Killer Instinct

FIFTEEN

Otto's FBI profiling team had paid microscopic attention to the autopsy reports, to maps and photographs of the various crime scenes. They had paid particular heed to how the victim was treated. A killer who takes the trouble to cover the body afterward speaks one thing, a killer who hides the body is saying something different, and a killer who displays the body like a trophy, quite another.

Byrnes said, “Our guy feels no remorse about his victims.”

“ But he does feel something,” countered O'Rourke. “He sees them as furthering his goal; and in this sense, he cares about them.”

“ But not enough to cut them down, cover them over,” said Schultz.

“ All he's interested in is the blood. The body may's well be an empty can, a receptacle from which he has taken what they willingly gave him.”

“ Whoa,” Jessica stepped in. “They didn't die willingly.”

“ Through no fault of their own, no. But in the killer's mind, they asked for what they got. They wanted to share in his grand design, the design to give him power over them and others.”

“ That's a stretch,” said Byrnes.

“ Well, what we know about victims-victimology-tells us that the victim unwittingly pushes the button. Something about her appearance, either dress or physical,” said Schultz.

“ Any rate, I agree with Teresa, this guy does not feel bad about what he's done, but good, very good. Which means he's likely going to strike again.”

“ I've put out an alert to every law enforcement agency in the nation on this one,” said Otto.

Byrnes had a master's degree in educational psychology from the University of Michigan, but O'Rourke had profiled some 450 murderers, and her degree was in psychology. “If he had moved the body,” she said, “even to a couch, he'd have shown some shred of human emotion. He didn't. Not in any of these instances. Now, Dr. Coran has shown that it is without a doubt the same man, I say we go with profile three.”

Otto told Jessica that the team had created three profiles and that they were in the midst of narrowing it to one. “He didn't give a damn about the victims' bodies being exposed to the elements. He had no idea how soon, if ever, they'd be discovered.”

“ Another personality trait,” said O'Rourke. “He really does not care one way or the other whether the bodies are found or not. He has a lot of rage in him, and a lot of contempt for anyone in authority.”

“ Didn't suckle his mother's breast enough?” asked Byrnes.

“ Something like that,” O'Rourke said, refusing to show any emotional response to Byrnes.

“ So you don't think he stuck around for the funerals?” asked Otto.

“ No way,” said O'Rourke.

Schultz agreed. “He'd only have contempt for such customs.”

“ He'd have no desire to see them decently buried,” said Teresa O'Rourke. “It would be like burying one of the canisters he used to carry off the girl's blood in. She was an object to him, an object to be emptied.”

“ It's the post-offensive behavior of the killer that interests me,” said Schultz, lifting profile number three. “And this fits with profile three. What he did to her after she was dead, and now with this paintbrush business, Christ, it fits. The guy is a stalker.”

“ He brings along his own weapons,” added O'Rourke.

There was no longer any argument about much of this, Jessica thought, because the autopsy information had proven so much.

“ So the guy was organized and cunning,” agreed Otto. “He came from a neighboring town and probably drove a van.”

“ Nothing impulsive or passionate about our vampire,” said Byrnes. “But the facial attack, that usually means the victim knew her killer. The killer, in order to perform his terrible deeds on her, puts out her eyes so that even she can't see what he is doing.”

“ Maybe they had crossed paths before. We need to check on that possibility. Prelims have shown that both Janel McDonell and the Copeland girl worked in hospitals, and the way this thing is shaping up, a hospital seems a likely setting for a first meeting. Say this guy knows a lot about trach tubes and tourniquets,” continued Schultz, whose degree was in sociology, “maybe our guy's a paramedic.”

“ Why stop at paramedic?” asked Byrnes. “Why not a doctor?”

O'Rourke quoted known dogma about murder. “The more brutal the attack-and we are talking Tort 9 here-the closer the relationship between victim and killer.”

“ Maybe she did bring it on herself,” said Byrnes, “in a manner of speaking.”

“ If she did, she had no idea she was doing it,” countered Schultz. “The victim might be guilty and innocent at the same time.”

“ Maybe she teased his sick mind at some point and he never forgot it.”

“ The killer showed mastery of the situation,” said Otto, slowing the back-and-forth intentionally, wishing to get back to profile number three. “He killed slowly and methodically, which means he's a more sadistic personality.”

“ Which places him in the probable range of late twenties or thirties,” said O'Rourke. “And what did he do right after the murder? Did he lounge there? Enjoy himself with the body? Necrophilia? Not so, according to Dr. Coran, who has said that the sperm did not belong to our man but was placed into the orifices-sperm brought with him in a vial. His ritual, the time gone into the act of cutting her tendons, tying her and dangling her and finally draining her… the other, post-offense measures were meant to fool you and me and people like Dr. Zach.”

There was some muffled laughter at this.

Schultz picked up the thread from here, clearing his throat first, his hand going habitually to his throat, as if protecting his own jugular as he spoke. “Many killers take something of the victim's away with them-a bracelet, a ring, a watch, a mirror or compact-as a kind of artifact of the crime; to use later to excite themselves, to relive the experience, recreate the memory. This guy took blood!”

