man on the spot, was peering into the camera, frowning grimly, and saying, “… and the police have only now admitted the connection between the three murders. Sources have told us that Carolyn Fiorio was brutally tortured and sexually assaulted before the killer broke her neck. The first victim, Lisa Morrow, apparently escaped the torture, perhaps because the killer feared detection. But the second victim, Miss Julia Cuthburt, was also tortured and sexually assaulted.”
Rosen nodded as the anchorman began asking him questions. “Yes, Harvey,” he responded, “the killer wrote numbers on their hands. One, two, three, and beside each number a slash and the numeral ten.”
The anchorman said, “That sounds ominous, Jerry. Are there any hypotheses about what those numbers might mean?”
“Well, there are theories that he intends to kill ten young women and he’s… well, he’s checking them off as he goes along. That could be wrong, however. The FBI spokesman cautioned us not to jump to conclusions. He claimed the numbers could be some kind of code or talisman, perhaps biblical passages, or dates of some sort.”
“Really…?” the anchorman asked.
“Well, here’s the odd thing, Harvey. A high-level source inside the FBI investigating team has informed us that, three years ago, a series of gruesome murders occurred in Los Angeles. They were remarkably similar to what we’ve seen here. That killer also numbered his victims one of five, and so forth.”
“And was he caught?” the anchorman asked, deliberately leading his reporter.
“Never, Harvey.” Rosen looked sad. “He killed five young women and eluded the FBI. Until now it was hoped that he had died, or simply decided he’d had enough. It now looks possible that he simply hibernated.” He paused and stared melodramatically into the camera. “It now looks as if he’s visiting Washington.”
CNN shifted to the next story, and he pushed the mute button. Mistakes from this moment on would be perilous. The FBI weren’t to be underestimated. They were the A-team of law enforcement for good reason.
He briefly reviewed his progress and was satisfied. The killings were coming at them fast and hard. Before the cops could even finish collecting and analyzing the evidence from one murder, they were inundated with a crop of fresh clues from the next. They were human. Each new murder drew their focus away from the earlier ones. They were conditioned to look for the similarities and peculiarities, to fit everything inside a neat pattern, to try to understand the twisted mind that manufactured them, and in the process were led even further away from the real connections.
He returned to Anne Carrol’s photo and was struck again by how wildly out of proportion her nose was with her other features. It was huge and misshapen, had obviously been injured, the dominant feature of a face that was narrow and thin. That she’d never gotten it fixed mystified him. His most recent nose job had cost a mere three grand, done by a guy widely regarded as one of the best. For a thousand less she could have that bone shaved, those nostrils narrowed, and the woman would’ve spun necks. Lovely blond hair. Striking blue eyes. Lips a bit too thin and hard for his tastes, but she could’ve verged on loveliness.
She posed a considerable challenge, yet one he regarded as manageable. A solid six-the only warning flags were her background in law enforcement, thin as it might be, and her lesbianism. Subtract those factors and a full point would’ve been shaved off easily. Her lesbianism most likely accounted for her harebrained refusal to fix that damned nose, it suddenly struck him. He hated to generalize, but all those dykes seemed to feel they had a pass from the ordinary burdens of being female.
He had never done a lesbo before. This could prove knotty. Understanding his victims was his signature flair, the key to his success, he was convinced.
The thick textbook he’d hurried through the night before explained that women of her predilection tended to slip into two categories-the dominator, a male-like figure, and passive, doe-like types. He distrusted stereotypes of any form, though the textbook had been written by an expert in the field and deserved consideration.
Anne Carrol had been a soccer star in both high school and college, a bruising fullback to be precise. She drove a black cherry Jeep Wrangler, customized with silver mudflaps, no hardtop, and brawny, oversized tires. She climbed mountains for a hobby, having flown to Tibet the winter before for a two-week course on high-altitude Himalayan techniques. High pants, flannel shirts, and Sears work boots were her ordinary attire away from the office. She was a regular at the local health club, where she pumped some serious iron. He had stood in a corner, watched her bench 150 pounds, and was frankly astonished that a woman with her bony, birdlike build could pull it off.
