Final Victim

R. 13-15

Something started tugging at his thoughts. He passed the pictures to Karen.

"The burglar alarm went off at seven-thirty A. M.," Stiner said. "When we got here, at about seven-forty-five, we found the body. She monitored foreign money exchanges for this firm at night and was alone on the floor. The coroner measured her liver temperature at eight o'clock and it indicated that she had just died. So we figure that the killer set off the silent alarm when he entered by the Center Street door at seven-thirty A. M. We also figure that while the security guard was checking the building, the perp came up here and killed her… did the mutilations. We musta just missed him."

Karen sat down at Candice Wilcox's desk and looked carefully at the crime scene photographs. Then she reached into her purse and took out her yellow pad. She began to add to the list she had started on the plane. The scissors that were stuck into the vagina were a sexual substitute, so she wrote down: "Sexually immature, inadequate individual."

"I think it's possible he may have stood here and masturbated," Karen said. "Did you check her body for semen?"

"I don't think so, not yet," Stiner said. "The autopsy won't be till nine this morning."

"Check. If he's a secretor, we could get a blood type from the semen," Lockwood said.

Karen looked at the pictures again. The sweater was carefully placed across Candice Wilcox's face… She felt this could mean one of two things. The killer could have felt bad about the crime after committing it and covered her face as some show of respect… Karen tried to think like this monster. The scissors connoted anger, sexual frustration. The mutilations had been precise and surgical. The post-mortem behavior had been methodical. The killer had stayed with her for a long time, working to remove the arms… Karen didn't think he had respect for Candice Wilcox. After she was dead he had butchered her, harvesting body parts. She decided the sweater had not been placed there because he felt bad about the crime… On her yellow pad she wrote: "Possibly very ugly, even disfigured." She thought it was possible the UnSub had covered Candice's face so her lifeless eyes would not stare at him. She studied the brand. It looked like an S inside a C… It could mean anything. It looked partially like the Chinese yin-and-yang symbol, but not exactly. She sketched it and copied the symbol along with the "R. 13-15" that appeared underneath. She wondered if it was some kind of computer symbol. She would study it in detail later.

Karen then turned the page and started a file on Candice Wilcox. Under her name, she wrote: "Victimology." She knew that profiling the victim was as important as profiling the UnSub. On this page she wrote: "Blond, thirty, Caucasian." She was almost certain that the UnSub was also white… Ritual or serial killers almost never kill outside of their own racial group. She thought it was probable that Candice had been a victim of choice. She had been selected by the UnSub for murder. There had to be some specific reason why she had been targeted for death. What did she represent to the killer? How had he selected her? What were the things about Candice that had led her to this terrible end? Candice did not seem to have led a life that would make her an easy target. She wasn't a prostitute or a small child who could easily be lured into a stranger's car; she had been working in a secure building, with a guard at the door. It was a high-risk crime committed against a low-risk victim-a difficult crime to pull off. Karen flipped the page back to her criminal profile. Under "UnSub," she added, "Possibly very smart, cautious." Her primary list of profile characteristics was beginning to grow.

She continued to study the photographs of the crime scene. She saw that the head was lower than the torso and that there was a large pool of blood around the body. Then she noticed the books propped under Candice.

"I wonder why he had these books under her like this?" she said.

"We don't know," Stiner replied.

"Sometimes a psychopathic killer will arrange a body in a special way," she said.

"You mean posing the corpse?" Stiner asked.

"Well, I'm not sure," Karen said, chewing on the tip of her pen.

"There's a difference between posing and staging. I'm not sure yet which this is. Posing is something the killer can't control, it's part of his ritual… He has to degrade the body for psychological reasons, dealing with a whole range of emotions-anger, hatred of women or his mother, sexual fantasy. Staging, on the other hand, is a post-mortem behavior aimed at throwing the police off"

Stiner looked at her for a long moment. "No kidding?" She nodded and looked again at the pictures. "So which is this?" he continued.

"I don't know for sure… Let me take a guess." She looked at the spot on the floor where Candice had died… then back up at Stiner and Lockwood. Malavida was still at the window, but he had turned slightly to listen to her.

"This crime scene was organized," she said, studying the pictures. "That means the guy we're dealing with is slightly older than the mean age of sex killers, which is twenty-five. He's more sophisticated, less frenzied. He cleaned up after himself. Probably used garbage bags to carry the limbs out, because there's no blood trail I can see from the crime scene pictures of the hall or the staircase."

"That's what we figured," Detective Stiner said.

"My guess is that since he cleaned up after himself, this thing with the books probably isn't ritual. He was trying to throw the police off somehow. I think it's staging."

"How would that do anything?" Stiner asked, puzzled.

Lockwood moved away from them and stood looking out the window. He could see down into the still-wet street and he wondered if the killer had watched her from there. Her desk was near the window. After a minute, Karen moved over to where he was standing and noticed a frown on his face. "What is it?" she asked.

"Karen, did you ever take any pre-med when you were getting your doctorates?"

Malavida was standing next to them, listening.

"They aren't that kind of doctorates."

"Well, I've been to maybe a hundred autopsies," he continued, still looking down into the street. "You have any idea how hard it is to sever somebody's arms like that? How long it takes? You need bone saws and clamps, extremely sharp instruments. Those photographs show clean incisions. Clean bone cuts. This guy didn't do this in a frenzy. This was methodical. I just.** "

They stood in silence and waited for him to finish his thought.

"… Okay, so he comes in, sets off the alarm at seven-thirty. He kills her, surgically removes both arms, brands her, then arranges the body with books… then bags all this up, cleans up the site, and leaves. All of this in fifteen minutes?" He turned now to face them. "That sound right to you?"

"Liver temperature is just approximate. It could be longer," Karen said.

"You know why he might have arranged the body like that? With the books under it?" Lockwood said, looking at the place on the floor where her body was found.

"No, why?"

"This is just a guess, but maybe he was trying to drain it so it wouldn't register lividity."

"Lividity?" Karen said. "If I remember correctly, lividity doesn't take place for eight or nine hours. So why would he worry about lividity? When the police arrived, her liver temp was still one hundred and one degrees. The liver is a chemical factory, the hottest organ in the body. In a normal human, it is one hundred and two degrees, and cools at one point five degrees per hour. That means the police found her body less than an hour after he killed her."

Malavida was again very impressed. Karen Dawson really knew her stuff.

"If he couldn't have done these amputations in fifteen minutes, then maybe the whole timetable is off," Lockwood continued.

"How could it be off? The burglar alarm marks the entry," Karen replied.

"I don't know… Maybe he changed the timetable somehow." Malavida sat down at one of the desks, took the plastic cover off the computer, and turned it on… The PC booted up and the screen said:

hoyt login:

He typed in:

root

And the computer said:

Password:

He typed the most common supervr password, which was: