by J. D. Robb
“Undoubtedly. Dorian Kuper, the cellist.”
“Did you know him?”
With a shake of his head, Roarke stepped back, took off his shirt. “By reputation only, and I’ve heard him play. How was he killed? The reports were very thin – deliberately so, I assume.”
“He was tortured for two days before they – and it was they – sliced open his belly and let him bleed out.”
Roarke pulled on a gray sweater, and made Eve wonder why the color had looked so dull and stiff in Earnestina’s apartment, and was so rich and soft over Roarke’s torso.
“Back to reality, indeed,” Roarke murmured. “ ‘They’? You’ve identified his killers?”
“Not yet, but there are two, and he wasn’t their first. He was a long way from their first.”
“It sounds as if we should have a glass of wine, a meal, and you should tell me.”
“I could use a glass of wine. Sexual sadists,” she began as they walked out of the bedroom together. “With a twist.”
She ran it through for him as she would for another cop. He might’ve winced at the comparison, but he could – and did – think like a cop.
While she arranged her board, he put a meal together. Which meant she wouldn’t get pizza, but compromises had to be made. It was in the marriage rules. He certainly made them, she thought, just by having the meal in her office at the little table with murder and death on full display.
“You believe New York was their destination.”
“Long-term, can’t say, but you’ve only got to look at the map, see their kill spots. It’s not an arrow from point to point, but any time they veered off, then shifted right back – north and east.”
She took the wine he offered, gestured with it to the map. “Detours, that’s how it looks to me. Maybe you need fuel for your vehicle, for yourselves, or there’s some attraction, or someone you know, so you jog off a few miles.”
“But come back,” he said, nodding, “to that same direction. What do they take from their victims?”
See, she thought. Cop thinking. “Cash and jewelry if there is any. A vehicle, or in some cases parts from a vehicle. Most – not all – of their known victims run in the high-risk area. LCs, the homeless, but they target others. Often remote areas. A woman in her seventies living alone. They used her residence as their torture/kill zone, took her easy-to-transport valuables. A guy in his twenties heading home on the back roads, late – from a bar. They used some vacant cabin for him.”
“And no trace?”
“They wipe it clean – maybe they seal up, maybe the forensics have been sloppy.” Too many to know, she thought, too many to pick over, step-by-step. “I can’t say for certain. But at least one of them’s organized enough to be careful. They haven’t found all the kill zones. The killers don’t leave the body where they work as a rule. They use dump sites, and generally a fair distance off. And plastic tarps.”
“So, someone might think they’ve had a break-in, but without the blood, the gore, not report a possible murder.”
“Exactly. And by the time they’ve put some of it together, the crime scene’s been thoroughly compromised. Lucky,” she mused. “Some of it’s just luck. Organized, careful, but lucky.”
“Come eat.” He took her hand, drew her over to the table.
The square white plates held a line of pork medallions drizzled with some sort of sauce, a golden huddle of roasted potatoes flecked with herbs, and a colorful medley of winter vegetables.
He had a much more creative hand with the AutoChef, she considered, than she ever would.
“The heart, the initials,” he began.
“Their signature.”
“Yes, but also a declaration, don’t you think? Not only we did this together, but we are together.”
“True love.”
“Wouldn’t they think so? The heart holding their initials symbolizes just that. Add the fact they don’t use their victims sexually.”
“Because they’re committed to each other, and that would be cheating.”
“Without the heart, what would you have concluded?”
Considering, she ate – whatever the drizzle of sauce was, it had some kick. “I would probably have concluded team. It’s possible for one killer to select, lure, overcome and torture with varied strokes. But it’s more likely two, given the range of the victims. A woman’s less likely to stop on the side of the road for a strange man, or open the door to one at night. Two of the LCs weren’t licensed for same sex – not that they wouldn’t have potentially gone off menu, but best probability: The client was male. Easier, too, for a lone woman to lure a single male with the will-you-give-me-a-hand-with-this-heavy-object ploy.”
“So your most likely conclusion would be a two-person team: one male, one female.”
“Most likely. I wouldn’t have ruled out a single, but most likely. But…” She nodded as she ate. “Without the heart I wouldn’t have seen them as a couple, as romantically linked. Sex, sure, but not romantically.”
She nodded again. “And they want to be acknowledged as that. Interesting.”
“Where’s the trigger?”
She smiled now, and though they were always low on her list, sampled the vegetables. “You know, not all criminals think like a cop.”
“The successful ones – even reformed – do.” He picked up his wine, studied her over it. “It’s unlikely they woke up one morning and decided. Well now, what do you say we take a ride out today, find ourselves someone to torture and kill – at least not without what they saw as cause. One of them may have killed in a rage or in defense of the other – the romantic angle again – or even by accident.”
“Which could have set them off,” Eve agreed. “Or they discovered torture as a sexual stimulant by happy accident during the commission of another crime. Or one brought the other in on his/her perverted hobby.”
Roarke glanced toward the board. “It appears they’re skilled hobbyists.”
