Vail sensed some anger, as if it would be an insult if she had asked. The murals flashed in her mind, along with Hancock’s comment. “What about her artwork? Did she have classes, formal training of any sort?”
“She took classes in college, then studied privately with a family friend in Alexandria.”
“The friend’s name?”
Howard’s eyes narrowed. “She’s seventy-nine years old, Agent Vail. I doubt she murdered my daughter.”
Vail was about to tell him that often an innocent person can provide information that leads to another individual, who leads to someone else that turns out to be the killer. But Robby told him before she could open her mouth.
“Cyn, honey,” Howard called into the kitchen, “we need Martha’s number, too.”
They continued to ask Howard questions about his daughter’s habits, family background, dating habits, and the always delicate question, her sexual practices. Howard’s drawn face looked ashen when Vail asked the question. But he answered it succinctly: “She wasn’t promiscuous, and besides, she didn’t have much time for dating.”
Cynthia returned to the room, handed Robby a slip of paper, and took her place on the couch.
Vail felt they had reached their limits for this visit. If they needed more information, they could drop by again, or simply call—which might be easier on the Hoffmans.
Robby, apparently sensing what Vail was thinking, rose from the couch and extended a hand. Howard shook it but didn’t make eye contact.
“Thanks for your help,” Vail said. “We’ll let ourselves out.”
They made their way down the hall but were stopped in their tracks by Howard’s voice. “When you catch this monster, I want to see him. I want some time alone with him.”
Vail and Robby had no answer, other than to nod. They turned back to the door and left.
nine
Her eyes stare straight ahead in rapture as I pull the bindings tighter. She doesn’t cry out, which is odd, but the terror is in her face—the jaw muscles are vise-tight, the forehead crinkled with dread. She doesn’t deserve to live. Because it’s there, like I tell them, it’s there if you’d only look. Do you see it, Agent Vail? Just like Douglas said—study the art, you’ll know the artist. So study! What do you see?
I’ll tell you what you see. You see nothing. Because you can’t; you’re blinded by what it means. You watch, frozen and helpless as I bring the knife back and stab her right eye, a nauseating squish! as the blade penetrates the surface and goes deeper into the brain—
Vail sat up, chest heaving, her throat dryer than dust, her heart bruising itself against her ribcage. Holy shit. That was all she could think: Holy shit, that was intense.
She lay in bed another hour or so, trying to fall back asleep, all the while hoping she wouldn’t, fearing a return to the dream that just about took her breath away. By the time dawn began creeping around the edges of her window shades, she was finally tired enough to drift off. Her alarm clock blared an hour later, and had she not just bought the damn thing she would have thrown it through the window. But then she’d have a window to repair, and in the past year the divorce had caused enough self-inflicted hell in her life. She was enjoying the calm and hoped there wasn’t a storm lurking around the bend.
When Vail got to the office, she remembered she was first up on the card to present. Twenty-five years ago, the founders of the profiling unit chose Wednesday mornings for a free-thinking roundtable discussion of current cases the agents were working. The unit still met on Wednesday mornings, and the brainstorming sessions remained a useful tool that ensured the lead profiler had not overlooked something because he had gotten too close to his case. Sometimes having someone look over your shoulder enabled you to pull back from the needle to see the haystack.
The meetings were held in a large rectangular conference room, with the new budget-conscious Bureau crafting a fiscally intelligent setup. Instead of a long, traditional oval table that had but one purpose, the new look was six rectangular cherry wood tables neatly abutting each other, forming one large table around which sixteen people could sit. If needed, the tables could be separated into six-seaters for impromptu workshop sessions.
Tan wallpaper with textured vertical stripes added to the room’s utilitarian feel. An LCD projector and wall-mounted screen, overhead projector, large pivoting white board, and television/VCR/ DVD setup were silently placed off to the side in an alcove, like a coroner ready to pull back the sheet to expose the horrors of psychotic minds.
Seated around the segmented conference table were Vail’s profiling colleagues: senior members Art Rooney, Dietrich Hutchings, Tom van Owen, Frank Del Monaco, and nine other men who’d been with the unit fewer than five years.
