Aberration

by Lisa Regan

  Awkwardly, I followed suit, using only one hand. I used the other one to cover my mouth and nose. We stepped out of the rental car. It was a humid, sunny morning in the most affluent suburb of Philadelphia. The uniformed men and women bustling about Martin Sorenson’s house seemed just as out of place as the yellow crime scene tape sealing the area.

  Like Sorenson’s, the homes in his neighborhood were large, elegant and meticulously kept. Lawns sparkled green, cut as fastidiously and precisely as the greens of a golf course. Almost every yard boasted an expensively landscaped garden, all of which likely went unappreciated by their busy owners.

  We slipped under the tape and walked to the front door. The intensity of the smell was like a kick to the shin. A blast of frigid air hit us as we entered. It felt as though someone had turned the central air in the house to full blast, but it didn’t dispel the stench.

  “Good Lord,” TK muttered. We glanced at one another. Both our eyes watered.

  “Hey guys.”

  We were so overwhelmed by the smell that we hadn’t noticed Tony Aiello. Tony was a crime scene tech for the city of Philadelphia—on loan to Ardmore PD to help process the Sorenson scene. Both TK and I had worked with him on a number of cases in the past. He was a nice guy—astute and helpful. Guys like him were the reason I never minded working in Philadelphia. It had become one of my favorite places to work, which was ironic since it was the city where Lexie had died sixteen years earlier. Ardmore was just outside the city.

  Tony smiled and pulled a jar of Vicks VapoRub out of his pocket. “I’ve been to a lot of crime scenes, but this is the worst smelling, hands down.”

  He handed me the VapoRub, and I immediately smeared a generous glob on my upper lip. TK did the same.

  “One of the guys went to the drug store and got us some jars,” Tony explained.

  The menthol didn’t cover the smell entirely, but it helped. Tony slipped the jar back into his pocket. “You’re only supposed to need this stuff in the morgue,” he added.

  We followed Tony toward the back of the house. “It smells like a landfill,” TK observed.

  “Really?” I said dryly. “All I can smell is rotting flesh.”

  Tony shook his head. “Wait till you see this one,” he said.

  We stopped outside the door to a small room. A uniformed officer from the local police department stood guard, monitoring who went in and out of the room. His face was pale green. Tony waved him off, and the man looked grateful for the break.

  “Looks like this was originally used as a laundry room,” Tony said.

  The room was windowless and not much bigger than a walk-in closet. A washer and dryer stood against one wall. TK stopped abruptly as he entered the room. Poking my head around his large frame, I took in the scene.

  The garbage was easily two foot deep. The washer and dryer backed against one wall like defeated sentries, their white sheen now smudge gray. A large form lay amid the trash. Martin Sorenson’s skin was waxy and translucent, thickened by death like the sole of a well-used shoe.

  “Are those maggots?” TK asked, gesturing toward a clump of waste at our feet.

  Tony nodded.

  I pulled my gaze from the floor. On the wall to our right large chunks of bland beige drywall had been gouged out, spelling the words FOR YOU.

  In spite of the heavy July heat, the movement of air through the house felt like an icy squall at my back.

  “Here’s the County detective,” Tony called.

  The man was in his fifties, tall and thin with gray whiskers protruding from the edges of his moustache. Tony introduced him as Umstead. TK and I stepped away from the door as Umstead smudged a fresh glop of menthol beneath his nose. He nodded at us and pulled a notebook from his inside jacket pocket.

  “Martin Sorenson, age fifty-eight. Married with a thirteen-year-old daughter, but his wife took the kid and left six weeks ago. One of the neighbors called it in. They thought the smell was from a sewage backup. Coroner estimates the time of death between seventy-two to ninety-six hours ago.”

  I swiped futilely at my nose which burned. “Wow... That’s four days.”

