a crime scene is highly significant. We’ll come back to that.
“B: Victimology. That you have. Age of the victims, occupation, background, habits, family structure, where were they last seen. C: Forensic Information. Cause of death, wounds—are they pre- or postmortem, sexual acts, autopsy report, lab reports. You have everything on two vics except the labs and the official report of autopsy on the Warwick woman. Right?”
Both detectives nodded. Sheriff Dixon sat stone-faced at the head of the table, taking it all in.
“D: Your preliminary police reports. And E: Photographs of the vics, of the crime scene and/or the dump scene.”
“We’ve got photos,” Hicks said.
“Let’s get them up on the wall, now, and I want a long table situated under the photos where we can organize copies of all the paperwork.”
While Hicks went to the large cork bulletin board and began to make room for the photographs, Vince moved to an empty section of chalkboard and wrote
“You’ve already seen escalation in terms of risk to your offender,” he said. “The first victim—first two victims—were dumped in remote locations. The Lisa Warwick scene was staged and in a location right in town, where he ran a much greater risk of being seen. What purpose did that risk serve him?”
“The bigger the risk, the bigger the rush,” Mendez said.
“Publicity,” Hicks offered.
“Generates greater fear in the community,” Dixon said. “It’s about power. He can do anything he wants. We can’t stop him.”
“All of the above,” Vince said. “Have you seen any escalation in the violence of the murders?”
“Julie Paulson and Lisa Warwick both died as a result of ligature strangulation,” Mendez said. “They had both been tortured. They were both cut up. Eyes and mouths glued shut. The second body was too badly decomposed to get an accurate picture.”
“Prior to the Julie Paulson murder, was there any pattern of sexual assaults in the area?”
“Nothing related,” Dixon said. “We had six reported rapes in the county in the past year. All solved.”
“Congratulations,” Vince said. “Let’s see what we can do to get your murder clearance rate up to that standard. With regards to the sexual assaults, what about the year before last, and the year before that?”
“The year before was about the same. Before that was before my time here.”
“My question is, is this guy homegrown or did he drop here from somewhere else? Most serial killers start smaller than murder. Fetishism, window peeping, assault, rape. They work their way up over time. On the other hand, though,” he conceded, “some just nurse the violent fantasies over the years until they have to act on them to release the pressure.”
