The 7th Victim

insight into herself. Insight that told her when it was time to leave her husband.

Vail stood at the head of the room with her expandable Dead Eyes case folder lying on the conference table in front of her. She opened the PowerPoint file and started the slide show mode.

She brushed back her hair, then took a sip of burnt coffee. It was time to start. “I’ve got an update on Dead Eyes,” she said in a normal speaking volume. The obligatory “shushes” followed. “He’s struck again, this time a young female CPA. Baseline crime scene pretty much the way he left it with vics one and two.” Vail punched the remote and the first slide appeared. Someone hit the light switch in the back of the room and everything darkened except for the faces of the agents, which were illuminated by the light bouncing off the screen.

It was a wide-angle view of Melanie Hoffman’s bedroom. Vail took a second to scan it, then said, “Stabbed through the eyes with ordinary steak knives taken from the vic’s apartment. Eviscerated stomach, kidneys, and liver. Left hand severed but not recovered by the techs. Small intestine tied around the victim’s thighs. Blood painted all over the walls.” She paused for a moment to let the information sink in. “Victim was a recent addition to a DC accounting firm. Nothing stood out in the interview with the parents. Couple of things to follow up on, but that’s it. The task force was reassembled, headed up by Paul Bledsoe, Fairfax County.”

One of the agents leaned forward. “I haven’t looked at this case in a while, but are we still thinking this guy’s disorganized?”

Vail looked at the man who had asked the question. Tom van Owen, a nine-year veteran of the unit. His cuticles were red and inflamed, the skin peeling from being incessantly picked. Even now, he sat reclining in the ergonomic chair, absently scraping at the calluses around the nail bed with his other hand.

“I don’t think so,” Vail said. She clicked past the next few slides until she reached the ones that showed the murals. “Even though there is an awful lot of blood, I’m not convinced it’s a sign of disorganization.” Vail thought of Chase Hancock’s “painter” comment. She clenched her jaw, irritated he may’ve been right.

“He used weapons of opportunity. Those knives,” Dietrich Hutchings said. He waved at the screen with his thick-framed reading glasses. “They’re the vic’s, you said.”

“I know that points to disorganization, but I’m thinking something else.” Typically, disorganized offenders did not bring weapons with them; they used common objects found in the victim’s own house. “Cause of death appears to be asphyxiation, just like the others. So the knives aren’t opportunistic weapons,” Vail explained. “The knife wounds are postmortem—making them part of his ritual, not his MO. The fact that he knows most women have a set of steak knives in their kitchen, which means he doesn’t have to risk hauling knives with him, indicates organization. Not disorganization.”

There was quiet for a moment before Art Rooney spoke up. Rooney had a crew cut and a military politeness and formality to him. He had once called the Quantico Marine Base home. “So we’re adjusting our profile to indicate a mixture of organization and disorganization.”

Vail hesitated. “I haven’t had much time to digest this. At this point, I’d have to say yes. If not almost completely organized.”

“Did the vic have defensive wounds?” Rooney’s slow, Southern demeanor seemed to be out of sync with the rest of the profilers’ urgent tones.

“None. Which again suggests this guy is planning his approach better, possibly using guile and disguise to comfort his vics before he takes them out. Definitely organized.”

Rooney frowned and his eyes again found the screen. “But the mess, the blood. . . .”

Vail respected Rooney’s profiling abilities and understood his point: typically, a crime scene like Melanie Hoffman’s indicated a disorganized offender, one of lower intelligence who did less planning. Their attacks tended to be blitzlike, creating more blood. Vail paged through the slides to the murals. “I think we’re looking at a series of paintings here. I’m having prints of these sent over to BSU for analysis. There might be some deep-seated message in here. I’ve also asked for them to be examined by an expert in Impressionist art, in case the offender had art training.”

