Deeper Than the Dead

24

There was a part of him that never wanted to wake up. Vince couldn’t decide if it was the damaged part of his brain that didn’t want him to wake up, or the rest of his brain that didn’t want to wake up and be subjected to the aftereffects of the bullet fragmented in his head.

The doctors, specialists, and neurosurgeons he had seen in the months since being shot had all been stunned by the fact he had survived at all. There were only a handful of cases like his in the world, each of them a little different from the others, dependent on the parts of the brain that had been impacted.

The doctors had no idea what would happen next. They had exhumed what shrapnel they could, but the largest piece of the .22 caliber slug had lodged in a place the surgeons wouldn’t go near. There was too great a chance of causing severe brain damage. Yet they couldn’t tell him what damage would be caused by leaving a bullet in his head.

They couldn’t be sued for that damage, they knew that.

So he was a living, breathing science project, a case study, a freak in the medical circus, an article in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The effects of what had happened to him varied. Some days his sense of smell or hearing seemed heightened. Some days he couldn’t get the taste of metal out of his mouth. Nearly every day he had a headache that could have knocked a mule off its feet.

In the initial weeks after the shooting he had experienced the frustration of aphasia, a disorder that made it difficult for him to grab the words he wanted from his brain and put them into coherent sentences.

Some days he found himself to be lacking impulse control, but whether that was damage to the frontal lobe or the result of fully realizing his own mortality, he couldn’t say. He was a walking, talking second chance. He had no interest in passing up experiences or putting opportunities off to a tomorrow that might never come.

The trauma had left his body weak and lacking the endurance to get through simple tasks. Now, months later, he could get through a day, but stamina was still an issue.

He had been so exhausted by the time Mendez dropped him off at the hotel he’d barely had the energy to try to shower off the smell of the morgue. He had no memory of falling naked across the bed. He had no memory of dreams. He had managed a full seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. That was the first time that had happened in months.

With the phantom smell of morgue still in his nose, he took another shower and made a pot of bad coffee in the little machine on the bathroom counter. Breathing deep the scents of coffee and soap in the steamy bathroom, he wiped off a section of mirror and took his daily inventory.

He had looked worse. He had looked better. If he had been a woman, he at least could have improved himself with makeup.

“You’d be a hell of an ugly woman, Vince,” he said, finding a chuckle in that.

He made a mental note to look into visiting a tanning parlor to get some of the gray out of his skin. He was in California, after all. Cali fornians loved their tans. He had no doubt that he would feel like an idiot doing it, but if it kept people from thinking he had one foot in the grave, it was probably worth it.

Room service brought a basket of muffins and toast. He ate what he could just to put a layer of something in his stomach before the first round of pills. The brown prescription bottles were arrayed on the dresser. Painkillers, antiseizure medication, antinausea medication, antipsychotic meds to ward off the paranoia sometimes brought on by pressure against some crucial part of his brain of which he couldn’t remember the name.

He had yet to take that one. So far he had managed to fend off the anxiety himself. He looked at the prescription bottle and wondered if he really needed it, would he be sane enough to take it.

As he picked at the food, he listened to his tape of the conversation in the car from the night before. Mendez had given him an overview of what had happened so far. Three probable victims and one woman missing. He made notes as he listened and mulled over the notes when the tape clicked off. He studied the Polaroids he had taken at the autopsy, particularly intrigued by the cutting wounds that seemed so deliberate and symmetrically placed on the limbs—where there was a vertical cut on one arm there was a corresponding cut in exactly the same place on the other arm. The same with the legs.

He pulled a paper from his briefcase that depicted a simple line drawing of the female human form, front and back, and drew in the marks on Lisa Warwick’s body. He would fax the form to Quantico later to find out if anyone in ISU had come across this pattern before.

He would go in to the sheriff’s office this morning and go over the particulars of all three cases, with a particular eye out for any similar marks on the previous victims, and begin work on the profile in earnest.

Not that he didn’t already have some strong ideas. He had worked enough cases, interviewed enough killers to have the checklist ingrained in his brain. There were maybe nine people on the planet who knew as much about the minds of murderers as he did. They were a small club. Too small for the ever-growing ranks of serial predators.

He picked up the phone and called the sheriff’s office.

“Detective Mendez, please.”

“What do you know today you didn’t know last night?”

“Not much,” Mendez said.

“Not much?” Vince said. “What have you been doing all morning? Golfing? And why wasn’t I invited?”

“We searched the home of the missing girl, Karly Vickers, and found nothing of significance.”

“And that’s not significant to you?”

Mendez conceded the point. “No signs of forced entry. No signs of a struggle. No indication she was involved with a man. So far, we haven’t found anyone who saw anything happen anywhere.”

“What does that tell you?”

“He’s careful.”

