The 7th Victim

by Alan Jacobson

  They moved outside, and the chill struck her body like a slap to the face. She sunk her hands into her pants pockets and walked over to the curb. “You know, Robby, there’s another option. The International Criminal Investigative Analysis Fellowship. It’s a two-year understudy training program. You’d have to be sponsored by an agency, one that’s big like Bledsoe’s. You’d spend the last month with my unit, then take a test. You could then do profiling for the police department.”

  Robby shrugged, then said, “Not quite the same.”

  Vail nodded. “Okay, but you can’t just apply for the profiling unit. You have the street experience, but you’ve got to be an agent for a while. You know, pay your dues, meet some pretty rigid criteria. There are a lot of candidates for very few openings.”

  “You don’t think I have the talent.”

  “I didn’t say that. From what I’ve seen, I think you’ve got great natural instincts. But it’s a lot more than that. A good profiler is open-minded. He can see the big picture and keep his feelings and emotions in check. He needs to be able to look at a scene and instantly analyze things logically: why did the offender do this—or not do that? He has to be able to think like the offender. I haven’t really assessed you in those terms. I’d need to work more cases with you before I could say you’ve got all the tools.”

  “My mom’s friend thinks I do.”

  “Man, it’s cold. Gotta walk, move the blood.” She started down the sidewalk and Robby followed. “So your mom’s friend thinks you’ve got the knack. That’s great, Robby. But who the hell’s your mom’s friend?”

  “Thomas Gifford.”

  “My ASAC?” Vail asked, referring to the Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge of the profiling unit.

  “Yeah.”

  Vail stopped walking and turned to face Robby. “You never told me that.”

  “Never came up. I wasn’t that close with my mom till she got sick, when I moved back here to take care of her. Gifford came around from time to time to see if she needed anything. I got the feeling they might’ve had a thing once. Anyway, after she died, suddenly the guy’s in my life, trying to help me out with all sorts of stuff. Probably made my mom a promise.”

  “So you want to be a profiler. Well, you’ve got a good ‘in,’ which will definitely help.”

  “I don’t want my mother’s friend pulling strings to get me a job, Karen. I want it legit.” Robby glanced up at the high sky as rain-drops began to dot the pavement. “Come on, we should get back.”

  They turned and headed toward Melanie Hoffman’s house.

  “Wanting to earn it on your own is fine, but don’t ever overlook inside contacts. Sometimes merit means shit. Good people, better people, get passed over all the time.”

  “Fine, so I’ll use one of my inside contacts. Teach me, be my tutor.”

  Vail looked up at the man who was a foot taller than she. “It’s not that easy. I mean, yeah, I could teach you stuff. But unless you have a good footing in psychology—”

  “I was a psych minor at Cal State Northridge.”

  Vail hesitated. “Well, that’s a start, I guess.” She continued on another few steps as she considered his request. “I guess there’s no harm. Just keep it from Hancock. Think of him as your enemy and you’ll be fine.”

  “Hancock—that the GQ dude in there?”

  “His history is short and sweet. Used to be with the Bureau, got passed over for the one vacant profiling position—which went to me—got pissed off, and left. He now heads up Senator Linwood’s security detail.”

  “So he’s got a chip on his shoulder.”

  “Not just a chip, the whole rock.”

  They shared a laugh.

  “Okay. Lesson one. You ready for this?”

  “Hey, I’m a dry sponge.”

  “Somehow that image doesn’t work for me, Robby.” They arrived at the house and stood by the front door, under the eave. “We were all in Melanie Hoffman’s bedroom looking over the crime scene. But we were seeing different things. You, Bledsoe, Manette, and Sinclair were following the criminalists’ lead, hoping to find a fingerprint, an errant hair fiber, a milligram of saliva. Something that’ll identify the monster who did this. I was looking at the offender’s behavior.” She paused a second and noted Robby’s furrowed brow. “A profiler isn’t concerned with fingerprints and DNA. We look at the behaviors the offender leaves behind at the scene. They’re crucial to helping us understand him, so we can figure out the type of person who did it.”

  “What do you mean by ‘behaviors’?”

  “Think of it this way. A sixteen year old who keeps a diary doesn’t lie to herself in her diary, right?”

  “There’s no reason to. She’s writing to herself.”

  “Exactly. So when you look at an offender, it’s best to look at his diary, which is the crime scene. He doesn’t lie to himself when he commits the crime. These behaviors, these things the offender has done after he’s killed his victim, are all over the crime scene, and they tell us a lot about him.”

  “Like stabbing the eyes.”

  “Right. Stabbing the eyes doesn’t prevent him from getting caught, and he doesn’t do it to disable the victim—she’s already dead.”

  “So then why does he do it?”

  “That’s the key question, Robby. Most of these offenders begin these behaviors when they’re young. For Dead Eyes, stabbing the eyes is part of a fantasy that kept evolving, developing over time. What we find repulsive is normal, even comforting to him. We find out why he finds it comforting, and we’re a step closer to understanding who this guy is. Understand who he is, and we can narrow the suspect pool. See, we don’t catch the bad guys, we give you dicks the information that helps you look at your suspects and say, this one fits, this one doesn’t.” She shivered. “Let’s go in, I’m freezing.”