Vail hadn’t had much time to prepare this morning’s presentation. She had been handed a CD with the remaining photos from Melanie Hoffman’s crime scene fifteen minutes ago, and she had rushed to view them on her laptop to throw them into some semblance of order. But she knew the case well, at least up to the point of the latest victim, and felt confident she could wing the rest of it.
Because she was the first and only woman in the profiling unit, looking good in front of her peers was important. She always felt she was held to different standards, higher levels of scrutiny. During her first few weeks in the new position, every time she was shown a crime scene photo of a dismembered body, a female so grotesquely beaten that she no longer had a face, the others in the unit expected her to grab for the garbage pail and puke her guts out. Not that they didn’t do that their first time around—they simply expected her to be weak because she was a woman. She was not superhuman—of course the pictures affected her—but she only wanted to be treated the same way they had treated each other.
But Vail felt that people learned who they were by placing themselves into situations and seeing how they reacted. While staring at grotesque photos of women who had been abused, she gained a tremendous amount of insight into herself. Insight that told her when it was time to leave her husband.
Vail stood at the head of the room with her expandable Dead Eyes case folder lying on the conference table in front of her. She opened the PowerPoint file and started the slide show mode.
She brushed back her hair, then took a sip of burnt coffee. It was time to start. “I’ve got an update on Dead Eyes,” she said in a normal speaking volume. The obligatory “shushes” followed. “He’s struck again, this time a young female CPA. Baseline crime scene pretty much the way he left it with vics one and two.” Vail punched the remote and the first slide appeared. Someone hit the light switch in the back of the room and everything darkened except for the faces of the agents, which were illuminated by the light bouncing off the screen.
It was a wide-angle view of Melanie Hoffman’s bedroom. Vail took a second to scan it, then said, “Stabbed through the eyes with ordinary steak knives taken from the vic’s apartment. Eviscerated stomach, kidneys, and liver. Left hand severed but not recovered by the techs. Small intestine tied around the victim’s thighs. Blood painted all over the walls.” She paused for a moment to let the information sink in. “Victim was a recent addition to a DC accounting firm. Nothing stood out in the interview with the parents. Couple of things to follow up on, but that’s it. The task force was reassembled, headed up by Paul Bledsoe, Fairfax County.”
One of the agents leaned forward. “I haven’t looked at this case in a while, but are we still thinking this guy’s disorganized?”
Vail looked at the man who had asked the question. Tom van Owen, a nine-year veteran of the unit. His cuticles were red and inflamed, the skin peeling from being incessantly picked. Even now, he sat reclining in the ergonomic chair, absently scraping at the calluses around the nail bed with his other hand.
“I don’t think so,” Vail said. She clicked past the next few slides until she reached the ones that showed the murals. “Even though there is an awful lot of blood, I’m not convinced it’s a sign of disorganization.”
Vail thought of Chase Hancock’s “painter” comment. She clenched her jaw, irritated he may’ve been right.
“He used weapons of opportunity. Those knives,” Dietrich Hutchings said. He waved at the screen with his thick-framed reading glasses. “They’re the vic’s, you said.”
“I know that points to disorganization, but I’m thinking something else.” Typically, disorganized offenders did not bring weapons with them; they used common objects found in the victim’s own house. “Cause of death appears to be asphyxiation, just like the others. So the knives aren’t opportunistic weapons,” Vail explained. “The knife wounds are postmortem—making them part of his ritual, not his MO. The fact that he knows most women have a set of steak knives in their kitchen, which means he doesn’t have to risk hauling knives with him, indicates organization. Not disorganization.”
There was quiet for a moment before Art Rooney spoke up. Rooney had a crew cut and a military politeness and formality to him. He had once called the Quantico Marine Base home. “So we’re adjusting our profile to indicate a mixture of organization and disorganization.”
Vail hesitated. “I haven’t had much time to digest this. At this point, I’d have to say yes. If not almost completely organized.”
“Did the vic have defensive wounds?” Rooney’s slow, Southern demeanor seemed to be out of sync with the rest of the profilers’ urgent tones.
“None. Which again suggests this guy is planning his approach better, possibly using guile and disguise to comfort his vics before he takes them out. Definitely organized.”
Rooney frowned and his eyes again found the screen. “But the mess, the blood. . . .”