  Umstead nodded. “This guy was a philosophy professor at Temple University. He’d been pretty depressed since the wife and kid left. Apparently, he’s very eccentric so the other professors in his department didn’t really notice that he hadn’t been in the office. Then the Fourth of July holiday—no one noticed him missing.”

  “Temple University?” I said.

  “Was he teaching summer courses?” TK asked.

  Umstead checked his notes. “One class.”

  “Let me guess,” TK interjected. “None of his students bothered to alert anyone to his absence.”

  A light shrug was as close as Umstead came to a smile. “From what I gathered, he wasn’t real well-liked.”

  The memory returned to me in pieces, like shattered glass. Seventeen years ago. Sorenson’s office. Him screaming at me, spittle flying from his mouth. It had to be the same guy. How many Martin Sorensons taught Philosophy at Temple?

  “He wasn’t,” I said flatly.

  I looked back toward the death scene where only the vague hill of Martin Sorenson’s stomach could be seen. Garbage trickled out of the doorway like autumn leaves tracked into the house.

  “That’s right,” TK said. “You went to Temple for your undergrad.”

  I nodded and turned back toward the two men. Umstead’s face was a grimace, but I couldn’t tell if he always looked that way or if it was a reaction to the foul odor. “My daughter just started there last fall,” he said.

  “I had to take Philosophy 101 as part of my General Education credits. Sorenson was terrible.”

  After nearly two decades and the beating from Sala, there were few college professors whose names or classes I remembered, but Martin Sorenson had been particularly brutal.

  “I remember him. He was just mean. He always implied that teaching was beneath him—like he was too smart for it, but he had to do it to make a living. There was a guy in my class who had cerebral palsy. He was in a wheelchair with all these adaptive devices for note taking and speaking.

  “He was smart but Sorenson didn’t have the patience to listen to the guy. Kept telling the kid that if he needed a wheelchair, he had no business being in a college class.”

  Umstead made a sound deep in his throat and hung his head. “They say you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but what an asshole.”

  I nodded. “Do you have a preliminary cause of death?”

  Umstead shook his head. “Nope, we won’t know much till after the autopsy. No signs of blunt force trauma, no signs of strangulation or asphyxiation. He’s just dead. But we got a lot of white powder mixed in with the garbage so we’ll run some labs and toxicology on Sorenson to see what we come up with.”

  “Could be arsenic,” I said. “Poison is certainly a passive way of killing someone.”

  “Yeah,” TK agreed. “Just like asphyxiating them. Where’d the trash come from?”

  “It’s his,” Umstead said, glancing at the room where crime scene techs now carefully bagged and logged each item of refuse. “Sanitation department said he’s been putting his garbage cans out empty, but one of the neighbors said Sorenson always put them out the night before—full.”

  “So our UNSUB was picking it up,” I said. “Saving it for this occasion. How long? How long was this guy collecting Sorenson’s trash?”

  Umstead checked his notes and this time his grimace was directly related to the crime scene at hand. “Six weeks,” he said.

  “That’s a long time,” I commented. “A lot of planning. No sign of forced entry. No obvious signs of trauma to his body, but Sorenson is a big guy and the UNSUB somehow got him into the laundry room.”

  “Yeah, but how d
id the UNSUB get in here in the first place—there were no signs of a struggle,” TK said.

  “The same way he got into Georgette Paul’s house. Either he is a real smooth-talker or he’s controlling the scene with a gun.” I said.

  TK nodded and turned to Umstead. “Did your guys canvass the neighborhood to see if anyone saw anything suspicious?”

  “Sure did. The neighbors on the west side have been away on a cruise for the last two weeks. The neighbor on the east side said she thought she saw a green van parked in Sorenson’s driveway a few nights ago, but she didn’t get a good look at it—can’t give us a make or model. She said she was just driving past and that the van was pretty far up Sorenson’s driveway, closer to the house than the street. Neighbors directly across the street didn’t notice anything unusual. My guys will keep working it though.”

