The 7th Victim

Vail inched forward on the couch. “Mr. Hoffman, we’re searching for details right now as to why this happened, but I can assure you it’s got nothing to do with what you told Melanie. The man who did this has killed other women and he’ll kill again. It has nothing to do with you or the advice you gave your daughter.” Vail had no guarantee what she was telling Howard was true, but she hated seeing the victim’s family beat themselves up with guilt over things they had said or hadn’t said, done or hadn’t done.

Howard nodded but kept his head down. Robby offered him a tissue, and he took it, wiped at his eyes.

“Mr. Hoffman, are you aware of anyone, family members included, who might’ve had a disagreement with Melanie?”

“No.”

“What about friends? Did she have many?”

Howard tilted his head up, made eye contact. “A few close ones. They were all good people. Most were single, one was divorced, like Melanie.”

Robby squinted. “Melanie was divorced?”

“Annulled,” Cynthia said. She turned to face Robby. “Her marriage was annulled. There’s a difference.” Her voice was stronger, but her eyes fluttered back down to her lap.

“This guy’s name?” Vail asked.

“You don’t think he—”

Robby held up a hand. “We turn over a lot of rocks during the course of an investigation. Just to see what crawls out.”

“Neil Kroes. We’ve got a number somewhere. Cynthia, hun, can you get it?” Without a word, Cynthia rose and walked out of the room.

“We’ll need a list of her friends, too,” Vail said. She tore a piece of paper from her notepad and handed it to Howard with a pen. While he wrote down their names, Vail continued: “Do you know if she frequented any bars or nightclubs?”

“That wasn’t Melanie. She didn’t drink, didn’t like the nightlife. And she didn’t use drugs, either, if that was going to be your next question.”

Vail sensed some anger, as if it would be an insult if she had asked. The murals flashed in her mind, along with Hancock’s comment. “What about her artwork? Did she have classes, formal training of any sort?”

“She took classes in college, then studied privately with a family friend in Alexandria.”

“The friend’s name?”

Howard’s eyes narrowed. “She’s seventy-nine years old, Agent Vail. I doubt she murdered my daughter.”

Vail was about to tell him that often an innocent person can provide information that leads to another individual, who leads to someone else that turns out to be the killer. But Robby told him before she could open her mouth.

“Cyn, honey,” Howard called into the kitchen, “we need Martha’s number, too.”

They continued to ask Howard questions about his daughter’s habits, family background, dating habits, and the always delicate question, her sexual practices. Howard’s drawn face looked ashen when Vail asked the question. But he answered it succinctly: “She wasn’t promiscuous, and besides, she didn’t have much time for dating.”

Cynthia returned to the room, handed Robby a slip of paper, and took her place on the couch.

Vail felt they had reached their limits for this visit. If they needed more information, they could drop by again, or simply call—which might be easier on the Hoffmans.

Robby, apparently sensing what Vail was thinking, rose from the couch and extended a hand. Howard shook it but didn’t make eye contact.

“Thanks for your help,” Vail said. “We’ll let ourselves out.”

They made their way down the hall but were stopped in their tracks by Howard’s voice. “When you catch this monster, I want to see him. I want some time alone with him.”

Vail and Robby had no answer, other than to nod. They turned back to the door and left.

nine

Her eyes stare straight ahead in rapture as I pull the bindings tighter. She doesn’t cry out, which is odd, but the terror is in her face—the jaw muscles are vise-tight, the forehead crinkled with dread. She doesn’t deserve to live. Because it’s there, like I tell them, it’s there if you’d only look. Do you see it, Agent Vail? Just like Douglas said—study the art, you’ll know the artist. So study! What do you see?

I’ll tell you what you see. You see nothing. Because you can’t; you’re blinded by what it means. You watch, frozen and helpless as I bring the knife back and stab her right eye, a nauseating squish! as the blade penetrates the surface and goes deeper into the brain—

Vail sat up, chest heaving, her throat dryer than dust, her heart bruising itself against her ribcage. Holy shit. That was all she could think: Holy shit, that was intense.

She lay in bed another hour or so, trying to fall back asleep, all the while hoping she wouldn’t, fearing a return to the dream that just about took her breath away. By the time dawn began creeping around the edges of her window shades, she was finally tired enough to drift off. Her alarm clock blared an hour later, and had she not just bought the damn thing she would have thrown it through the window. But then she’d have a window to repair, and in the past year the divorce had caused enough self-inflicted hell in her life. She was enjoying the calm and hoped there wasn’t a storm lurking around the bend.

When Vail got to the office, she remembered she was first up on the card to present. Twenty-five years ago, the founders of the profiling unit chose Wednesday mornings for a free-thinking roundtable discussion of current cases the agents were working. The unit still met on Wednesday mornings, and the brainstorming sessions remained a useful tool that ensured the lead profiler had not overlooked something because he had gotten too close to his case. Sometimes having someone look over your shoulder enabled you to pull back from the needle to see the haystack.

The meetings were held in a large rectangular conference room, with the new budget-conscious Bureau crafting a fiscally intelligent setup. Instead of a long, traditional oval table that had but one purpose, the new look was six rectangular cherry wood tables neatly abutting each other, forming one large table around which sixteen people could sit. If needed, the tables could be separated into six-seaters for impromptu workshop sessions.

Tan wallpaper with textured vertical stripes added to the room’s utilitarian feel. An LCD projector and wall- mounted screen, overhead projector, large pivoting white board, and television/VCR/ DVD setup were silently placed off to the side in an alcove, like a coroner ready to pull back the sheet to expose the horrors of psychotic minds.

Seated around the segmented conference table were Vail’s profiling colleagues: senior members Art Rooney, Dietrich Hutchings, Tom van Owen, Frank Del Monaco, and nine other men who’d been with the unit fewer than five years.

Vail hadn’t had much time to prepare this morning’s presentation. She had been handed a CD with the remaining photos from Melanie Hoffman’s crime scene fifteen minutes ago, and she had rushed to view them on her laptop to throw them into some semblance of order. But she knew the case well, at least up to the point of the latest victim, and felt confident she could wing the rest of it.

Because she was the first and only woman in the profiling unit, looking good in front of her peers was important. She always felt she was held to different standards, higher levels of scrutiny. During her first few weeks in the new position, every time she was shown a crime scene photo of a dismembered body, a female so grotesquely beaten that she no longer had a face, the others in the unit expected her to grab for the garbage pail and puke her guts out. Not that they didn’t do that their first time around—they simply expected her to be weak because she was a woman. She was not superhuman—of course the pictures affected her—but she only wanted to be treated the same way they had treated each other.

But Vail felt that people learned who they were by placing themselves into situations and seeing how they reacted. While staring at grotesque photos of women who had been abused, she gained a tremendous amount of