They sat in a nice white conference room with big windows looking out on huge, spreading oak trees and green grass. Nice.

“This beats the hell out of the basement at Quantico,” he said, getting up from his chair and going to the window.

“You work in the basement?” Detective Hicks asked.

“Deeper than the dead,” he said. “I think the Bureau should put that on T-shirts and sell them. BSU could be the next big thing in pop culture.”

“Yeah,” Mendez said, chuckling. “Behavioral Sciences could be the next Miami Vice.”

Vince gave his lopsided grin and shrugged. “Move over, Don Johnson.

“What about your murder victim?” he asked.

“A coworker felt like maybe Lisa Warwick was having an affair, but she never confided in anyone about it,” Mendez said. “We found semen on her sheets, and a photograph that may or may not lead us to the guy who left it there.”

“Did her neighbors have anything to say about a boyfriend?”

“Not so far,” Hicks said. “She lived in a duplex, but her neighbor never saw or heard anything going on next door.”

“She was discreet,” Vince said.

“Or secretive,” Hicks offered. “The guy might be married.”

“The guy might be a killer,” Vince said.

He went to the long chalkboard that took up most of one wall.

“This is how you build a profile, kids.”

He took a piece of chalk and wrote 1. Profile Inputs. He spoke as he noted pertinent points. “A: What did you find at the crime scene? Physical evidence, a pattern of evidence, body position, weapons.”

“We don’t have a crime scene,” Detective Hicks pointed out. “We have dump sites.”

“Make the same notes for dump sites,” Vince said. “And the fact that you don’t have a crime scene is highly significant. We’ll come back to that.

“B: Victimology. That you have. Age of the victims, occupation, background, habits, family structure, where were they last seen. C: Forensic Information. Cause of death, wounds—are they pre- or postmortem, sexual acts, autopsy report, lab reports. You have everything on two vics except the labs and the official report of autopsy on the Warwick woman. Right?”

Both detectives nodded. Sheriff Dixon sat stone-faced at the head of the table, taking it all in.

“D: Your preliminary police reports. And E: Photographs of the vics, of the crime scene and/or the dump scene.”

“We’ve got photos,” Hicks said.

“Let’s get them up on the wall, now, and I want a long table situated under the photos where we can organize copies of all the paperwork.”

While Hicks went to the large cork bulletin board and began to make room for the photographs, Vince moved to an empty section of chalkboard and wrote 2. Decision Process Models. Homicide type & Style, Primary Intent, Victim Risk, Offender Risk, Escalation, Time for Crime, Location Factors.

“You’ve already seen escalation in terms of risk to your offender,” he said. “The first victim—first two victims—were dumped in remote locations. The Lisa Warwick scene was staged and in a location right in town, where he ran a much greater risk of being seen. What purpose did that risk serve him?”

“The bigger the risk, the bigger the rush,” Mendez said.

“Publicity,” Hicks offered.

“Generates greater fear in the community,” Dixon said. “It’s about power. He can do anything he wants. We can’t stop him.”

“All of the above,” Vince said. “Have you seen any escalation in the violence of the murders?”

“Julie Paulson and Lisa Warwick both died as a result of ligature strangulation,” Mendez said. “They had both been tortured. They were both cut up. Eyes and mouths glued shut. The second body was too badly decomposed to get an accurate picture.”

“Prior to the Julie Paulson murder, was there any pattern of sexual assaults in the area?”

“Nothing related,” Dixon said. “We had six reported rapes in the county in the past year. All solved.”

“Congratulations,” Vince said. “Let’s see what we can do to get your murder clearance rate up to that standard. With regards to the sexual assaults, what about the year before last, and the year before that?”

“The year before was about the same. Before that was before my time here.”

“My question is, is this guy homegrown or did he drop here from somewhere else? Most serial killers start smaller than murder. Fetishism, window peeping, assault, rape. They work their way up over time. On the other hand, though,” he conceded, “some just nurse the violent fantasies over the years until they have to act on them to release the pressure.”

“We’re looking at known offenders,” Dixon said.

The door to the conference room opened and a uniformed deputy stepped in.

“You’re late,” Dixon said. He turned back toward Vince. “Vince, this is my chief deputy, Frank Farman. Frank, Vince Leone.”

Vince had specifically asked the sheriff to keep things casual. The less people said those three magic letters, FBI, the better.

“Vince is an expert on serial killers,” Dixon explained.

The deputy gave him a hard look and said flatly, “You’re a Feeb.”

Vince smiled like an alligator. “Have a seat, Deputy.”

“I’ll stand, thanks.”

There was one in every crowd.

“I’ve got feelers out in other parts of the country,” Vince said, “looking for any murders with a similar MO and signature. But I’ll tell you right now, based on what I’ve heard and seen so far, this guy is no amateur. He’s acting on fantasies he’s held for a long, long time, and he’s been acting on them long enough to have his routine down pat.”