She did not flaunt her lifestyle; nor did she make the slightest attempt to camouflage or conceal it. Two months before she had split up with a live-in girlfriend and moved on her own into a tiny efficiency in Crystal City, Virginia. She did not drink, and had stopped using drugs when she left law school and took a government job.
She had obtained a business degree before that, was analytical by inclination-in fact, was regarded as something of a prodigy at the Securities and Exchange Commission where she labored fourteen hours a day in its six-story headquarters. She was a registered Democrat, gave money to liberal causes, and corporate fraud was her passion and specialty. Unfortunately for her, she was also impatient, pushy, and sarcastic, the type who could and often did rub people the wrong way. The SEC kept her miles away from litigation. After an hour with her, juries would swoon for the defense, so her bosses wisely relegated her to the backroom, reviewing stock transactions and annual reports, picking and developing targets for the big boys upstairs.
He tossed down the photo and stared out the window into the courtyard of the Executive Suites. His room was in fact a suite, composed of a living room, an efficiency-style kitchen, and an expansive bedroom. The kitchen was a necessity, an enclave to hole up in complete privacy when he wasn’t in action. The less traces he left the better. He paid cash for his groceries and toted them up to the room. All three of his rental cars had been picked up out of town and driven in. His last plane ticket showed him flying out of Washington to Philadelphia, where he picked up the last rental car and drove back. An associate was, in fact, at that moment using his real charge card and ID to spread a trail of evidence across northern New Jersey and New York City. Electronically, there would be no trace he’d ever been in or around Washington, D. C.
Pictures and reports and observation sheets detailing the habits of his victims cluttered the bedroom walls. Not much longer-the walls would soon be bare and every last piece of evidence would be incinerated. He would progress through each and every room with bottles of Pine-Sol and Windex, and scrub away every last fingerprint and fragment of evidence. He had rented the suite for the entire month and planned to be gone a week early.
He moved to the bathroom, undressed, and studied himself in the mirror. His head was completely bald, shaved down to the skin, yet he moved his large frame into the tub, and began spreading shaving cream over nearly every inch of his body and head. It had only been a day since his last shave, yet nothing would be left to chance. The only hairs he did not shave were his eyebrows and lashes, as their absence would be noticeable, and that was the last thing he could afford. The cops could search the murder sites with a vacuum cleaner and find no trace of his DNA or fingerprints.
By that night, the profilers at the FBI would inevitably conclude that he was the very same L. A. Killer who had turned that city upside down three years before. Victim profiles, flawless planning and execution, the tortures and method of death-they’d study it all and reach the inevitable conclusion. Every bit of it was identical, down to necks snapped to the right and the ejaculations.
The cop labs would note how none of the sperm deposits matched the sets they had collected in L. A. a few years before, but then none of the sperm deposits matched each other either.
They would add the L. A. murders to the total and assume Carolyn Fiorio was victim number eight, not number three, and would pull their hair out to understand his logic.
The FBI would recall that the L. A. Killer also had that annoying habit of calling the press and offering them inside tips that infuriated their investigators. Like it was all a big game and he owned the board, which was exactly why he had called both NBC and CBS, offering them the location of the limo and a few very juicy details to taunt the FBI spokesman. Damned shame he couldn’t be there to witness the shock on the cops’ faces when they arrived at the murder site with the camera crews already set up and waiting.
By midnight a planeload of Fibbies would be packed on the red-eye to the coast, frantically rushing to get refreshed on the particulars of that case.
He ran the razor across his chest and chuckled. Funny thing was, long before two hours was up, Carolyn Fiorio had completely changed her mind about the death sentence. By the end there, she was probably the most bloodthirsty advocate in the whole damned country.