  “So why would a guy stab a woman in the eyes?”

  “First of all, you can’t consider all the possibilities of why he did something. It’ll take you in a million different directions and you’ll never be able to focus. Only look at what’s most probable. So for the eyes, think symbolism,” she said as they walked through the hallway. “Maybe he didn’t want her to see what he was doing. Or maybe he’d met her somewhere and made a pass. She rejected him, and this was his way of making her pay for not seeing his true value. Or piercing the eyes may be sexual in nature. Maybe he’s incapable of having an erection.”

  “I’d say it was probably rejection.”

  “You can’t say it was anything. Not yet, anyway. A profiler has to come into the crime scene with her eyes wide open. No preconceived notions, no trying to attach labels to things. Consider the scene one fact at a time.” They stood at the doorway to the bedroom. “I’ve got some binders back in my office I can give you to read. Notes and research articles. They’ll give you an overview of all this stuff.”

  “Cool.”

  Vail nodded. “Okay, let’s go in again. And remember, you’re not looking at forensics. Keep an open mind and take what’s there, what the offender has given you. No biases.”

  “Okay.”

  Vail walked in and saw the other task force members standing at the foot of Melanie’s bed, staring at the wall.

  “Those dot painters,” Hancock said.

  “What?” Bledsoe asked.

  “Those painters from like, a hundred years ago. They had a weird way of painting. See the wall, the paint strokes?”

  Vail moved beside Bledsoe to get Hancock’s perspective. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “It’s blood, not paint.”

  “You of all people should appreciate this, Vail.” Hancock looked at her. “These walls are filled with psycho stuff. Rorschachs all over the place.”

  “Your mind’s as twisted as the offender’s.”

  “Hang on,” Manette said, holding up a hand. She gestured to Hancock. “Tell us what you’re thinking.”

  “The painters who used dots to paint their pictures,” he said. “Th
at’s what this looks like.”

  Vail studied the blood patterns on the wall. “Pointillism or Impressionism?” she finally asked. “Pointillism involved dot painting. If I had to fit this into a category, I’d say this looks more like Impressionism to me.”

  Bledsoe eyed her curiously.

  “Art history/psych double major,” she explained.

  Hancock tilted his chin ever so slightly toward the ceiling, as if looking down at Vail through reading glasses. “So, Miss Art History Major, still think my mind’s twisted?”

  “I do,” Vail said, “but it’s got nothing to do with this case.”

  “Let’s get some shots,” Bledsoe said to the forensic technician. “Wide angles, close-ups of all the walls.” He turned to Vail and said, under his breath, “Just in case. I think the guy’s onto something.”

  Vail frowned, but she knew Bledsoe—and Hancock—were right. The blood murals were worth reviewing. In rejecting Hancock’s observation due to her prior history with him, she had broken the cardinal rule on which she had just counseled Robby: go in with an open mind and don’t bring any personal biases to the scene. She would discuss it with Robby later, if he didn’t bring it up himself.

  Sinclair was standing at the edge of the bedroom with his forearms folded across his chest. “Anybody find the left hand?”

  Everyone glanced around. Blank faces stared at each other. Bledsoe turned to the head forensic technician. “Chuck, you guys locate the severed hand?”

  Chuck scanned the clipboarded list of identified and photographed items. “No left hand.”

  Vail thought she knew why the hand was missing, but for the moment decided to keep her theory to herself until she could be more certain. “Let us know if there are any other . . . anatomical parts missing,” she said to Chuck.

  “Why’d he bother to cut her hair?” Robby asked.

  Vail nodded at the victim’s right hand. “Goes with the fingernails. For some reason, he’s trying to make her ugly. Butcher the hair, cut the nails down so short they bleed. It holds some meaning to him. Nothing can be overlooked.”

  VAIL REMAINED ANOTHER FIFTEEN MINUTES, then left the forensic crew and task force to finish their work and headed to her office to gather materials for a class she was teaching at the Academy. While on the interstate, she pulled out her PDA and dictated her impressions on the Melanie Hoffman crime scene. She arrived earlier than expected, so she decided to grab a coffee at Gargoyle’s, the café across the road from the BAU, or Behavioral Analysis Unit, housed in the Aquia Commerce Center.

  The downtime would allow her to collect her thoughts and transition between the crime scene and her office. She needed to become a person again, even if for only half an hour, before plunging back into the underworld of serial killers. Over the years, she’d found she needed that time, or risk losing herself in the dark abyss of the offenders’ twisted minds. If she entered that world, it would be harder to separate herself from the killer, harder to maintain her touch with reality.