“An artiste. That’s a new one,” Frank Del Monaco said, his round, saggy face contorting into a smirk. He glanced at a few of his colleagues, who shared the ridicule. “But I can’t disagree. He certainly left . . . an impression.”

Laughter erupted just before the conference room door opened and a long male shadow spilled into the room. Thomas Gifford walked in and observed the levity; a few of the agents were still guffawing. Gifford then looked at Vail, whose stern face indicated she was not sharing the joke.

Vail locked eyes with Del Monaco. “I don’t want to miss anything, Frank. Thinking out of the box is supposed to be a strength here.”

Gifford marched to Vail’s side and stood in front of the screen. The room became silent. The blood mural covered his dark suit and face with a red pall as he spoke. “Just a heads-up. I got word late yesterday that Senator Eleanor Linwood has requested—or more like told—Fairfax PD’s Chief Thurston to add her lead security detail agent to the Dead Eyes Task Force. His name is Chase Hancock. Ring a bell to anyone?”

Frank Del Monaco spoke. “The asshole who sued the Bureau because he didn’t get one of our seats.”

“That’s the one,” Gifford said. “Now let me warn you people. This guy is trouble. But the police chief is doing the senator a favor. Some backroom political maneuvering. She wants to look tough on crime in an election year. That democrat, Redmond, is breathing down her throat in the early polls and she thinks she can use Dead Eyes to boost her approval rating.”

“So we get dragged into shoveling their political bullshit,” van Owen said.

“We’re thirty miles from DC,” Gifford said. “They’ve got a list of shit shovelers there dating back two hundred years.”

Rooney coughed a deep, raspy gurgling, then cleared his throat and asked, “Any chance we can do an end run around this? I’ve known assholes with more brains than this Hancock chump.”

“Easiest way to be rid of him is to draw up the best goddamn profile you’ve ever done. Give the dicks a write-up that’s right on the money, something they can run with. Otherwise, stay out of Hancock’s way. That’s how we play it. Do your jobs, and let him do his. If he gets to be a problem, let me know and I’ll handle it.”

“Let him hang himself,” Vail said.

“Exactly.” Gifford dipped his chin in her direction, handing the discussion back to Vail, and then took a seat in the back of the room.

Vail hit the next slide, a wide-angle view of the exterior of the house. “Bledsoe is checking into Melanie Hoffman’s past and present accounting firms. It’s possible whoever did her might have met her through the workplace. Co-workers, clients, support staff, everyone’s being looked at. There’s also an ex-husband. Marriage was annulled three years ago.”

She hit the remote a few more times, showing the photos of what was once a beautiful young woman. Again and again slides flicked across the screen, the latest one being a close-up of Melanie’s head and trunk.

“This is his fourth victim.” Vail said it as if they should feel shame for not having helped catch the offender before he’d taken another young life.

“You mean third. This is his third vic,” Del Monaco said. “That last one wasn’t the same guy.”

“You know my thoughts on that.” And indeed he did. Everyone knew her opinion, because a year ago, when Dead Eyes had last struck, she made her opinion well-known.

“What does Bledsoe think?”

Vail glared at Del Monaco. “He’s operating under the same assumption.”

“Uh huh.”

“What’s your problem, Frank?”

“All we have with that other vic is a very loose connection to Dead Eyes. Vic was killed and disemboweled. That’s it. No wrapping of the intestines around the thigh, no stabbing of the eyes, no severing of the hand, almost no other signature evidence. We’ve seen scenes like that a hundred times before. Nothing links the vic, or the offender, to Dead Eyes.”

Vail scanned the faces in the room. No one seemed to be disagreeing with Del Monaco. If anything, their expressions seemed to put the onus on her to prove his opinion wrong. But her brain was foggy from the rotten night’s sleep and she didn’t feel like getting into it with him. She tried to focus. Before her brain had the sense to back off, her mouth was moving. “True, the eyes weren’t stabbed. So what?”

“So what?” Del Monaco looked around the room, as if to garner support for his consternation. Since most