cavity.
“Keep in mind that this is not your typical postmortem evisceration and savage mutilation consistent with the psy-chotic, disorganized work of a delusional, out-of-control madman. What we have here is the very careful and precise work of an organized, psychopathic sexual sadist. And while I know you’re all quite sick of this much detail, there is one other signature aspect of these homicides.”
“God,” Jack Murray moaned from the back, “we’re afraid to ask.”
“But you need to know,” Powell said calmly. “Before beginning the thoraco-abdominal incision, the Alphabet Man removes the nipples of his victims and forces the victim to consume them.”
Maria Chavez, still seated in her chair, bent over at the waist, gagging and retching, then stood up and bolted for the door. Two other male investigators, hands held to mouth, ran after her.
Powell looked down at Bransford. “Don’t be too hard on them,” he said. “That’s not the first time that’s happened.”
A hand from the back corner went up. “Yes?” Powell asked.
“Do we have any indication of the type of weapon used?”
“Good question,” Powell said. “Unfortunately, it’s one that we don’t have a complete answer for. You’re looking for a small, thin-bladed weapon that’s surgically sharp. It could be a straight razor, a scalpel, probably not a box opener. Perhaps an X-Acto knife. And our guy knows how to use it.”
“Which means what?” Gilley asked. “Is he a doctor or something?”
“Probably not, but he may have some kind of medical training, perhaps a biology background.”
“He sure as hell has some dissecting skills,” Bransford added.
“Maybe he’s a butcher,” another voice from the shadows behind the projector suggested.
“Don’t think so,” Powell noted. “I’ve reviewed our case files on every murder committed by a butcher going back about thirty years, and in not one have we seen this degree of precision and care. So I’m not ruling it out, but it’s not probable.”
To Powell’s left, the door opened and a shaken Maria Chavez stepped into the room, still swabbing a wet, dark brown paper towel across her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said weakly.
“Please, Detective, don’t be,” Powell offered soothingly.
“You’re by no means the first.”
Chavez forced a smile. “Murray’s still in the men’s room.
I could hear him through the door.”
“Why don’t we kill the slide projector and bring the lights up,” Powell said. “We’ve seen enough of this for now.”
As Gilley stowed the projector and Hank Powell switched the lights back on, the other two ill detectives filed back into the room looking distinctly hangdog and took their chairs.
Powell stepped back to the podium and looked briefly at his notes, then up to the group.
“I’ve got a classified set of photos from the other crime scenes we’ve investigated that will be available for you to examine until I go back to Washington, which won’t be for another day or so. I also have a map of the eleven other cities, all different and apparently random, where the other murders were committed. I recommend that each of you spend extra time examining the Nashville crime-scene photos as well. What you’ll find is that there are a couple of things about this particular crime scene that are unique and different from the Alphabet Man’s normal routine.”
Powell stepped out from behind the podium, once again in the manner of a professor nearing the end of a lecture.
“First of all, this is the Alphabet Man’s first double homicide. He’s never done a twofer before, and if you examine closely the nature of the two murders, you see some obvious and profound differences. In the first set of slides, the one with the M painted on the wall in the victim’s blood, we see a degree of savagery that is in the great scheme of things quite subdued, at least by our guy’s standards.”
Powell walked over to the table by the far wall and picked up a poster-size blowup of a line drawing of the crime scene and held it out to his side.
“What does this mean?” he asked. “Here’s what we think happened. The Alphabet Man enters the business via this door and finds one of the girls …” Powell paused and looked down at his notes.
“… Allison Matthews at the reception desk. We know business is slow on Church Street, even on a Friday night, because of the intense cold. Practically nobody’s out, which is a tailor-made evening for our boy. Perhaps he was hoping to find just one girl there, or maybe for whatever reason, this time he didn’t care. His MO in the past has been to find women alone in places of business late at night. The D victim, for instance, was working alone in a convenience market. He went in there, subdued the victim, then closed the business and locked up. They found her the next morning in the walk-in cooler.”
Max Bransford turned in his seat and faced the detectives.
“We interviewed the manager, and he told us Allison had just started at the tanning parlor the week before. He also said that she was just the receptionist. She didn’t work in the back.”
“Did she know the second girl-” Maria Chavez spoke up, then looked down at her notes. “Sarah Burnham?”
“They were roommates and, apparently, best friends,”
Bransford answered. “Sarah got Allison the job.”
“The job that got her killed,” a voice from the back of the room whispered.
Bransford nodded, then turned back in his seat to face the front of the room. “Allison May Matthews was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Powell turned back to the diagram and pointed. “In any case, our guy somehow gets Allison to go back to this room, which is the first one you come to.”
“To coin a phrase …” a voice in the back spoke up.
Powell cleared his throat. “Yes, to coin a phrase. So he ties her up, gags her-”
Powell ran his finger down the hallway toward the second room, where the L girl was found.
“Then he scouts out the place and finds Sarah Burnham, the second girl. Maybe he walks in on her, startles her.
Maybe he offers her, as we’ve already speculated, a bond-age bonus, and maybe Sarah figures it’s been a slow night and she can use the extra, but then decides no, she’s not into that. Anyway, it takes a bit more to get Sarah down. It looks like she may have fought him some, but our boy’s an expert.
She goes down without too much trouble. So he ties her up as well. He checks the place out, figures it’s late. The restaurant next door is closed, the block is deserted. So just for grins, he decides not to gag her. And he takes his time.”
Powell turns, sets the poster down, and faces his audience grimly. “Meanwhile, Allison in the first room has to listen as her friend is slowly tortured to death. She hears the screaming, the shrieks of agony and fear, the begging and pleading, the crying for momma, and then this awful, terrible, deadly silence …”
“And then footsteps coming down the hall for her,” Bransford interjects.
“Exactly,” Powell said. “And by the time he gets to Allison-the M girl-who will be his thirteenth victim, he’s tired and he’s spent. So there’s just the slow, exquisite mental game of torturing someone to death. It’s not the death of a thousand cuts, but it’s damn close.”
Powell stood there for a few moments in his own terrible, deadly silence. His form seemed to droop as he finished his analysis and suppositions about what had happened sometime early Saturday morning at Exotica Tans on the coldest February night in Nashville, Tennessee, that anyone could remember in a long time.
Sergeant Frank Woessner, the Homicide Squad’s senior African-American investigator, a man who’d successfully attended a half-dozen summer courses at the FBI Academy, spoke up from the back row. It was the first time he’d spoken during the meeting. His voice was low and smooth, but coldly serious.
“So,” he asked calmly. “How do we catch this mother-fucker?”
Powell straightened, reached back for his notebook, and held it out in front of him.
“With this,” he said. “With the information we already have on this guy. We already know more about what makes this guy tick than his own momma.”
Powell turned, walked back behind the podium, and opened the notebook. “In the past twenty years or so,
