' 'The guy did know a lot about Wekosha. He has spent a lot of time there,” said Schultz.
“ And Iowa City, and Paris, Illinois,” added Bymes.
“ Because he knew where to take his victims. He knew how much time he had with each. “He had to be fairly familiar with his surroundings to chance this kind of killing. He's no fool, no impulsive kid on a rampage.”
“ So he lives near the crime scene for a while?” asked Jessica. “People in the area had to have had dealings with him, then.”
“ All that's certain is that he knew the area well enough that he felt he could do whatever he wanted to do without disturbance,” finished Otto. “But the distances between these cases suggests a moving killer, someone who may be familiar to people in Wekosha, but someone who does not stay very long, a kind of recurring, cyclical person.”
“ Like a deliveryman?”
“ A trucker? Maybe a long-haul man?”
“ Or a salesman,” suggested O'Rourke.
“ Hospitals on the one hand, salesmen on the other.”
“ Salespeople frequent hospitals every day,” said Jessica.
“ By the hundreds of thousands,” said J.T.
Otto paced. Everyone watched him. He had an uncanny ability to come up with detailed descriptions of unknown assailants on the scantiest of information. His mind seemed to be boiling over with these new suggestions. Everyone remained silent, watching him.
Boutine began his profiling career in 1979, and at the time he taught a course in applied criminology at the FBI Academy, where students who came from all over the country brought him their cases. One story had it that when one of his former students telephoned from Oregon with a baffling case, Otto, with a handful of details about the stabbing death of a young woman, told his student he should be looking for a teenager who lived near the victim. Otto said he would be a skinny, pimply boy who spent more time with computers than people, a socially isolated individual. He said it was an impulsive act and the kid was suffering from great fear, grief and remorse, and that his guilt would give him away. “If you walk the neighborhood, knock on doors, you'll probably run into him, and when you identify yourself, just stare straight into his eyes and say, 'You know why I'm here.'“ The next day the Oregon officer called back to thank Otto and to say that he had apprehended the killer, a teenager with acne whose best friend was his Tandy 2000.
Otto had made it clear that he wasn't interested in psychology for psychology's sake, that a treatise on mental disorders was of no use to the FBI, that his interest was not in why a killer did what he did, but how he did it, and how knowing that leads to his capture.
“ A profile,” he said now, “is supposed to point to a certain general type of person, not a certain individual-or profession. If we're not careful here, folks, we could spend the next several months following up blind leads in hospital corridors looking for a guy who sells white linen or bedpans to hospitals. I'm not sure we can stretch our profiling to that degree, at least not yet.”
Without saying it, he was telling them something they all knew, that the FBI profile could be dead wrong.
“ Still, Chief, don't you think we should get people in Wekosha, you know, to sniff around? More than one killer's been caught putting flowers on the grave of his victim,” said Byrnes.
“ Sure… sure,” said Otto. “You want to coordinate with Milwaukee on that?”
“ Will do,” replied Byrnes.
“ I just keep remembering the Koontz case,” said Boutine.
There was a communal moan.
Otto went on. “We had the guy living alone, a possible orphan, uneducated, without a job or ties in the community, remember?”
Everyone remembered but Otto said it anyway. “He was the son of the town minister; had children and a wife and mother-in-law; was the town's most well liked, well known appliance store owner, which gave him an annual income of forty thousand plus a year. He taught Sunday school and played on the softball team, never touched a drop of alcohol and attended church regularly.” His crimes, in fact, were an “act” of faith. It was a reminder that profiling was far more art than science, despite probability statistics.
“ If we could pinpoint where he lived, go at this in a proactive sense,” began Schultz. “Put the press to work for us.”
Byrnes objected. “That could backfire. A guy that's this nuts could kill himself.”
“ Better him than another of his victims,” said O'Rourke coldly.
“ And so he's buried with what he knows, like how many others he killed,” finished Byrnes.
The proactive technique meant utilizing the press, feeding them information selectively, the end result to smoke out the killer, taunt him, and hope that he might be foolish enough to give something of himself away. It was a deadly kind of cat-and-mouse game, a bit like Russian roulette. “We can't use the press unless we know the guy's jumpy,” said Boutine. “So far, he seems quite cool.”
“ How cool would he be if we put out a diagram of the kind of devices he uses in his hometown paper?” asked O'Rourke, who seemed to favor the proactive method.
“ Along with the fact he drives a gray van with lettering along the side,” added Schultz. “And then we leak the fact we've got some of his DNA left at the scene. Don't know about you, but that'd make me kind of jumpy.”
“ Add to the list that we suspect he's some sort of a traveling pervert-salesman who combs the Midwest, possibly selling to hospitals,” said O'Rourke.
“ Call him a fag because he didn't rape the victim, some insults like that. Call him impotent, that kind of thing,” said Byrnes. “Yeah, maybe it would smoke him. Maybe he'd respond to insults.”
“ Maybe, maybe not,” said Otto.
“ It's worth a shot,” said Schultz.
“ You want to coordinate that, then, Schultz, all the big midwestern papers get the story. Do something with the victims' families in all three cases, try to draw the bastard back to the victim psychologically. Although with this guy, I have my doubts he's going to feel the least sympathetic to the families. But start there and if that gets no results, go with the insults. Remember to stress no bylines on the damned stories. We don't want this psycho going after a reporter.”
Otto took a deep breath before going on, pausing for everyone's complete attention. “I talked with a man in my office who claimed to be a goddamned vampire expert, who says he can help stalk this 'thing,' as he called it.”
There was some muffled laughter.
“ A real loon but the guy's not only the Exalted Emperor of something called the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Vampires and Werewolves in North America, he's a legitimate biologist with the Corning Corporation in Upstate New York.”
This drew a few more laughs and remarks.
“ Guy flew here as soon as he read about the case, insisted on seeing me and me alone-”
“ You were alone with this guy?” asked O'Rourke.
“ He insisted on seeing the evidence, everything we have. Of course, I showed him the door. You know how much store I put in these wackos and fringe guys, even if it is more than a goddamned weekend hobby for the man.”
“ So, we got 'em coming out of the woodwork,” said Schultz.
“ All the same, the Exalted One did say something that made sense. What sets this killer apart is his very real instinctual drives, such as his unquenchable taste for human blood. I don't go along with all the crap about superhuman gifts or reanimated beings, but this monster has an acquired taste for blood, whether that's due to some physiological need, a psychosexual need, or a combination of the two, that's what we must determine. What makes this bastard tick.”
“ Well, from all we've researched on the subject, and there's damned little to go on, boss,” began Byrnes. “You've got to figure this guy is working out some twisted sexual fantasy. What is it they say: one man's garbage is another man's treasure? In sex, it's similar; what one man gags over, say menstrual blood, another man is turned on by.”
