The Cold Room

Thirty-Four

Taylor woke when the plane began its skidding run down the Potomac. She reset her watch for Eastern time, brushed her hair, and swiped on some ChapStick. Baldwin was meeting her at the gate. Another perk for the FBI.

She deplaned, was met in the jetway by an airline official who handed her both her overnight bag and her gun case. She’d carried on the killer’s laptop, in her own case, so she attached that to her bag and strolled up the jetway. As she exited, she saw Baldwin waiting. He had on a white Brooks Brothers button-down and chinos, looked endearingly preppy and handsome, his green eyes flashing in welcome. And weary. Too many long nights, too many murders. It was starting to take a toll. But his face lit up when he saw her, and he enveloped her in a hug that took her breath away.

God, just being near him made her feel more settled.

Reagan National Airport had changed since she was last here. Of course, that was ages ago, everything in this town but the monuments would have changed, and they’d added a few new ones to the city, too. D.C. could never be accused of being a static entity.

They chatted about nothing until they exited the terminal, the humidity smacking her in the face like a wet washcloth. Funny, she knew Nashville was just as humid, but it felt wetter here.

Dodging a multitude of people going in every direction but theirs, they reached the curb, where a driver sat with a big black sedan that fairly screamed government. Baldwin held the door for her. The air was on full blast and gave her a chill. Baldwin slid in beside her, and the driver wormed his way through the mass of taxis and cars to the exit. Within ten minutes, they were heading south, toward Quantico, on I-95.

“Ready?” Baldwin asked.

“As I’ll ever be. Tell me what you know.”

“We’re heading to Italy in the morning. The carabinieri are looking for Adler. He landed in Rome early this afternoon, made it through customs before the alert went out. Well, I shouldn’t say that. The alert had gone out, but they didn’t pay it enough attention. He was smart, drove to Atlanta, took the first flight out. Georgia Bureau of Investigation has already impounded the Prius. Oh, and we have his passport photo.” He handed her a black-and-white glossy eight-by-ten photograph.

It was a much more recent shot than Adler’s driver’s license. The man who looked back at her didn’t send waves of fear crashing through her system. He was…boring. Nondescript. Not terribly handsome, not ugly. Where so many mixed-race children took on the most glorious aspects of their parents’ blood, nothing elegant leapt out about Gavin Adler. He had curly black hair and a round face, with skin so light that if his full lips didn’t have a slightly ethnic bent to them, she would have assumed he was white. Wide brown eyes. His nose wasn’t big, nor was it small, but a bit thick through the nostrils. He looked…more scared than scary. How had this benign little man killed four women? How had he had sex with their corpses? How did he manage to have an elaborate chamber in his basement solely for the purpose of hastening his victims’ deaths?

Taylor was used to evil, saw it every day. But she had a hard time seeing much of anything in Gavin Adler’s face.

“This is him? This is the man who’s created such havoc?”

“Half of him, anyway. We have the Italians, the Brits and Interpol using facial recognition software to look for another man like this in their passport rolls, people who’ve traveled in and out of the country. But we don’t know what country issued II Macellaio’s passport, or what name he’s traveling under, so that makes it difficult. We don’t know travel dates. We have very little to go on over there. Tommaso isn’t exactly an uncommon name over there. It’s like us pulling all the records of people named Tom.”

Taylor tapped her laptop bag.

“Hopefully, this will change everything. I assume you’ll be able to trace the IP address he was using and narrow a location down pretty damn quick. I doubt Tommaso is his real name.”

“Maybe, maybe not. We have been trying to track it down, and we do have a possible on the Tommaso front. There’s a famous art photographer named Tommaso. It’s a long shot, but it just might be him.”

“An art photographer?”

“Yeah. And catch this. He takes photographs of paintings for the art catalogs for the museums.”

“Well, that fits. How’d you find him?”

“One of my profilers, Charlaine Shultz, is a big art fan. When we said the name she mentioned this guy. We searched on Google for him and he showed up everywhere. We even know where he lives.” He paused for a moment. “Care to guess?”

Taylor raised an eyebrow. “Florence?”

“Exactly. He warranted checking out, under the circumstances. He’s well-known. Sought after. He goes simply by Tommaso, if that tells you anything.”

“That’s as good a start as any I’ve heard. Man, your team has been busy.”

“Do you know what Tommaso means in Italian?”

Taylor shook her head. “No, what?”

“Twin. Tommaso means twin.”

She spit out a laugh. “That’s precious.”

“You better believe it. Taylor, I don’t want to lose these guys. I want to nail them, and then I want to study them. Identical-twin serial killers. Identical twin necrosadists. Can you imagine?”

