“Good,” he said, his easygoing smile returning. “That means, for once, we’re doing our jobs. We’ve emphasized with this particular perp more than any other case in my experience the absolute necessity of keeping this guy’s signature just between ourselves. For once, the news media hasn’t put this together. If they ever do, we’re screwed.”
Powell paused, and as he did, a hand rose in the back of the room.
“Yes?”
Jack Murray leaned back in his folding chair and cradled his hands behind his head. “The guy leaves a signature?”
“Yes, practically speaking. I’ve investigated over two hundred cases in which the homicide was considered the likely work of a serial killer. In those two hundred-plus cases, I’ve seen the work of about two dozen perps and have interviewed fourteen of them after capture. In the case of each one, there was some aspect to the crime that was so unique and repeated so much that it became a signature aspect to the crimes. It was, so to speak, the guy’s calling card.”
“So what’s our guy’s calling card?” Murray asked.
Powell stepped away from the podium and over to the wall. “Detective Gilley,” he said, flipping the switch to turn off the overhead lights. “Why don’t we just show them our guy’s signature?”
Gilley nodded, then stood and walked to the small table holding a slide projector at the back of the room. As he turned on the projector-the fan clattering as its ancient motor sputtered to life-Powell slowly lowered the screen from its holder on the wall above the podium. Gilley pressed the control button, and the first slide came into view on the dingy gray screen.
Low moans erupted as the slide came into focus. In the first view, the massage table that served as a butcher’s block revealed the bloody corpse of Allison Matthews, her arms and legs still bound, her straining facial muscles still frozen as testament to the nature of her death.
“What we have here,” Powell explained, “is the work of what we believe to be a primarily organized killer with some random elements of disorganized behavior.”
Powell paused as Gilley moved to the next slide. This was another view of the murder scene, this time from the opposite side of the room, focusing over the young girl’s body to the large block M painted in her blood on the opposite wall.
“You’ll notice,” Powell said, “that even with all the blood and carnage of this scene, everything is relatively neat.”
He pointed to one side of the slide. “For instance, you’ll notice on this table that none of the bottles of massage oil are knocked over or even out of place. The large battery-operated vibrator in the corner here is still standing up. If our killer bumped the table and knocked it over, he was fussy enough to pick it back up and put it in its place.”
Powell stepped into the light and pointed to the middle of the victim’s torso. “You can’t really tell from this slide because of all the blood, but in autopsy it was discovered that a series of shallow cutting wounds were made throughout the chest, torso, and abdomen of the victim, Allison May Matthews. These wounds were superficial and parallel to the lines of cleavage, which meant the sides of the incisions remained together, in some cases almost closing. The incisions were within a quarter-inch of being uniformly spaced apart all the way down the anterior side of the ventral cavity and were within a half-inch of being the same length.”
Powell turned to face the room and stepped out of the light. “What this means is that our killer is anatomically savvy and very precise. He might even have some kind of medical training.”
A hand went up in back, from just ahead of the projector.
“What’s a line of cleavage?” a voice asked from the darkness.
“The ME could explain it better than I can, but essentially muscle tissue in the body runs in groups that continue in certain directions. These directions are called ‘lines of cleavage.’ If you cut along, or parallel to these lines, then the wounds tend to remain closed, depending on the depth of the incision, of course. If you cut across these lines of cleavage, then the incised wound will be gaping or open and generally much nastier.”
“So our boy wasn’t trying to chop these girls up?” Bransford asked.
“Quite the opposite,” Powell said, turning again to the slide and pointing. “Try to look past the gore. What we’ve got here is a situation where Allison was tied up and then patiently, carefully-and extremely painfully-bled to death.
She also experienced violent sex as well, with both moderate to severe anal and vaginal tearing. However, I’ll have more on that aspect of the scene later.”
“Was she raped?” Maria Chavez asked.
“There was no evidence of semen found on either body during crime-scene examination and the autopsy,” Gilley offered.
Maria turned, faced Gilley. “Kind of a quick determination, isn’t it?”
“We took swabs, ran acid phosphatase and microscope examination. We’re waiting on the P30,” Gilley said, referring to the test for a specific glycoprotein found only in seminal fluid.
“In the past murders, we haven’t found semen, either. So we’re going to take for granted at this point,” Powell said,
“that the sexual violations were with foreign objects or by a condom-wrapped penis.”
“So the guy goes into what’s essentially a massage parlor,” Maria Chavez spoke up again, “pays his money, goes to a back room with the girl, where, say, the guy offers her an extra fifty or hundred to let him tie her up. Once she’s tied up, the guy takes his time on her.”
“Let’s hold judgment on that for the time being,” Powell said. “For now, just examine the scene. Notice one thing, up here on the wall opposite the table-”
“The letter M,” Jack Murray said. “The guy’s signature!”
“Yes,” Powell answered, “but look at this next set of slides.” He motioned for the next slide.
Soft, low moans erupted again as the slide of the second victim flashed on the screen. Exponentially more brutal than the first slide, and more brutal than anything most of the investigators had ever seen, the second slide depicted a victim who must have died in unimaginable agony and terror. Sarah Denise Burnham’s last moments of consciousness had to have been as close to hell as any living human could get and still be drawing-even if only for a few moments more-breath.
Behind him, from off his left shoulder, Powell heard retching disguised as coughing. He’d heard this sort of reaction before from even the most hardened veteran homicide investigators. No one could remain unaffected by a scene like this one.
“As you can see,” Powell said, “our boy was considerably more thorough with this victim. The ME estimates that he must have spent at least two hours in this room. What you’re seeing is essentially the beginning of an autopsy performed on a live human being.”
Maria Chavez let loose a sound that was a cross between a gasp and a squeak. “Surely,” she croaked, “the poor girl wasn’t conscious!”
Powell turned. “Your ME estimates that it’s possible the victim could have retained some level of consciousness perhaps even up the point where the thoraco-abdominal incision was complete.”
“The what?” a voice asked from the back.
“The Y incision, which in the female begins roughly in the area of the navel and extends upward through the anterior ventral cavity, between the breasts, and then branching out to the shoulders.”
Powell turned back to the slide. “However, it’s extremely likely that the victim was in a state of severe shock by then and was hopefully rendered insensate. Let’s hope so, anyway, for Sarah’s sake.”
“If you examine this photograph closely, you’ll see that following the completion of the thoraco-abdominal incision and the removal of the breastplate, our killer then manipulated the internal organs of the victim. According to the ME, the muscle tissues of the heart were constricted and bruised in a manner consistent with a kind of strangulation maneuver. This is another signature aspect of the Alphabet Man’s murders. In all instances up to the first victim you saw here this morning in the previous set of slides, the killer has performed the beginnings of a surgical-quality autopsy and literally stopped a beating heart with his own hands.
Then he has removed and manipulated various interior organs before replacing them back in the body