O'Rourke added to this. “Certain kinds of killers also keep diaries, scrapbooks, other memorabilia of their deeds. With this guy, it's likely to be a freezer filled with blood in tidy packs or jars.”

“ Tidy,” said Jessica.

“ What?” asked Otto.

“ Oh, nothing… just that I had gotten the exact same impression of the killer when we were there, in Wekosha, that he was a fastidious man. You people are remarkable,” she said to them.

“ Trust me,” said O'Rourke, “we rely a great deal more on statistical probability than on our deep psychological insights.”

“ Ah-ahhh, Teresa,” said Byrnes with a shake of his index finger, “we're not to give away trade secrets.”

“ Plain common sense; experience gained from sweating out hundreds of cases,” said Schultz. “With the Copeland case, for instance, since the victim was white, it's a good, educated guess that her killer, too, is white. But then you connected Janel McDonell to the killer, and she was black. Most black women are killed by blacks, and whites by whites,” said Byrnes.

“ This is especially true in the vast majority of mutilation murders,” said Otto.

“ We settled on white, because Trent was white. Two out of three,” said Schultz.

“ And the age?” Jessica asked.

O'Rourke replied. “The kind of methodical, organized killer he is points to someone who's been around a while. He's probably fantasized about these crimes for twenty years, since puberty.”

“ The killer's conduct with regard to the victim both before and after death,” added Bymes a bit smugly, “was quite measured, quite controlled, and this would be highly unusual in an impulsive teenager or someone in his early twenties.”

“ He lives alone, or if with someone else it will be an elderly parent who is dependent upon him.”

“ How can you possibly know that?” asked Jessica, who had remained silent, completely fascinated by the work of the profiling team.

O'Rourke half turned in her chair and crossed her shapely legs before saying, “It's virtually certain he can't carry on a lasting relationship with a woman, and if he has sustained one, it will be to a wife who is totally dominated by him, a virtual house slave. But more likely, he's a momma's boy, and is either taking care of his mother or living in her house left him when she died. This is, of course, in all probabil-ity.”

' 'The guy did know a lot about Wekosha. He has spent a lot of time there,” said Schultz.

“ And Iowa City, and Paris, Illinois,” added Bymes.

“ Because he knew where to take his victims. He knew how much time he had with each. “He had to be fairly familiar with his surroundings to chance this kind of killing. He's no fool, no impulsive kid on a rampage.”

“ So he lives near the crime scene for a while?” asked Jessica. “People in the area had to have had dealings with him, then.”

“ All that's certain is that he knew the area well enough that he felt he could do whatever he wanted to do without disturbance,” finished Otto. “But the distances between these cases suggests a moving killer, someone who may be familiar to people in Wekosha, but someone who does not stay very long, a kind of recurring, cyclical person.”

“ Like a deliveryman?”

“ A trucker? Maybe a long-haul man?”

“ Or a salesman,” suggested O'Rourke.

“ Hospitals on the one hand, salesmen on the other.”

“ Salespeople frequent hospitals every day,” said Jessica.

“ By the hundreds of thousands,” said J.T.

Otto paced. Everyone watched him. He had an uncanny ability to come up with detailed descriptions of unknown assailants on the scantiest of information. His mind seemed to be boiling over with these new suggestions. Everyone remained silent, watching him.

Boutine began his profiling career in 1979, and at the time he taught a course in applied criminology at the FBI Academy, where students who came from all over the country brought him their cases. One story had it that when one of his former students telephoned from Oregon with a baffling case, Otto, with a handful of details about the stabbing death of a young woman, told his student he should be looking for a teenager who lived near the victim. Otto said he would be a skinny, pimply boy who spent more time with computers than people, a socially isolated individual. He said it was an impulsive act and the kid was suffering from great fear, grief and remorse, and that his guilt would give him away. “If you walk the neighborhood, knock on doors, you'll probably run into him, and when you identify yourself, just stare straight into his eyes and say, 'You know why I'm here.'“ The next day the Oregon officer called back to thank Otto and to say that he had apprehended the killer, a teenager with acne whose best friend was his Tandy 2000.

Otto had made it clear that he wasn't interested in psychology for psychology's sake, that a treatise on mental disorders was of no use to the FBI, that his interest was not in why a killer did what he did, but how he did it, and how knowing that leads to his capture.

“ A profile,” he said now, “is supposed to point to a certain general type of person, not a certain individual-or profession. If we're not careful here, folks, we could spend the next several months following up blind leads in hospital corridors looking for a guy who sells white linen or bedpans to hospitals. I'm not sure we can stretch our profiling to that degree, at least not yet.”

Without saying it, he was telling them something they all knew, that the FBI profile could be dead wrong.

“ Still, Chief, don't you think we should get people in Wekosha, you know, to sniff around? More than one killer's been caught putting flowers on the grave of his victim,” said Byrnes.

“ Sure… sure,” said Otto. “You want to coordinate with Milwaukee on that?”

“ Will do,” replied Byrnes.

“ I just keep remembering the Koontz case,” said Boutine.

There was a communal moan.