Baldwin’s voice had taken on that dreamy quality it always did when he was confronted by true evil. It was his calling, his purpose, to find out what made these men and women tick.

“No, I can’t. What in the world would drive this type of pathology?”

“That’s the fascinating thing about this. With identical twins, it’s like they are the same person, just in two bodies. It makes sense that if one has the pathological desire to commune with the dead, the other would as well. Of course, that drives a massive stake in the nature versus nurture theory.”

Taylor looked at him. “Are you assuming they were brought up in some sort of environment that made them this way?”

“I can’t assume anything, not until we find out who they really are. The background on Gavin Adler shows he was adopted. We’re trying to track down by whom. Hopefully, that will give us the name of the other brother. It’s going to be fascinating to see what their young lives were like. I’m telling you, Taylor, no matter what kind of environment a child is brought up in, there is a reasonable expectation that they’ll understand what’s right and what’s wrong, that they will receive the tools to form a positive moral compass. Serial killers aren’t made. They choose to be killers, they choose to take lives. A hidden desire for necrophilia is something that’s probably not learned. Of course, that’s another completely misunderstood pathology. Did you know that necrophilia is really just the desire to have sex with an unresisting partner, and the vast majority of necrophiliacs are stunted in the fantasy stage? Very few actually act on their desires, and when they do, they seek out role-playing partners who are willing to pretend with them. They’re looking for compliant sex, completely submissive. Some of the more disturbed ones will drug their prey-like roofies. Classic necro behavior.”

“You’re saying that men who give roofies to women and rape them are actually necrophiliacs?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. They want power and control, and they don’t want to be told no. You should see the Web sites out there dedicated to this. They have what they call ‘Sleepy Sex,’ arranged for partners who are willing to be photographed during the role play, then share them.”

“That’s…disturbing. The thought of an undercurrent of men and women who are into this…well, everyone has their kink. From the instant messages it seems Adler didn’t know Tommaso was his brother until yesterday. Do you think Tommaso and Gavin met through one of these sites?”

“I don’t know. Here’s the problem, though. Our boys have moved on to something much more sinister. They are actually killing to have sex with the dead bodies. They are a highly evolved version of the classic necrophiliac. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a background that includes working at or near a morgue, or in the funeral business. As it is, they’re well beyond anything I’ve seen before. And the art, the painting? Leaving the postcards at the scenes? Think about it.”

She did. “Oh…Static women, posed and at the ready.”

“Exactly.”

He settled back in the seat, took her hand. “I’ll tell you one thing, Adler is panicked. You know when a suspect goes off his beaten path, does something that isn’t in his normal routine, he messes up. Our boy has messed up, royally. We’re going to catch him now, and we’re going to catch his brother, too. There are a lot of people in Italy who will sleep easier once we have II Macellaio off the streets.”

“Should we be calling them I Macellai now, instead?” she asked.

“The Butchers. Plural. Yes, I guess we should.”

“He left his cat behind.”

“Adler?”

“Yes. McKenzie is going to foster it. I didn’t have the heart to tell him no, animal control might have destroyed the poor thing. But guess what the cat’s name is.”

“What?”

“Art.”

Baldwin just shook his head. “That’s just too much. Adler’s an artist of sorts. He’s listed as the designer on the Picasso monograph. We’re looking into anything that’s got a copyright with his name near it. Any idea where he worked?”

“No. McKenzie is handling that part back in Nashville. But now that I know all of this, I can have McKenzie look deeper. It didn’t seem like he worked out of the house. Granted, once we get into his computer all the way, we can find out all of this.”

“It’s like Son of Sam.”

“Huh?”

“Remember, he got caught because of a parking ticket. Adler got caught because one of your patrol officers was sharp enough to spot that he was acting weird.”

“He wasn’t wearing his safety belt. Such a stupid little mistake. But we’d have found him anyway. I think that’s what made him run, getting pulled over. I think he would have stuck it out with Kendra Kelley otherwise, and we might have actually gotten our hands on him in the act.”

“How is the Kelley girl?”

“She’ll live. She’d been drugged, they had to pump her full of Narcan to stop the overdose. I don’t know what kind of emotional scars she might have. He glued the eyes of his last victim open. Imagine, being locked in a Plexiglas box, able to see your killer, feeling your life draining away inch by inch. You can imagine where he may go next. We saved her from a nasty fate.”

“We’re here,” Baldwin said.

Taylor looked out the window. They were parked in front of a restaurant called the Globe and Laurel. It was nearly 10:00 p.m. Taylor was starving, her mouth watering at the mere thought of sustenance. Baldwin heard her stomach growl, looked sheepishly at her. “Everyone’s already here. Thought we might eat before we worked.”

“That, my dear, sounds wonderful.”