Wrath's Storm: A Masters' Admiralty Novel

by Mari Carr

  “Yes. Which means that their guard may have been down, as you said, but it also made them inherently less vulnerable. That, plus the public nature of where they were taken most likely means that the unsub approached them and used some sort of ruse or pretense to get them to deviate from that routine enough to be vulnerable.”

  Jakob nodded. “And English is widely spoken in all those countries?”

  “Yes, I checked, and over half the population in both Belgium and Poland speak English fluently.”

  “And most of them are probably in the large cities.”

  “Precisely.”

  When she smiled, Jakob smiled back. It was for only a moment, but it was enough to take her breath away.

  “Do you believe you have enough to start a profile?” he asked.

  Annalise glanced at her notes and took a deep breath as something she hadn’t felt in a very long time washed through her.

  Excitement? Self-assurance? The thrill of the chase?

  All of those things that had made her good at her job were suddenly there again, and she was tempted to rise from the couch, walk over to Jakob…and what? Hug him? Kiss him? Drag him to her bed?

  She dismissed those notions and picked up her pen, flipping the pages of the notebook until she found a blank sheet of paper.

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  Chapter Five

  Walt added another teaspoon of sugar to his coffee after taking a sip as Eric smirked. The fleet admiral drank his coffee black and strong and obviously viewed Walt’s desire for added sweetness as a personal flaw.

  Walt rolled his eyes in response, unconcerned what Eric thought. He was a Southern boy through and through, so that meant he liked sugar. A lot. In his coffee, in his iced tea, and in his mama’s so-sweet-you-get-a-cavity-looking-at-them Christmas cookies.

  Maybe the flaw was Eric’s. God knew the man could use a little sweetness in his life.

  They’d arrived at the restaurant in Frankfurt a half hour before the meeting time they’d arranged with Dr. Annalise Fischer and her bodyguard, Jakob. Eric claimed he wanted to do some reconnaissance of the place.

  The fleet admiral took paranoid behavior to the next level. But considering his position and the current case they were working—he, Walt Hayden, was on a case. Ha!—Walt didn’t have a problem with the extra precautions.

  He and Eric had spent the last few days cooling their heels in a Frankfurt hotel, while they waited for Annalise to create her profile of the serial killer. It was safe to say no one would ever accuse Eric of being a patient man. He’d prowled the room like a caged tiger, until Walt had hit his limit and gone out to play tourist in Frankfurt, a city he’d never had the opportunity to visit before.

  “Hello.”

  Walt rose at the sound of Annalise’s voice as she approached their table.

  “Dr. Fischer. It’s good to see you again.” Walt reached out to shake her hand and watched as Jakob shifted closer. The man took his responsibility as Annalise’s bodyguard very seriously.

  “Please, call me Annalise.”

  Walt nodded, smiling.

  Eric gestured at the other chairs at the table. “Join us.”

  Annalise took the seat next to Walt. Jakob hesitated for a moment, glancing around the restaurant.

  “Sit, Bauer,” Eric growled. “I’ve already checked the place out.”

  Walt thought it spoke to Jakob’s level of professionalism that he didn’t take a seat until he finished his quick survey of their surroundings.

  “Fleet Admiral,” Jakob said as he sat. “Dr. Hayden.”

  The waiter stopped by to see if Annalise and Jakob wanted to place an order. Well, that’s what he assumed, since the server was speaking German.

  Jakob’s and Annalise’s accents were crisp and sort of hip, the “s” sounds becoming “z’s”, yet also intimate in the way the words flowed and paused. Walt’s knowledge of German accents was mostly from American-made movies. Neither Jakob nor Annalise had the harsh, guttural Indiana-Jones-Nazi accent he’d always associated with German. He was going to go ahead and never admit any of that out loud, since it was cultural racism. He’d just do better.

  Eric was clearly pissed off by the interruption, impatient to discover what Annalise had found.

  “We ordered coffee,” Walt said, gesturing to their cups, hoping he was adding that comment at an appropriate point.

