was only three pounds and the difference in height was half an inch. Facial structure and hair was also alike. A victim’s body type is a key component in terms of what makes them chosen. An opportunistic killer takes what comes along. But when you see two victims like this with exactly the same body type, it tells us this is a predator who is patient, who chooses.”
It looked like she had more to say but stopped. I waited but she didn’t continue.
“What?” I said. “You know more than you’re saying.”
She dropped the hesitation.
“When I was in Behavioral it was in the early days. The profilers often sat around and talked about the correlation between the predators we hunted and the predators in the wild. You’d be surprised how similar a serial killer can be to a leopard or a jackal. And the same could be said for victims. In fact, when it came to body types we often assigned victims animal types. These two women we would have called giraffes. They were tall and long-legged. Our predator has a taste for giraffes.”
I wanted to write some of this down to use later but I was afraid that any obvious recording of her interpretation of the files would cause her to shut down the exposition. So I tried not to even move.
“There’s something else,” she said. “At this point this is purely conjecture on my part. But both autopsies ascribe marks on each of the victims’ legs to ligature. I think that might be wrong.”
“Why?”
“Let me show you something.”
I finally moved. We were in seats that faced each other. I unbuckled and moved to the seat next to her. She went through the files and pulled several of the copies of photos from the crime scenes and the autopsies.
“Okay, you see the marks left above and below the knees here and here and here?”
“Yeah, like they were tied up.”
“Not quite.”
She used a clear polished fingernail to trace the markings on the victims as she explained.
“The marks are too symmetrical to be from traditional bindings. Plus, if these were ligature marks we would see them around the ankles. If you were going to tie someone up to control them or to prevent escape, you would tie their ankles. Yet we have no ligature marks in these areas. The wrists, yes, but not on the ankles.”
She was right. I just hadn’t seen it until she explained it.
“So what made those marks on the legs?”
“Well, I can’t say for sure, but when I was in Behavioral, we came upon new paraphilias on almost every case. We started categorizing them.”
“You’re talking about sexual perversions?”
“Well, we didn’t call them that.”
“Why, you had to be politically correct around serial killers?”
“It may be very nuanced, but there is a difference between being perverted and abnormal. We call the behaviors paraphilias.”
“Okay, and these marks, they’re part of a paraphilia?”
“They could be. I think they are marks left by straps.”
“Straps from what?”
“Leg braces.”
I almost laughed.
“You’ve got to be kidding. People get off on leg braces?”
Rachel nodded.
“It even has a name. It’s called abasiophilia. A psychosexual fascination with leg braces. Yes, people get off on it. There are even websites and chat rooms dedicated to it. They call them irons and calipers. Women who wear braces are sometimes called iron maidens.”
I was reminded by how thoroughly intoxicating Rachel’s skill as a profiler had been when we were chasing the Poet. She had been dead-on about the case in many ways. Damn near prescient. And I had been captivated by her ability to take small pieces of information and obscure details and then draw telling conclusions. She was doing it again and I was along for the ride.
“And you had a case with this?”
“Yes, we had a case in Louisiana. A man abducted a woman off a bus bench and held her for a week in a fishing shack out in a bayou. She managed to escape and make her way through the swamp. She was lucky because the four women he grabbed before her didn’t escape. We found their partial remains in the swamp.”
“And it was a basophilia case?”
“Abasiophilia,” she corrected. “Yes, the woman who escaped told us the subject made her wear leg braces that strapped around the legs and had side irons and joints running from her ankles to her hips and several leather straps.”
“This is so creepy,” I said. “Not that there is anything like a normal serial killer, but leg braces? Where does an addiction like this come from?”
“It’s unknown. But most paraphilias are embedded in early childhood. A paraphilia is like a recipe for an individual’s sexual fulfillment. It’s what they need to get off. Why someone would need to wear leg braces or have their partner wear them is anybody’s guess, but it starts young. That is a given.”
“Do you think the guy from your case back then could be-”
“No, the man who committed those murders in Louisiana was put to death. I witnessed it. And right up to the end, he never spoke a word to us about any of it.”
“Well, I guess that gives him a perfect alibi for this.”
I smiled but she didn’t smile back. I moved on.
“These braces, are they hard to find?”
“They are bought and sold over the Internet every day. They can be expensive, with all kinds of gadgetry and straps. Next time you’re on Google, plug in
As she said it I realized there was a story in this. Something separate from the trunk murders case. Maybe even a book. I put the idea aside for later and went back to the case at hand.
“So what do you think the killer does? He makes them put on leg braces and then he rapes them? Does the suffocation mean anything?”
“Every detail means something, Jack. You just need to know how to read it. The scene he creates reflects his paraphilia. More than likely this is not about killing the women. It’s about creating a psychosexual scene that fulfills a fantasy. The women are killed afterward because he is simply finished with them and he can’t have the threat of them living to tell about him. My guess is that he may even apologize to them when he pulls the bag over their head.”
“They both were dancers. Do you think he made them dance or something?”
“Again, it’s all conjecture at this point, but that could be part of it, yes. But my guess is that it’s about body type. Giraffes. Dancers by trade have thin muscular legs. If that is what he wanted, then he would look at dancers.”
I thought about the hours the two women spent with their killer. The stretch of hours between abduction and time of death. What happened during those hours? No matter what the answer, it added up to a horrible and terrifying end.
“You said something before about the bag being familiar somehow. Do you remember how?”
Rachel thought for a moment before answering.
“No, there’s just something about it. Some familiarity. Probably from another case but I can’t place it yet.”
“Will you put all of this through VICAP?”
“As soon as I get the chance.”
The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was a computer data bank of the details of thousands of crimes. It could be used to find crimes of similar nature when the details of a new crime were entered.
“There’s something else that should be noted about the killer’s program,” Rachel said. “In both cases he left
