Killer Genius

by David Archer

  He led the way toward his office and Eric followed meekly. They stepped inside and everyone at the table turned to look at the young man. Darren rose to his feet as they approached the table.

  “Everybody,” Sam said, “this is Eric. Eric, this is Darren, Steve, Walter, Summer, Jade and Denny.”

  There were various nods and acknowledgments around the table, and then Darren held out a hand. “Nice to meet you, Eric,” he said.

  Eric looked at him for a moment, glancing at the hand he was holding out. "I don't like to shake hands. You're going to let me visit my mother?"

  Sam nodded. "That was the deal, yes. We already have it arranged."

  "Good." Eric stepped over to the table and picked up the first file he came to. He flipped through it quickly, then laid it down and took up another.

  Darren looked at Sam. “Down to business,” he said. “Gotta respect that, right?”

  Sam nodded and the two of them sat down at the table again.

  "Would you like us to tell you what we’ve come up with so far?" Sam asked.

  “That would take too long,” Eric said. “I can read all of it faster than you can explain it to me.”

  Denny's eyebrows rose a bit, but he shrugged it off and looked at Sam. Sam only shrugged back.

  Eric was mumbling to himself as he was reading, and the stack of files he had already finished was growing rather quickly.

  "Something isn’t adding up, here," Eric said.

  Sam leaned toward him. "What do you mean?"

  "Were there any victims in this most recent group you thought might have been unusual?" Eric continued looking through the files as he waited for someone to answer.

  "Anna Vaughn." Sam and Jade had both given the name at the same time.

  Denny nodded slowly. "I would agree with that,” he said. “Something just appeared a bit out of place, right?"

  Summer, Steve and Darren all nodded their own agreement. “Yeah, just not quite right about it. She was treated differently than the other victims.”

  "Yes, that’s what I see, as well." Eric looked closely at the picture of the girl and then stuck it on the whiteboard. A moment later, he put up the pictures of the other two victims, one on either side of the first. "These are the three victims, but Ms. Vaughn is the one he was really after."

  "All right, slow the stick a bit," Denny said, waving a finger in the air. "Tell us, lad, just how you came to that conclusion."

  Eric blinked at them. "It isn’t obvious?" He turned to Sam with a look of frustration on his face. "Is that gonna cut in to my visit time?"

  Sam shook his head. "No, not at all."

  Eric turned back to look at Denny and took a deep breath.

  "There have been thirty-six victims over the last ten years, in twelve groups of three victims each. All of them were bound and tortured, but none were assaulted sexually. All three bodies are disposed of together, but forensic examination shows that they died at different times, and the first one to die is often as much as a day or more before the second, while the third follows within a couple of hours after the second victim. This tells us that the second victim in each group was his actual target, but…"

  "Why do you say that?" Darren asked, leaning forward for emphasis. “In each group, all three of them ended up dead. What makes you think any one of them was more important than the other two?”

  "Based on what I’m seeing, I would say that this individual has a specific agenda,. He isn’t killing his victims all at once, even though he’s disposing of the bodies all at the same time. He’s keeping them alive for a period of time, probably to torture them, and almost certainly because there is some specific admission or concession he wants out of them. Once he gets that, that particular victim is no longer needed, so he kills her and moves on to the next." He began scribbling on the board as he spoke. "If we take a good, careful look at all of the victims, one of them stands out in each group because, if you look at the X-rays taken by the medical examiner in each case, you'll see that one victim always has three broken ribs, all on the right side of the body. All of the other victims have broken ribs as well, but some of them will be on the left side."

  Denny nodded and held up a hand. "That’s not unusual,” he said. “The first or last victims often tend to be the most important to a killer who works in groupings like this, but I still don’t see why you think it’s the second victim who’s most important to this bloke."

  "I’m saying it’s the second victim in this particular group, not necessarily all of them, but this guy knows enough to realize that you’re going to look at it that way. He plans out every attack to make you think it was a particular victim he was truly after, but then he works to conceal which one it really was." Eric began drawing diagrams to illustrate what he was trying to say. "He maneuvered all of you into thinking three was his magic number, because it adds to his feeling of superiority to know that he has outsmarted professional investigators like yourselves. However, his ego makes him want to stand out, so he put the three broken ribs on only one victim in each of the groupings. If you add together the fact that he choose only one of his victims for that special treatment, the incredible size of his ego, a strong possibility of a law enforcement background giving him basic knowledge of what you will do, and the fact that the first of his victims in each group was killed at least one full day before the others even though their bodies were disposed of all at once, you are looking for someone who thinks of himself as a kind of hero. He’s not killing for fun, he’s killing because he believes that the particular victims he’s going after represent a clear and present danger that must be eliminated.