  “That sounds good,” Annalise said, then looked to the waiter and repeated her words in German.

  The server replied in somewhat more heavily accented English. “Coffee, for you, very good.”

  Jakob raised two fingers. “And cream for her, please.”

  Annalise smiled at the Ritter, obviously pleased with Jakob’s order. Walt wondered if there was something going on between the pretty psychologist and Jakob. The sexual tension between the two was unmistakable.

  Once the server was gone, Eric sat forward, seeming both eager and grim as he looked at Annalise. “You have something.”

  She nodded. “Very preliminary. I only had time to go through the files you’d grouped under dismemberment.”

  Eric frowned. “But we don’t know if Josephine was dismembered.”

  “Precisely. You don’t know.” Annalise pulled out file folders. “From the dismembered victim group, I’ve identified two potential victims.” The top folder was labeled “Dr. Hayden.” She passed it to Walt, then handed Eric and Jakob equally innocuous folders. She set her own stack of papers, which was a bit thicker, on the table in front of her.

  Walt opened his, blinked, and muttered, “Jesus.” The first page was a full-color autopsy photo.

  “You’re a doctor.” Eric glanced at him.

  “Yes, I like alive, breathing people.”

  “Dr. Hayden, I think the place we should start is with you.”

  “Me?” Walt raised his eyebrows comically high and was rewarded with a smile from Annalise.

  “I’d like your assessment of the skill of the person who did the dismembering.”

  “Okay, give me a minute…” He glanced down at the papers and grimaced. “Actually, do you have higher-resolution versions of the photos?”

  “Jakob had suggested you might ask for that.” She reached into her bag, pulled out a tablet, and passed it over. “I loaded the images on this.”

  “Wow. It’s exactly as bad as you think it would be in high def.” Walt was inwardly horrified, but he was perfectly capable of viewing the images with a clinical eye. “I’ll need a few minutes.”

  Eric craned his neck to look at the tablet, then turned his attention back to Annalise. “Start talking. I don’t want to wait.”

  That was, undeniably, a command. Walt shook his head and sighed, but if Eric saw him, he ignored it.

  “I always begin my first lecture on the first day of abnormal psychology with a single question.” Annalise had a lovely speaking voice, calm, authoritative, and with that smart-sounding crisp accent. Walt could listen to her all day. “Do you know the definition of a serial killer?”

  She paused, and Walt took a moment to appreciate the dramatic effect.

  “My students’ answers usually range from ‘someone crazy’ to ‘someone who likes to kill people’ or, for students who’ve already taken a psych class or two, the response is usually ‘someone with a compulsive need.’ Do you know the definition of a serial killer, Fleet Admiral?”

  “Someone who needs killing,” Eric replied instantly.

  Annalise blinked, nonplussed, and beside her, Jakob stiffened a little.

  “Fleet Admiral, if you’d ever like to talk to someone…” Annalise began hesitantly.

  “Nope. I did plenty of therapy after my wives died, and I think I damn near broke the poor guy.”

  “I was sorry to hear about your wives,” Walt said softly, recalling Eric mentioning to Juliette and Devon that his wives had died. “Was it an accident?”

  Eric glanced in his direction, his jaw tight. “Assassinated.”

  A
ssassinated was an interesting word. Different from murdered. Obviously, Eric’s wives, like him, held positions of power.

  Walt wasn’t sure how to respond to the fact that both of Eric’s wives had been killed, but he didn’t have an opportunity to when Eric looked at Annalise and said, “Just keep going.”

  “Right. Of course.” Annalise took a breath.

  Walt imagined she was putting the fleet admiral’s mental health on a back burner, but only for now.

  “A serial killer is someone for whom the murder of another person fills an abnormal psychological gratification.” Annalise spoke quietly, though there was no one sitting near them. “Sometimes this is coupled with a mental disorder, other times rooted in trauma, but either way, the impetus for the killing is to satisfy a need, the same needs you or I might have, but which we satisfy in socially acceptable ways.”

  “He needs to kill people and cut their heads off,” Eric said.