“You talk about this dirtbag like he’s some kind of genius,” Farman said. “Looks to me like he’s just one sick son of a bitch.”

“Then why haven’t you caught him?” Vince challenged. “I’m assuming you’re a top cop, or you wouldn’t be in this room right now. If your perp is just some crazy guy, foaming at the mouth, running around attacking women at random, why haven’t you caught him?”

Farman had no answer for that.

“I’ll tell you why,” Vince said. “Because he’s not just some sick son of a bitch. Not in the way you mean.”

He turned back to the board and wrote 3. Crime Assessment. A: Crime Classification. B: Organized/Disorganized. (And under that heading) a: Victim Selection. b: Control of Victim. c: Sequence of Crime. C: Staging. D: Motivation. E: Crime Scene Dynamics.

He tapped the chalk at B. “A disorganized offender sees a potential victim and commits a crime of opportunity. The crime scene will be sloppy. He’ll leave the body there. This guy isn’t very smart. He’s socially immature. He’s impulsive.”

“Sounds like you, Tony,” Hicks joked.

“Very funny.”

“He isn’t interested beyond the immediate act,” Vince went on. “He isn’t looking for publicity. He’s not the kind of creep you’re looking for here. And too bad, ’cause he’s not that hard to outsmart. If this was your animal, you’d catch him today and we could all go fishing.”

“So,” Farman said, “are you going to look into your crystal ball and tell us who the killer is?”

“I’m going to tell you what he is,” Vince said. “If I were psychic, I’d be in Vegas with a wad of cash. I sure as hell wouldn’t be here looking at your ugly mugs. Sure, I’d miss all the glamour and adoration . . .”

A single sharp pain pierced his brain like a lance. He hid the automatic wince by turning quickly back toward the chalkboard.

“The organized offender,” he said, placing his hand on the chalk tray to counter the vertigo. He held his breath for a second, let it out, raised his hand—willing it not to shake—and started to write again. “The organized offender is intelligent, socially competent, holds down a job. He’s likely to be in a relationship. He could have a family, even. No one in his life would look at him and think he might have a second life as a predator.”

“Bundy,” Mendez said.

He took a slow, deep breath and turned back around slowly to face his audience.

“Bundy. Edmund Kemper up in Santa Cruz. John Wayne Gacy in the Chicago area. Robert Hansen from Alaska is a perfect example of an organized killer.”

“Never heard of him,” Farman said.

“The guy was a baker by trade,” Vince began. “He was a family man, a pillar of the community. He was also a sexual sadist. We think he killed around twenty-one women. His victims of choice were prostitutes. He would engage them for their services, then fly them in his own plane to his hunting cabin, rape them, torture them, then turn them loose in the wilderness, hunt them down like animals, and kill them.

“The Anchorage cops had an escaped victim at one point. The girl had a handcuff dangling from her wrist when she runs into a cop and tells him what happened. She tells how this guy had tied her up in his basement and tortured her, how she got away from him at the airport before he could get her into his plane.

“She identifies Hansen’s home as the place where she was raped and tortured. The cops take her to the airport and she identifies his plane. But when the cops go to question Hansen and tell him what the girl said, he’s outraged. He produces two business associates who say they had dinner with him the night he supposedly had the girl in the basement. It’s his word against the girl’s, and he’s so freakin’ normal, the cops believe him.

“Hansen wasn’t charged. He wasn’t even arrested. That happened in 1982. It was another year before they finally took him down.”

He had the undivided attention of all of them now.

“The organized killer plans his crimes. He chooses his victims. He’s more apt to draw out the attack, to restrain the victim, to torture the victim. He’s got the whole situation under control. That’s what it’s about for him: control. And when he’s done, he’ll transport the victim away from the death scene, then go home and wait to read about it in the papers, see the reports on the news.

“What you’re dealing with here, gentlemen, truly is a big-game hunter,” Vince said. “He’s a killing machine, and he’s very, very good at it. Experience tells me he’s a white male. Serial killers tend to hunt within their own ethnic group.”

“That narrows it right down,” Farman said sarcastically.

“He’s in his midthirties,” Vince went on. “That’s when these guys hit their prime. And he believes he’s hitting his prime now. He’s moving into the big time with this latest victim. He’s put her on display so we can all look and see what a badass he is. This victim was his challenge. He’s thrown down the gauntlet. He doesn’t believe you’re smart enough to catch him, and so far he’s right.”

He gripped the chalk tray with his left hand to ward off another wave of dizziness.

Mendez was watching him like a hawk.

“And I’ll take some IV coffee now, if you’ve got it,” Vince said. “This jet lag is a bitch.”