“Yeah, and that’s a hitch for me. How do you get good at anything?”
“Innate ability and true interest lay a foundation. But it’s practice, isn’t it, that hones a skill. They didn’t start with the victim currently first on your board.”
“I don’t think so. You can see they’ve escalated, gradually. Less time between – but then a longer gap. Consistently they kept the victim alive longer until they settled on the two-day period. But the teamwork seems too smooth to have started where we have them now. And those gaps?”
“Victims not yet found or identified as such.”
“There the FBI and I are in disagreement. Their profilers think the twenty is it – or close. Twenty-one now with Kuper. I think those gaps are most likely as-yet-unfound vics. Killers like this don’t de-escalate unless they’re forced to stop for a period of time. They lean in my direction with the longer gaps, but they’re focused on this group, this route. They have a low probability of a vic before the woman in Nashville. And they’ve spent too much time debating if they’re serial or spree killers.”
“I doubt the terminology matters to the victims, or those who loved them.”
“Yeah. You fill in these gaps with vics – no cooling-off period. You consider the victimology – no specific type, chosen at random. You’ve got spree killers, sexual sadists who can feel, but only for each other. Most likely a man and a woman, most likely somewhat attractive, nonthreatening in appearance and demeanor. In none of the interviews or canvasses, including my own, has anyone remembered an individual or individuals who stood out, who seemed off.”
“So they do neither.”
“Ordinary enough not to stick out. Smart enough not to do anything that draws attention. A couple, that lowers suspicion right there. Having drinks at a bar, checking into a motel, renting a cabin. Switching vehicles regularly, so by the time we’re looking for one, they’re in another.”
“It’s early to be frustrated, isn’t it?”
“For Kuper, yeah, but when
you look at the whole picture, they’ve had a hell of a streak. I’ve got a hell of a lot of data, but nothing that pins them.”
“What do you do next?”
“Keep pushing on Kuper. Why did they choose that neighborhood? Was it completely random, or was there a specific reason? We have one wit who saw the vehicle, so we push there. Dark all-terrain or van, and he was leaning toward a van. We do what we can do for Kuper, but we need to find the first. We have to work back from the first known, look at missing persons, at unsolveds, at what was deemed accidental death. Everything rays out from the first.”
“Aren’t the feds doing just that?”
“They’ve got somebody poking, but primarily they’re focused from the first known and forward. I need to reach out to local law enforcement south and west of the first known. Missing persons,” she continued. “Runaways, accidents, unsolveds.”
“Won’t that be fun?”
“Not even close.” She blew out a breath, picked up her wine. “I’m going to run probabilities, using the current route, working back from the first known.”
“I can do that for you, and faster. You don’t have any financial data searches to entertain me. The geography and navigation should.”
“It’s all yours, ace. Thanks.” She cut a small bite of pork. “This couple, they came from somewhere, that’s another key. They grew up with parents or fosters, had some education, some source of income. And, given their profile, one or both of them probably has a sheet and some history of violent behavior.”
“History together?” Roarke wondered. “That bond.”
“I don’t see long-term history, unless we find the killings go back years. And I don’t see them getting away with this for years before it hit the radar. They’re not kids,” she continued. “People tend to notice kids. Yeah, I saw a couple of kids hanging out around there. Why aren’t they in school? What trouble are they getting into? Plus anybody skewing teens, early twenties, isn’t likely to have the control needed to target a vic, have a place to hold one, wipe everything. Probably not out of their thirties, either.”
“And why is that?”
“How do you squash these impulses that long? They’re in there – they just needed the right trigger. Everybody’s capable of killing, given the right circumstances. Not everybody’s capable of torture. Add the heart in again? Not everyone’s capable of enjoying or romanticizing torture.”
She nudged her plate aside. “Would you kill for me?”
“I would, yes, of course.”
“Jesus, don’t say it without even a second’s thought.”
“I don’t need a second’s thought. Consider who we are, Eve. We’re both capable of killing, and have done so. But there’s… criteria. Would I kill to protect you, to save your life, to save you from harm? Without hesitation. Would I kill because you said, Do me a favor, I’d like this person dead? I don’t have to give it a second thought as you’d never say that, want that, ask that.”
“If I did.”
He polished off his wine. “I think we’d have to have quite a conversation.”
“Okay.” That satisfied her. “Would you torture someone for me?”
His brow lifted. “We are stepping into odd territories. All right, then, I’ll follow you in. To save or protect you from harm, if I believed torture – of any nature – would accomplish that, then, yes, I would. Would I – or you in the same circumstances – find that increased sexual passion, no. Deliberately causing pain is an ugly business. We’ve both been used physically, emotionally, and know how ugly it is.”
“That’s right. Some people who’ve experienced abuse become abusers. So I need to look at that, too. Somebody hurt her – a parent, authority figure, spouse, partner. Now you’re the one in control. You’re the one who gets to deliver the pain and the fear.”