  “Actually, the killing might be secondary. The fact that the people die may or may not be part of this person’s motivation.”

  “You can’t cut someone’s head off and keep them alive,” Walt pointed out.

  “Precisely. But if what you need is to remove a head from a body, the fact that they have to die for it to happen is a consequence, not the focus.”

  Beside Walt, Eric flipped open his folder, spreading out the papers. Walt turned his attention back to the images on the tablet. He told himself this was just like cadaver lab. He was looking at cadaver photos. Technically, they were pictures of cadavers, but…

  “You think these two were killed by the same person who killed Josephine,” Eric said. He’d laid three sheets of paper beside each other. They looked like the front page of a medical chart, except, that in addition to a smiling headshot, probably from an ID, on each page there was also a picture of the woman’s head after death. The pale slackness of death made them bear only a passing resemblance to the people they’d been when alive.

  There was also a large bold note with cause of death on each sheet.

  The page bearing Josephine O’Connor’s name said, “Unknown COD, Presumed Respiratory Arrest.”

  Yep, not having the brain connected to the heart was a pretty sure-fire way to cause respiratory arrest.

  “Possibly,” Annalise was saying, “but I’d like Dr. Hayden’s opinion.”

  Walt refocused on the tablet, swiping to the next picture and then enlarging it to study the details while the rest of them continued to talk.

  “Why?” Eric pulled a picture out of his folder. A woman’s body in multiple pieces, laid out like a jigsaw puzzle on a steel autopsy table.

  “Why do they do it? As I said, to satisfy their need—sexual, emotional, physical, intellectual.”

  “Intellectual?” Walt looked up at that.

  Annalise nodded. “Britain and America have—and please take no offense, Dr. Hayden—”

  “None taken, we’re a dumpster fire a lot of the time.”

  “—a high number of, and therefore an extensive body of work on, serial killers.” Annalise settled in her chair, leaning ever so slightly closer to Jakob. There was something about the two of them together that made him even more certain that they were in love. However, Walt couldn’t tell if they’d acted on those feelings. They both seemed rather reserved with each other. Maybe they were just being professional in front of the fleet admiral.

  “The Americans are nuts. Go on,” Eric prompted.

  Walt kicked Eric under the table, and the big man snorted in amusement. Everyone showed him so much deference, Walt felt like it was his job to take the Viking down a few notches whenever possible.

  “Let’s focus on the dismemberment and work under the theory that cutting up the victims is the act that satisfies the killer’s need.” Annalise pulled several papers out of her folder and spread them out, facing Eric and Walt. “The Cleveland Torso Murderer killed and dismembered at least a dozen people in Cleveland—that’s a city in America.”

  Walt snickered. “My family traveled there once when I was a kid. My mama was determined to see the Great Lakes. Did you know the house from A Christmas Story is there?”

  Eric scowled and pointed at the tablet. “Don’t make me shoot your eye out.”

  “You get that reference but not the Star Trek one?”

  “I got it. I just didn’t think it was funny.”

  Annalise glanced over at Jakob, who shrugged.

  “Sorry for the interruption, Annalise,” Walt said. “Please continue before Eric has an aneurysm.”

  “Yes…well… The bodies in Cleveland were found in pieces, sometimes in boxes or a shallow pond or wrapped up in baskets.”

  Eric stiffened at the word basket. Walt had seen the picture of Josephine’s head sitting in a basket, placed atop a cabinet in the famous Long Room of Trinity College Dublin’s library, blood dripping down the glass of the display case. It had been horrific, and Walt hadn’t even known her.

  “This particular case offered potential insight into the need—the killer sent Agent Ness, the man in charge of the investigation a letter, stating,” Annalise glanced down at her notes, “‘I felt bad operating on those people, but science must advance. I shall soon astound’—spelled incorrectly a-s-t-o-n-d-e in the letter—‘the medical profession.’”

  “He was using them for medical experimentation,” Eric said softly. “That could mean the rest of Josephine’s body…”

  The tense silence was broken only when Annalise flipped to another page.