  I sighed. “Well, the driveways are long and secluded. There’s a lot of foliage between houses. It’s possible the UNSUB drove right up to the house with no one the wiser.”

  “That’s pretty bold,” Umstead said.

  I shrugged. “Yeah but Sorenson wasn’t well liked. People probably didn’t care enough about him to notice who, if anyone, was coming and going. So let’s assume the UNSUB drove into the driveway without being noticed. He knocks on the door, Sorenson answers and the UNSUB smooth talks his way in. Then he pulls out a gun. Sorenson does what he’s told.”

  Umstead sighed and motioned toward the laundry room. “Seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to just to kill someone.”

  “It is but this wasn’t really about the killing, it was about humiliating Sorenson,” I replied. “BTK—the Wichita Strangler—he used a gun to control his first crime scene, but he never shot anyone. He made the victims believe that he was just there to rob them. The gun scared them into compliance so that he could carry out his bondage fantasies. He killed a family of four his first time out without firing a shot. Of course, I think that’s where the similarities between these two killers end.”

  “I agree,” TK said.

  Both mine and TK’s cell phones rang simultaneously. I jumped at the sound. Again we met each other’s eyes. Then I fished my phone out of my jacket pocket and flipped it open.

  “Bishop,” I said.

  Talia Crossen’s voice came through as clearly as if she were standing beside me. “You’re going to Trenton,” she said without preamble.

  “Trenton, New Jersey?” I asked.

  TK’s broad shoulders slumped.

  “There’s been another one,” Crossen said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  KASSIDY

  July 8th

  “This guy works fast,” I said.

  “I hate New Jersey.”

  “Serials usually have a cooling down period,” I went on. “This guy did two in four days.”

  Boyd Henderson’s body was splayed in the middle of his living room, his pale skin, bra and miniskirt like a splash of color on a dull palette. The locals had already worked the scene over, taking photos, collecting what trace evidence they could find, and dusting for prints, but we always liked to study a fresh crime scene on our own given the opportunity. BAU agents rarely saw a fresh scene. Our work was largely academic and our profiles were written after reading police reports and studying photos of crime scenes.

  We stood in the doorway of Henderson’s Trenton home, waiting for their homicide detective to get off the phone. Emmett Lane was a short, bald black man with a stocky frame and fastidiously cropped facial hair. His crisp black suit made him seem out of place in Henderson’s dated house, with its nubby shag carpets and dark paneled walls. There was something defeated about the place.

  Lane stood in the corner of the living room, just a few feet from Henderson’s body, talking rapidly in a low voice into his cell phone. As he spoke, he lifted his chin in acknowledgement. He pulled a small black notebook out of his jacket pocket and waved us over. He ended his call and dropped the phone into his other pocket as we approached.

  “Emmett Lane,” he said, shaking both our hands and taking a quick glance at our credentials. “I’m with Trenton Homicide. Glad you guys could come. This is a weird one. I saw the advisory and thought it might be the same guy.”

  “Glad you’re close enough that we could get here in time to see the scene,” TK said.

  “Who found him?” I asked.

  Lane looked at his notepad and back at me. “A customer. Henderson was an antiques dealer. He had a guy stopping by this morning to pick something up—something he had purchased online. Henderson didn’t answer the door, the guy took a peek through the front windows, thought he saw Henderson lying on the floor and called us.”

  “No one else lives here?”

  Lane shook his head. “I talked to one neighbor and one colleague. They both said he lives alone. No girlfriend—or boyfriend. He’s been divorced ten years. No kids. We did a door-to-door canvass of the street, but it didn’t turn up anything. But this is a busy street. An unusual vehicle wouldn’t stand out around here. Based on the coroner’s initial exam, he thinks Henderson’s been dead for twenty-four hours. We won’t know the cause of death till the ME gets him on the autopsy table, but his head is pretty banged up.”