Otto went on. “We had the guy living alone, a possible orphan, uneducated, without a job or ties in the community, remember?”

Everyone remembered but Otto said it anyway. “He was the son of the town minister; had children and a wife and mother-in-law; was the town's most well liked, well known appliance store owner, which gave him an annual income of forty thousand plus a year. He taught Sunday school and played on the softball team, never touched a drop of alcohol and attended church regularly.” His crimes, in fact, were an “act” of faith. It was a reminder that profiling was far more art than science, despite probability statistics.

“ If we could pinpoint where he lived, go at this in a proactive sense,” began Schultz. “Put the press to work for us.”

Byrnes objected. “That could backfire. A guy that's this nuts could kill himself.”

“ Better him than another of his victims,” said O'Rourke coldly.

“ And so he's buried with what he knows, like how many others he killed,” finished Byrnes.

The proactive technique meant utilizing the press, feeding them information selectively, the end result to smoke out the killer, taunt him, and hope that he might be foolish enough to give something of himself away. It was a deadly kind of cat-and-mouse game, a bit like Russian roulette. “We can't use the press unless we know the guy's jumpy,” said Boutine. “So far, he seems quite cool.”

“ How cool would he be if we put out a diagram of the kind of devices he uses in his hometown paper?” asked O'Rourke, who seemed to favor the proactive method.

“ Along with the fact he drives a gray van with lettering along the side,” added Schultz. “And then we leak the fact we've got some of his DNA left at the scene. Don't know about you, but that'd make me kind of jumpy.”

“ Add to the list that we suspect he's some sort of a traveling pervert-salesman who combs the Midwest, possibly selling to hospitals,” said O'Rourke.

“ Call him a fag because he didn't rape the victim, some insults like that. Call him impotent, that kind of thing,” said Byrnes. “Yeah, maybe it would smoke him. Maybe he'd respond to insults.”

“ Maybe, maybe not,” said Otto.

“ It's worth a shot,” said Schultz.

“ You want to coordinate that, then, Schultz, all the big midwestern papers get the story. Do something with the victims' families in all three cases, try to draw the bastard back to the victim psychologically. Although with this guy, I have my doubts he's going to feel the least sympathetic to the families. But start there and if that gets no results, go with the insults. Remember to stress no bylines on the damned stories. We don't want this psycho going after a reporter.”

Otto took a deep breath before going on, pausing for everyone's complete attention. “I talked with a man in my office who claimed to be a goddamned vampire expert, who says he can help stalk this 'thing,' as he called it.”

There was some muffled laughter.

“ A real loon but the guy's not only the Exalted Emperor of something called the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Vampires and Werewolves in North America, he's a legitimate biologist with the Corning Corporation in Upstate New York.”

This drew a few more laughs and remarks.

“ Guy flew here as soon as he read about the case, insisted on seeing me and me alone-”

“ You were alone with this guy?” asked O'Rourke.

“ He insisted on seeing the evidence, everything we have. Of course, I showed him the door. You know how much store I put in these wackos and fringe guys, even if it is more than a goddamned weekend hobby for the man.”

“ So, we got 'em coming out of the woodwork,” said Schultz.

“ All the same, the Exalted One did say something that made sense. What sets this killer apart is his very real instinctual drives, such as his unquenchable taste for human blood. I don't go along with all the crap about superhuman gifts or reanimated beings, but this monster has an acquired taste for blood, whether that's due to some physiological need, a psychosexual need, or a combination of the two, that's what we must determine. What makes this bastard tick.”

“ Well, from all we've researched on the subject, and there's damned little to go on, boss,” began Byrnes. “You've got to figure this guy is working out some twisted sexual fantasy. What is it they say: one man's garbage is another man's treasure? In sex, it's similar; what one man gags over, say menstrual blood, another man is turned on by.”

“ Blood turns this bastard on for sure,” added Jessica who had calmly listened to the discussion.

“ But only eighty or ninety percent of known blood drinkers also perform deviant sex acts on their victims,” O'Rourke interjected.

“ But even the other ten percent are in it for some twisted psychosexual perversion,” countered Otto, “albeit so bloody sick that the sexual nature of the crime is overtly unapparent. I think our creep is totally screwed in the head and has, for whatever reasons, gotten blood and semen and sex and murder all balled up into one.”

“ So he gets sexual pleasure from drinking the blood,” said Jessica.

“ His ultimate gratification, yes.”

The others considered this in a moment of silence.

“ Maybe that's your lead, Schultz,” suggested Byrnes.

“ What lead?” asked Schultz.

“ For your story. Plaster it across the headline that the bastard we're after gets his rocks off by pouring blood down his pants.”

“ Intimate that he's unable to please a woman,” added O'Rourke.

“ Intimate hell,” replied Byrnes. “Call him a faggot vampire.”

“ Byrnes may be on the right track,” said Schultz. “If this thing is to work, we have to piss the bloodsucker off.” Schultz pursed his lips, nodded and tapped a pencil before him, considering his next move. Jessica, searching the features of everyone around the room, realized that all of them were considering their next steps very carefully. None moreso than Otto.?