  “That is one possibility. Another is that the dismemberment was not the focus, not the source of the need, but secondary. Józef Cyppek dismembered his victim after killing her, claiming it was in order to transport the body. But viewed through a modern abnormal psychology lens, I’d say that dismembering the victims—only one confirmed, but reports indicate that Cyppek also killed dozens of children in addition to an adult female—had more to do with dehumanizing them. He needed to dismember them, not in a defensive sense but offensive.” Annalise paused for a moment, seeming to consider how to phrase it. “If you butcher a human like an animal—remove the organs, setting aside those that are edible, removing the intestines for disposal, separating muscle from bone—you have stripped away the humanity of that person. Turned them into meat and offal.”

  Walt had seen plenty of gross shit in his time and yet her words made him feel slightly sick to his stomach. “An indication of remorse?” he asked. “They feel bad they killed someone?”

  Annalise pursed her lips. “Close. They are distancing themselves from the reality of the act, which may not be remorse but denial.”

  Walt looked back at the pictures. One of them was bugging him, but he flicked away, back to the image of the second body, which had been cut in half at the waist. “This body still had its internal organs.”

  “True, so again, it doesn’t quite fit.”

  “The torso killer is closer,” Eric said. “So you think the killer is a wannabe doctor?”

  “Possible, but if the person you are hunting had that pathology, I’d suspect the volume of kills to be higher. Also, isolated in a central place.” She shuffled papers and pulled out several sheets, placing them beside each other so she had a map showing Europe and North Africa. There were color-coded dots spread far and wide. “If they believe they are performing medical innovation or experimentation, they would be centralized around a private space, somewhere they think of as a lab or operating room.”

  “But this fucker killed whomever Petro told him to,” Eric snarled.

  “Every victim was selected by a partner?” Annalise asked it more as a leading question than an actual inquiry.

  Eric’s jaw clenched. “I’m not a student, Professor. And I’m not a complete asshole, so you can tell me if I’m wrong.”

  Annalise inclined her head. “Of course, Fleet Admiral. Let us put aside the issue of the partnership for the moment. Dismemberment could be, one, due to perceived medical experimentation,
most likely to fill a need to be seen as intelligent and skilled. Two, a way to dehumanize the victim after death, or three…” Annalise hesitated. “A final act of control over the victims. It’s close to the pathology of killers such as Giorgio Orsolano or Ted Bundy.”

  “Bundy.” Walt looked up. He’d watched his share of true crime documentaries. “Bundy kidnapped, tortured, raped, and then kept the heads.”

  “Yes, and he often revisited the bodies. They belonged to him, and he was able to find sexual gratification with them, even after death. The heads were kept as trophies, or mementos, most likely allowing him to relive the act by looking at them.”

  Eric was so tense that the air around him was charged. “Orsolano cut up girls to dispose of the bodies after he raped and tortured them.”

  Annalise spoke very calmly, with the firm but compassionate tone Walt recognized well. It was the voice he used when telling a family their loved one was dead. It was the tone for delivering devastating news.

  “Of the two potential victims we’re focusing on, three if you include Josephine, we have the complete, pre-decomposition lower torso of only one.” Annalise tapped the picture Eric had put on the table.

  Most of the woman’s body was there, laid out on a coroner’s table. Unlike the other victim, the…pieces…of this one had been found before advanced decomp could set in.

  The body had been laid out like a puzzle waiting to be put together. A puzzle missing two pieces—right hand, left foot—but otherwise intact. That picture was on his tablet, as were closeups of the places where the body had been cut—across the waist, arms severed at the shoulders, hands at the wrists. Her thighs were still attached to her pelvis, but the legs were severed below the knee and at the ankle.

  “Alicja Lewandowski.” Annalise placed a large picture of a smiling woman who bore only surface resemblance to the corpse over the top of the autopsy photo. “A Polish woman who lived in, and was found in, Krakow. Vaginal and anal bruising and tearing indicates sexual assault, though no DNA was recovered.”

  Eric stood, turned, and hauled back his fist to punch the wall behind them.