ritualistic, sadistic, pseudo-sexual acts performed on the victim?”
“ What in God's name do you think I am, Parry? A magician? No way I can tell all that with what little I have to work with. Get me more of Linda Kahala's body and maybe… just maybe…”
Still, she understood his burning need to know the answers to all the questions: Did the murderer take his time, or was he hurried? What insight into the mind of the maniac haunted the killing ground? What was he thinking before, during, after?
As her father had once put it, “To understand the 'artist,' you must first truly look at his “work.'“ Otto Boutine's profiling team had taught her that the killer must be defined as either an “organized” or a “disorganized” murderer, and that these traits were “symptoms” of orderly or disorderly behavior at the scene of his crimes, further defining the fiend far more than the type of weapon he used or the caliber of the bullet he preferred. Cane cutters on these islands were a dime a dozen.
“ What I can tell you now for certain is that given the severity of the mutilation to the arm alone, the ritual nature of the slashes, the blade marks against the bone itself, he definitely cut into her while she remained alive; we are also confident that such brutalization means that he's certain to continue. He enjoys it.”
“ So that's the reason for the consistent victim profile. He seeks women who have that certain look.” Parry stated it as a verification of what he'd already come to believe.
“ When killing involves such butchery, it is either a crime of passion or psycho-sexual passion.”
“ Psycho-sexual passion?”
“ A term we've just coined recently at the bureau for all the sociopaths who destroy people based upon some predisposition to an ideal or fantasy that is all mixed up with their emotional crisis.”
“ Passion seems a dirty word to use with this bastard.”
'Two sides to every passion, Inspector.”
“ Yeah, I suppose so.”
“ We've got to locate his lair, find his killing ground, where he plays out his fantasy,” she said, her right hand running the length of a stiff neck.
“ Don't get your hopes up on that score.”
She looked at him with a wondering gaze.
“ You know as well as I that chances favor our serial killer going the way of most, meaning he'll never be caught,” said Parry. “More likely than an arrest, he'll reach a state of complete mental breakdown.”
“ And quiet, private institutionalization,” she softly agreed.
“ It's what most believe happened to Jack the Ripper, who was also 'down on whores.' “
She bit her lip thoughtfully, placed her head in her hands and asked, “Do you think they were all prostitutes? Including Linda Kahala?”
“ If not, she was mistaken for one. Hard to tell if she was into that scene just yet.”
She showed him proof positive that the errant limb had once belonged to Linda, and then she told him about Kahala's blood on Kaniola's palm. This information shocked him into uncharacteristic silence.
'Then old Joe Kaniola was right about his son's having been the only man to ever see this bastard up close. If it's her arm, the killer must've been at work getting rid of the body when Kaniola and Hilani surprised him.”
“ It appears so.”
Parry continued to ruminate. “But how'd the Kaniola boy get her blood on his palm?”
“ That boy was thirty-four, Jim,” she corrected him.
He frowned, realizing he'd been caught in a verbal slip that could have cost him had he been on camera. “Of course,” he quietly agreed. “So how did he get her blood on his hands?”
“ You figure it out. He was following a suspicious-looking vehicle, right?”
Parry thought back over the radio signal tapes he'd listened to countless times now of Hilani and Kaniola sparring with one another, their friendly banter culminating in their last words on earth. “Yeah, the car they followed.”
“ The car, the dead girl's clothes, the dead girl's body- anything's possible,” she suggested.
“ So Kaniola reaches into the car, touches the dead girl or her clothes, sure… sure.”
“ Your guesswork is quite probable.” There was a little girl's glint in her eye and a lilt to her voice.
“ You've found something else, haven't you?”
“ There were some cloth fibers found on his uniform and adhering to his left palm, in the coagulated blood. All the fibers match. Now all we've got to do is find Linda Kahala's clothes, have the relatives I.D. them and we cross-match.”
“ Is that all?”
“ Get Scanlon's people to comb the countryside up there around Koko Head, see if something gets shaken loose.”
“ Why wouldn't he have simply tossed the clothes into the Blow Hole with the body parts?”
'Too much chance of their going awry, lifted by the wind, missing the hole; besides, if he's a purist, I think he'd send his victims over nude.”
“ Purist? Purist what?”
“ This guy's into some kind of la-la fantasy world I don't pretend to understand, but suffice it to say that sacrifices appear to be his thing. Usually sacrifices are sent from this world in the manner in which they came into it, nude.”
“ Is that how you see it?”
“ Kaniola comes along, finds the clothing in the car and while he and Hilani are examining it, realizing too late what they have in their possession, he surprises them. That's the way I see it.”
“ Pretty shrewd,” he replied, a hand going to his chin.
“ Damn sure the first giveaway clue from this guy in all this time, and completely unintentional. He's cool and calculated, quite organized in the way he eliminated your two HPD cops, and in not drawing attention to himself over the years. He obviously is quite intelligent.”
“ That'd figure.” Parry paced the office, his mind racing now that he had the first forensic truth to back his up-till-now-flimsy net of assumptions.
Because the killer was in the organized category, they could predict with some confidence that, once caught, he would match the profile, at least in part. Unlike psychics, they weren't professing to “see” into the heart and mind of a killer, but utilizing known facts and information gleamed from serial killers in captivity, such as John Wayne Gacey, Jeffrey Dahmer, Gerald Ray Sims before he'd killed himself while in captivity, the executed Ted Bundy- all serial killers who'd been far more forthcoming and cooperative than Mad Matt Matisak cared to be. Although for her money, Jessica believed Ted Bundy had merely filled in blanks to presupposed questions placed before him by the State Attorney's office in Florida, providing little more than what they wanted to hear.
The Trade Winds Killer would come from a dysfunctional family. His father's work would be stable, but parental discipline would have been inconsistent at best. Child molestation in one of its myriad forms was likely a staple of family life. He would have an average or better-than-average I.Q., but was likely working at a menial job which he felt was far below his designated rank or calling or talented abilities; his work history would be sporadic, even chaotic.
“ He could be a student at the University of Hawaii, most likely with an uneven average,” she suggested.
“ Perhaps, but then again not.”
“ Several of the girls were attending the university,” she reminded him.
“ One of the few connections we've made among some of the victims,” he agreed. He briefly told her about George Oniiwah, Linda's boyfriend, who happened to be a student at the Monoa campus at U.H.
“ It would seem likely that the killer may have some connection with the university, given what little we know, that is.” Jessica lifted a warm can of Coca-Cola off her desktop and poured what remained of its contents down a drain in the lab, rinsed the can and tossed it into a recycling bin below a table. Lau watched her movements from a room three doors away through a series of glass partitions separating the portions of the lab and offices. She was a little unnerved by Lau's interest in her and Parry, and she couldn't help wonder what was cooking behind his black eyes. Is good gossip in the lab hard to come by? she wondered.
“ Yeah, and that means forty-six percent of the student population,” Jim Parry was saying as he followed her about.”Come again?”