  I took a look around. The place was sparsely furnished—a couch, one end table and a television on a small entertainment center. None of the furniture was overturned. The lamp on the end table hadn’t been knocked over. “He didn’t put up a fight,” I said.

  Lane nodded. “He must have believed that the killer might let him go if he just did as he was told.”

  “Mind if we look around?” TK said.

  Lane’s phone vibrated, the buzzing sound audible. “Go ahead,” he said. “Just about everything’s been processed, we’re just waiting for the bus to come get him. I have to take this call.”

  TK and I each donned a pair of latex gloves which he took from the pocket of his suit jacket. I knelt beside Boyd Henderson’s body, gently probing the thin strap of Henderson’s ill-fitting, red bra. It looked brand new.

  TK knelt beside me and lifted Henderson’s other arm, first checking for defensive wounds on the forearms. He sighed. “Nothing.”

  I studied Henderson’s other forearm. “Nothing over here either.”

  TK pulled his latex gloves off with a snap and stuffed them into his pocket. He surveyed the room once more, his gaze landing on the words “for you” scrawled in bright red lipstick across Henderson’s living room wall.

  Gingerly, I moved around Henderson’s body. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, his last expression frozen on his face. It looked like he had begged for mercy. One side of his skull was cracked open, brain matter seeping into the carpet beneath him

  I had already seen the pinpoint petechiae in his eyes, which meant he had been suffocated, and like Georgette Paul, the blunt trauma to his skull had been inflicted postmortem.

  “These wounds look the same as Paul’s,” I noted.

  “Baseball bat again?” TK asked.

  I nodded. I pointed toward a couch cushion lying above Henderson’s head. “Looks like he used that to suffocate him.”

  I moved down toward Henderson’s feet. Even though I wore nylons beneath my skirt, my knees felt naked against Henderson’s carpet. Carefully, I slipped the red four-inch-heeled pump from Henderson’s right foot.

  “Blisters,” I said.

  TK crouched beside me as I pointed out the red marks where the pump had dug into Henderson’s skin. “They’re fresh,” he said. “Looks like the UNSUB made him walk the runway.”

  I walked over to the wall, which bore the killer’s signature words. I used the tip of one latex covered finger to smudge the lipstick. It was just beginning to harden. Like the rest of the scene, it was still fresh.

  I turned away from the killer’s mural and took in
the sterility of the crime scene. One of the responding officers led a crime scene technician into the room. The tech began carving out the piece of drywall with the killer’s message on it.

  “Do you know if Henderson was a neat freak?” I asked Lane after he ended his second call.

  He shrugged. “Well, the neighbor and the colleague described him as anal so probably.”

  “What about women’s clothing? You guys find any in the house?”

  “Nope. We didn’t find anything to indicate that Henderson was into cross-dressing.”

  Which meant that the UNSUB had brought the women’s clothing to the scene. Lane motioned toward Henderson’s body. “They’ll send the clothes for processing when they get him down to the ME’s office.”

  I nodded and thanked him. TK and I toured the rest of Boyd Henderson’s home, which was neatly kept and unremarkable. There were no adornments in any of the rooms. Nothing to suggest a man lived and slept in the house. Even Henderson’s bedroom had the temporary air of a hotel room. The only oddity was a stack of newspapers next to the bed, probably fifty of them. They were three days old. There was a newspaper from every major city within a hundred miles.

  I thumbed through the newspapers, listening to TK’s footsteps echoing in the hallway. He poked his head into the bedroom. “You ready?” he said.

  Without turning, I said, “Yes.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  KASSIDY

  August 22nd

  “I thought this guy would be on a rampage by now, but he’s gone completely silent,” TK said. He stood at the head of the conference room table, facing me and Talia. Behind him, crime scene photos of the For You Killer’s three victims lined the wall.

  “He’s stalking his next victim,” I said.

  Talia tapped her pen against the table. “We can’t know that for sure.”

  “No, we can’t, but serial killers don’t just stop,” I replied.