  "Now, from a strictly psychological viewpoint, I conclude that the victims, the special ones, somehow make him feel threatened to such a degree that the only answer he can come up with is to torture and eliminate them, but not until he’s gotten what he wants from them." Eric tapped on the pictures of the two girls. "All of them appear to be very similar, physically—all have brown eyes and dark hair, all are reasonably attractive and all of them were unemployed when they were taken, despite the fact that they were living a relatively lavish lifestyle. All of them were recently divorced and almost certainly living on substantial alimony, and none of them had children. This leads me to believe that the killer probably had a wife who left him and bled him financially, demanding alimony because she couldn’t get child support. He’s almost certainly trying to rectify that situation for other men. He probably thinks of himself as some sort of avenging angel for men who have been done wrong by their wives." Eric turned to face them all again. "Based on his knowledge of investigative techniques and the precision with which he abducts, tortures and kills his victims, your killer is a former law-enforcement officer with SWAT experience. His wife, probably close in appearance to the victims, divorced him sometime in the last couple of years before the first group of victims was taken, and was awarded substantial alimony. She is undoubtedly still alive, because he is seeking a cathartic release from her by torturing and killing substitute victims.”

  Summer waved a finger in the air. “Eric,” she said, “you said that he tortures them to get some sort of specific response. Any idea what it might be?”

  “Isn’t that obvious?” Eric asked. “The victims are tortured until they admit that they had no right to alimony, that they were simply greedy women who took advantage of their husbands. One of the victims is the one he identifies most closely with his former wife, so he’s probably ready to be finished with the entire group once he gets her to make that confession. That would explain why the third victim is sometimes killed quickly after the second, because she actually doesn’t matter to him at all. Two of the victims in each group are nothing but camouflage to keep you from figuring out who he was really after.”

  “But, that doesn’t make sense,” Jade said. “All of the victims are the same type. Why would any one of them stand out to him as being more like his ex-wife?”

  “Look at the other major diffe
rence between the victims with all the broken ribs on one side and the rest of them. No, wait, it will take you too long to see it, so I’ll just explain it. Only those victims in each group had a complete college education. Each of those women had a degree in a professional field, but was not working within that field when she was abducted and killed. She didn’t need to, because she was collecting enough from her former husband to live comfortably.”

  Sam snatched up a chart showing all of the victims and looked it over. “He’s right,” he said. “Somehow, we all missed that.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Eric said. “You naturally focused on the similarities between the victims, rather than the differences.” He turned back to the board and began writing something else. “Back to your killer. Considering that the victims were all abducted at different times of the day or night, I believe your suspect is probably retired. For that reason, I would start by looking for retired law enforcement officers who served on SWAT teams, either here in Denver, or it’s possible he moved here after retirement. He was divorced from his wife within two years before the first group of victims appeared, and she is almost certainly a college-educated professional who is not working in the field she received her degree in. Instead, she’s milking him for every dime she can, and this is why he resents her.” He turned to look at Sam. “May I see my mother now?"

  Sam was taken aback by the sudden switch from explaining who their killer must be to making his request, and he started to insist on more information, but then changed his mind. He and his team could go over everything they had just learned while Eric was visiting with his mother, who was waiting down the hall in a secure room.

  "Yes,” Sam said. ”Come with me, and I’ll show you the way. She’s waiting for you.”

  Eric’s eyes went wide, and tears began to flow down his cheeks. “She’s already here?” he asked.

  Sam nodded. “Yes. If you’ll just follow me?”

  He got up and led Eric out of the room, then turned down the hall and waited for the young man to catch up. The holding room was only three doors down, and Sam nodded to the two security officers who were sitting in chairs just outside.

  One of them unlocked the door and Eric sobbed as he saw his mother sitting at the table inside. He rushed in, and the door was closed behind them.

  “Thirty minutes,” Sam said to the security officers. “I’ll be back for him then.”

  TWO

  He turned and went back to the conference room, where the rest of them were still gathered around the big table. They were talking among themselves, and he noticed that several of them had wide eyes. Sam sat down at the table with them and turned on the big monitor on the wall, which was tuned to the security cameras in the holding room.

  Sam watched as Eric finally released his mother from the embrace he had wrapped around her, and the two of them sat down side by side in the chairs at the table. For a moment, they only looked at one another, and Sam was struck by the look of complete adoration in the older woman’s face.

  "Hi, Mom," Eric said.“I cannot believe it,” she said, her smile broad. “When they told me they were going to bring you to visit me, I was sure it was some kind of a trick.” She bounced up and down on her seat, a visible sign of her excitement. “Well, don’t just sit there,” she said. “Tell me how you’ve been. I haven’t seen you in just about forever, you know.”

  “I guess I’ve been okay,” Eric said. “I’ve been going a little bit crazy, trying to figure out some way to get in touch with you, but they watch me pretty closely.” He wiped at his eyes and nose with his long sleeve. “Oh, Mom, I can’t believe we finally get to look at each other again.”

  Sam caught Darren looking up at him, and he was sure Darren was thinking about their earlier talk. Agreeing to the visit may have been a small price to pay for the help Eric had just given them. Sam nodded and then turned back to the monitor.

  “I can’t believe how much deeper your voice is,” Louise Brenner said. “Last time I saw you, your voice was cracking and squeaking.”

  Eric chuckled suddenly, and Sam couldn’t suppress a grin. “Of course my voice is deeper, Mom,” the kid said. “It’s called puberty. I was on the verge of it when they arrested me, remember? I guess the stress just brought it on harder, because it hit me like an atomic bomb over the next couple of months. That’s enough about me, tell me how you’ve been doing. I heard about you getting arrested, of course, so what in the world were you thinking?”