  If Thomas Gifford, her boss, ever found out she needed this “downtime,” he’d probably transfer her to a resident agency in a quiet town in the middle of nowhere. Because a profiler sees so much violent death—the worst offenses humanity has to offer—the Bureau has to be careful who it exposes to these atrocities on a daily basis. Gifford, the man who owned the desk where the profiling buck stopped, maintained a hawk-like vigilance over the people in his command. If there was a hint someone in the unit was not handling it well, he was gone. No questions asked and no chances for reinstatement. A suicide in the profiling unit would be a slight . . . kink in the old FBI shield of public opinion. Profilers had been known to tip the glass a bit too much, and suffer from heart disease and other stress-induced maladies, but none had committed suicide. Yet.

  The commerce center was a grouping of modern two-story brick buildings in Aquia, Virginia, fifteen minutes south of the FBI Academy. The BAU, colloquially the “Profiling Unit,” having undergone myriad name changes and reorganizations over the years, underwent its most sweeping transformation of all when it moved out of the Academy’s subbasement. The brain trust realized that sitting sixty feet underground in an old bunker while analyzing grotesque photos of mutilated women was too much to ask the human mind to endure.

  Divorcing itself from a shared existence with the BSU, or Behavioral Science Unit, its research and academic arm, the BAU moved down the road into the Aquia Commerce Center buildings. The new buildings’ large windows provided the antitoxin to death’s depressing cloak of subbasement bleakness: sunlight.

  When Vail returned to her nine-by-nine office to retrieve her voice mail, she found a FedEx box on her desk with five pink “While you were out” messages sitting on her chair. She grabbed up the notes and sat down heavily. Her office had a cluttered feel to it, but though there were books and files and reports stacked atop every level surface, nothing was out of place. Two incandescent lights were clamped to opposite ends of her desk, reminder notes clipped to the rippled lampshades. Lining the metal bookshelves were black FBI binders with computer-printed titles peeking through the windowed spines: SEXUAL HOMICIDE, STALKING, BLOODSTAIN PATTERN INTERPRETATION, and SEXUAL SADISM. A handwritten sign taped to the shelf served as a warning: Do not “borrow” ANY of these binders.

  Vail pressed a button on her phone and found three voice mails waiting for her. One was from the Office of Professional Responsibility about the shooting this morning at the bank. The second message was from her attorney, informing her the divorce was almost final. She closed her eyes and sighed relief.

  Her euphoria lasted only until she heard the third message, which was from Jonathan, her fourteen year old, who was staying with his father this week. The message said he needed to talk. A teenager needing to talk is like a volcano erupting: it doesn’t happen often, and when it does, one never knows which way the lava is going to flow. Vail figured the topic of conversation was going to be his father, and she had spent the better part of the past eighteen months trying to get away from that man. Like it or not, her son was doing his best to unintentionally draw them back together.

  She picked up the phone. At least it would buy her another five minutes of sanity before leaving for class. She’d had enough blood and guts today. She was in no hurry to wade through more.

  five

  He moved amongst his various creations, vases and large containers, fired hard and slick. All standing on pedestals of varying heights, lit by overhead spots that showcased them as the works of art that they were. The potter’s wheels and bisque kilns were in the rear of his studio, in another room and out of sight, visible only to his students. An artiste never left his tools of creation in plain view for the unindoctrinated to see. Only the finished products, the masterpieces, were worthy of display.

  He stored the boxes of wet clay off to the side of his studio, behind a movable wall. Every month he loaded and unloaded a half ton of clay—literally a thousand pounds—from the distributor to his Audi’s trailer and from the trailer to his studio. At first, whenever he’d go buy the stuff, the damn boxes were so heavy he’d need a student to help carry them. But after a few months of hauling the cases to and from his car and kneading the stuff with his hands, he could maneuver them around the loft pretty easily without any help.

  But the best part of being a ceramicist was the feel of the cold, wet, firm clay as he squeezed it between his fingers. It kind of felt like a liver, heavy and dense. Holding someone’s liver in your hands was a tremendous feeling of power.

  He closed up the plastic bag so the clay would stay fresh, rinsed off his hands, and headed into the adjacent loft to change into his dark suit. After slipping on the jacket, he stepped into the old walk-in closet to pick out a tie and something—the musty smell? the darkness? the brush of clothing against his cheek? Something set off the old memories. It was dizzying, almost disorienting. He shut the door and sat down at his nearby desk, thoughts and emotions flooding into his mind. He just wanted i
t to stop, but realized it may be best to embrace it, confront it. Shape it.

  He lifted the screen to his laptop and woke it from sleep. The words, the feelings, the memories just flowed out of him like some kind of rushing river that kept surging no matter what stood in its path.

  The hiding place smells like some musty box I once opened when I was looking for his cigarettes. It’s strong and kind of burns my nose. It’s small and dark, but it’s mine. He doesn’t know I have it, which means he can’t find me here. And if he can’t find me, he can’t hurt me. I can think here, I can breathe here (well, except for the smell) without him yelling. I sit in the darkness, alone with myself, where no one can hurt me. Where HE can’t hurt me.

  But I watch him. I watch everything he does through little holes in the walls. I watch him bring home the whores, I watch what he does to them before dragging them upstairs to his bedroom. Sometimes I even hear what they’re saying, but most of the time I just see. I see what he does.