She rose, wandered to the board. “But not for payback, not right out anyway. Because it feels good. Who knew how good, how exciting it could be to cause the pain, the fear? And now that you know it, you can’t stop.”
“An addiction.”
“Exactly. And again that’s why it didn’t start here.” She tapped the board, the image of the first victim. “This wasn’t the first taste. They knew what it was going to feel like here. The first? That was a surprise. Maybe what you’d call a revelation. I know what they are. I’ve got a pretty good sense of what they are already. But who, and why. I can’t see it.”
He rose as well, came over to stand behind her. He laid his hands on her shoulders, brushed his lips over the top of her head. “And it worries you because you know there’ll be another.”
“New York’s the biggest urban area they’ve been in, that we know. And when I look at the map, the route, that holds true. Here, they can pick and choose like nowhere else. That has to be exciting. And motivating.”
“So they’ll want another quickly.”
“If they don’t already have one, they will within another day. I’d be surprised if it took any longer. Two days to play with the victim before the kill. The last two, Kuper and the vic in New Jersey, barely a week between the grabs. Addicts always need more and quicker. It won’t be long before they need another.”
“As who they are and when they started are key, I’ll work up your probabilities.”
“Thanks. You put the meal on the table, I’ll take care of the debris.”
“Fair enough.” He tipped her face up to his a moment, tapped the shallow dent in her chin. “All and all – considering who we are – it’s good to be home.”
When he went into his adjoining office she carted the dishes into the kitchen, stacked them in the washer. They made a good team, she thought, worked well together – the cop and the (former) criminal. The ridiculously rich man with his roots in the alleyways of Dublin, and the woman who’d squeezed out a life on a cop’s salary who’d grown up in the system after the nightmare of her first eight years.
Few – including herself – would have predicted they’d match and mesh as they had. That they’d become all to each other.
She doubted the killers she sought seemed so ill-matched on the surface. People noticed such things, too. They looked right together, she believed. Looked as people expected a couple to look.
And they sure as hell worked well together.
She thought of Roarke again, and how easily she’d agreed to accept his offer of help on an official investigation.
Trust, she realized. Not just attraction, not just passion, not just a mutual goal. There had to be trust to work as a team.
With that in mind she went back to her desk to review her notes.
7
Eve read Baxter’s roundup of the interviews, did a spot-check on the recordings. Nothing stood out, nothing popped – and she hadn’t expected it. But it gave her a chance to evaluate Trueheart’s interview techniques, his rhythm.
A good balance with Baxter’s slicker style, she decided.
She made another note to team Trueheart up in interviews with other detectives, take him out of his comfort zone.
She finalized another report to Whitney and Mira with her conclusions that data and evidence indicated Kuper had been a random victim, the last known in a long-term spree by two unsubs, and not target specific.
She let Morris know they’d ID’d Earnestina. Morris reported that the victim’s mother had come in, had asked when she could have her son. Eve recommended the body be turned over to the next of kin or her representative as soon as possible.
No point, she thought, just no point in prolonging the misery. Kuper’s body had told them all it could.
She reached out to two more primaries, which entailed long, winding conversations, no fresh insights or information, and promises on all sides to share all data.
When Roarke came back in, she was running fresh probabilities on the New Jersey victim.
“I’ve generated several routes, with three being top contenders,” he told her. “These three run too close in probability to pul
l one out at this point. Even those would have any number of variance.”
“Can I see them, on screen?”
He set it up. “This brings them from southeast Texas, through Louisiana, into Arkansas, touching into Mississippi before meeting up with your first known in Tennessee. It also speculates, as you see from the highlighted points, other most probable stops in Tennessee, and across the Missouri border through Kentucky, which eliminates the gap before West Virginia, and the second point in West Virginia. Another in the western part of Maryland eliminates the gap prior to Ohio. You’ve two in Pennsylvania, but it seemed unusual, and the computer agreed, that they wouldn’t hunt in one of that area’s more rural, less populated areas, so there’s yet another point there before the jog over to New Jersey, then into New York.”
“Some detours, but a fairly direct route northeast.”
“The second comes from the west. I started as far west as California, across Nevada, into Arizona, through New Mexico. Touching on Texas, then into Oklahoma, once again into Arkansas, and the route remains as the first from there.”
“California. A long way, a lot of time.” A lot of potential bodies, Eve thought.
“Both, yes. It would be a southeastern route to start, curving into a northeastern direction. The last route supposes they had a purpose in Tennessee or changed directions there, initially coming from Florida, going through sections of Alabama and Georgia, potentially Mississippi again before your first known in Tennessee, and the following route would remain as the other two.”
“What’s the probability range?”
“From 70.2 to 73.4. It’s far too speculative for higher without more hard data.”
“Let’s take the third one.” She studied it, tried to imagine it. “Coming from the south – where it’s warm and sunny, right? They’d have started out in the fall – most likely – for this timeline – but winter’s coming. People do leave the warm and sunny for the cold and bitter, but if you’re on a killing spree, and you’ve pulled it off in the warm, why not wait for spring to drive so far north?”