  Louise rolled her eyes. “Well, they wouldn’t let me visit you,” she said. “I figured it was worth trying to sneak in and see you.”

  Darren slowly got up from his chair and picked up his coffee cup. "I think I’m ready for a refill."

  Jade cleared her throat and quickly joined him, but Summer, Steve, Walter and Denny stayed. All of them except Walter kept their eyes glued to the monitor, where the reunion was still playing out. Walter was busy reading through notes he had taken while Eric was talking.

  Eric chuckled, but his voice lacked much humor. “It was a dumb idea, Mom,” he said. “Now you have a criminal record. Even if they were going to give me a chance to come back out into the world, they’ll have restrictions on how much time I can spend around you, now.”

  “No, it was worth it,” she said. “Granted, it would’ve been better if I had been successful and not gotten caught.” They both chuckled at that. “Now, though? It doesn’t even matter. I got a chance to go to school while I was locked up, which means I’ll be able to get a better job when I get out. Secretary, can you imagine? Your old mom as a secretary?”

  Eric shrugged and chuckled. “Step up from bartender, anyway. If it lets you live better, then maybe it isn’t all bad.”

  “So, how did you arrange this?” Louise asked. “I didn’t think we were allowed to see each other at all.”

  “I can’t tell you details,” Eric said. “There are cameras up in the corners of the room, so I’m sure somebody is watching and listening. You know that NFH likes to basically rent us out to consult, sometimes? Well, these people needed someone to help them figure out a puzzle, and I guess I had the qualifications they were looking for. I’ve been requested a few times in the past, but I always refused unless the deal included the chance to visit with you.” He shrugged. “This time, somebody went for it.”

  “So, do they pay you for doing this kind of consulting?”

  “I get some money on my commissary account,” Eric said. “Why? Do you need some money? I can ask if maybe they can transfer some over to you.”

  Louise shook her head, smiling. “No, no, I’m fine. I just figured it would be good if they give you something for using that marvelous brain of yours.”

  Sam turned down the volume and tried to tune out the visuals as he pushed the file in front of him toward Denny. "I think the kid gave us a pretty good run down,” he said. “We need to get started looking at retired policemen."

  Denny nodded. "I agree, and I think Jade was going to get started on it. On the other hand, I’m thinking about the torture the victims went through. If Eric is right, then our killer already knows everything about his victims. Why bother torturing them?"

  “According to Eric,” Summer said, “he just wants them to admit they’re golddiggers, that they played their husbands for the alimony they could collect.” She shook her head. “I hate to admit it, but he makes a lot of sense. If this guy really feels his wife took him to the cleaners, that could explain the way he targets his victims.”

  “But Eric says,” Denny added, “that only one victim in each group is the one that really matters to him. The other two are only taken and killed to try to confuse the investigation.” He shook his head. “Bloody bastard. We’ve got to stop this bugger, Sam.”

  “Damn right we do,” Sam said. “And we will. Let’s get busy. We’ll start by searching for retired and divorced officers with SWAT training, as Eric suggested.”

  Denny, Summer, Walter and Steve got up to head for their cubicles
. With the new information Eric had provided, the search for the killer was about to take on new life.

  Sam went to his office and turned to his own computer, then picked up the phone to call his wife. Indie answered on the second ring.

  “Hey, babe,” she said. “How’s it going?”

  “This NFH thing may be paying off,” Sam said. “This kid, Eric, was able to show us a couple of things we had missed. Turns out we’re looking for a retired police officer, probably a former SWAT member. His wife divorced him somewhere over ten years ago and took him for alimony pretty hard. One of the victims in each group is a substitute for her, but the rest are simply murdered to try to keep the investigation off-track.”

  “Oh, Sam, that’s terrible. That means more than a dozen women have died just to cover up what he’s really doing?”

  “Yeah, that’s the way it looks. Do me a favor and see what you can find. We don’t know if this is a local officer or somebody who moved here after he retired. These guys are pretty good with computers, but not as good as you.”

  “I’ll get on it right now,” Indie said. “I’ll call you if I find anything.”

  Sam hung up the phone and brought up the video from the interrogation room on his computer, then turned the sound on again. Eric and his mother were talking about a vacation they had taken back when he was a child, and Sam could see that the boy had been crying again.

  “That was just before Dad left,” Eric said. “I know you always said it wasn’t my fault, but I can’t help feeling like it was. Dad was always trying to show me he was smarter than me, like he just couldn’t handle the thought that his son might actually have a higher IQ than he did.”

  “He was jealous,” Louise admitted. “He’d always thought of himself as pretty smart, till you came along, but that isn’t why he left, Eric.” She bit her bottom lip for a moment, then looked him in the eye. “Eric, there’s something I’ve never told you. Back before you were born, your dad and I—well, we didn’t always get along very well.” She lowered her eyes to the table for a moment. “He’d come home from work and be all pissed off about something, and he’d start to take it out on me, yelling and carrying on like whatever problem he had was my fault. I got tired of that after a while, and it turned into a lot of fighting.”