Vail respected Rooney’s profiling abilities and understood his point: typically, a crime scene like Melanie Hoffman’s indicated a disorganized offender, one of lower intelligence who did less planning. Their attacks tended to be blitzlike, creating more blood. Vail paged through the slides to the murals. “I think we’re looking at a series of paintings here. I’m having prints of these sent over to BSU for analysis. There might be some deep-seated message in here. I’ve also asked for them to be examined by an expert in Impressionist art, in case the offender had art training.”
“An artiste. That’s a new one,” Frank Del Monaco said, his round, saggy face contorting into a smirk. He glanced at a few of his colleagues, who shared the ridicule. “But I can’t disagree. He certainly left . . . an impression.”
Laughter erupted just before the conference room door opened and a long male shadow spilled into the room. Thomas Gifford walked in and observed the levity; a few of the agents were still guffawing. Gifford then looked at Vail, whose stern face indicated she was not sharing the joke.
Vail locked eyes with Del Monaco. “I don’t want to miss anything, Frank. Thinking out of the box is supposed to be a strength here.”
Gifford marched to Vail’s side and stood in front of the screen. The room became silent. The blood mural covered his dark suit and face with a red pall as he spoke. “Just a heads-up. I got word late yesterday that Senator Eleanor Linwood has requested—or more like told—Fairfax PD’s Chief Thurston to add her lead security detail agent to the Dead Eyes Task Force. His name is Chase Hancock. Ring a bell to anyone?”
Frank Del Monaco spoke. “The asshole who sued the Bureau because he didn’t get one of our seats.”
“That’s the one,” Gifford said. “Now let me warn you people. This guy is trouble. But the police chief is doing the senator a favor. Some backroom political maneuvering. She wants to look tough on crime in an election year. That democrat, Redmond, is breathing down her throat in the early polls and she thinks she can use Dead Eyes to boost her approval rating.”
“So we get dragged into shoveling their political bullshit,” van Owen said.
“We’re thirty miles from DC,” Gifford said. “They’ve got a list of shit shovelers there dating back two hundred years.”
Rooney coughed a deep, raspy gurgling, then cleared his throat and asked, “Any chance we can do an end run around this? I’ve known assholes with more brains than this Hancock chump.”
“Easiest way to be rid of him is to draw up the best goddamn profile you’ve ever done. Give the dicks a write-up that’s right on the money, something they can run with. Otherwise, stay out of Hancock’s way. That’s how we play it. Do your jobs, and let him do his. If he gets to be a problem, let me know and I’ll handle it.”
“Let him hang himself,” Vail said.
“Exactly.” Gifford dipped his chin in her direction, handing the discussion back to Vail, and then took a seat in the back of the room.
Vail hit the next slide, a wide-angle view of the exterior of the house. “Bledsoe is checking into Melanie Hoffman’s past and present accounting firms. It’s possible whoever did her might have met her through the workplace. Co-workers, clients, support staff, everyone’s being looked at. There’s also an ex-husband. Marriage was annulled three years ago.”
She hit the remote a few more times, showing the photos of what was once a beautiful young woman. Again and again slides flicked across the screen, the latest one being a close-up of Melanie’s head and trunk.
“This is his fourth victim.” Vail said it as if they should feel shame for not having helped catch the offender before he’d taken another young life.
“You mean third. This is his third vic,” Del Monaco said. “That last one wasn’t the same guy.”
“You know my thoughts on that.” And indeed he did. Everyone knew her opinion, because a year ago, when Dead Eyes had last struck, she made her opinion well-known.
“What does Bledsoe think?”
Vail glared at Del Monaco. “He’s operating under the same assumption.”
“Uh huh.”
“What’s your problem, Frank?”
“All we have with that other vic is a very loose connection to Dead Eyes. Vic was killed and disemboweled. That’s it. No wrapping of the intestines around the thigh, no stabbing of the eyes, no severing of the hand, almost no other signature evidence. We’ve seen scenes like that a hundred times before. Nothing links the vic, or the offender, to Dead Eyes.”
Vail scanned the faces in the room. No one seemed to be disagreeing with Del Monaco. If anything, their expressions seemed to put the onus on her to prove his opinion wrong. But her brain was foggy from the rotten night’s sleep and she didn’t feel like getting into it with him. She tried to focus. Before her brain had the sense to back off, her mouth was moving. “True, the eyes weren’t stabbed. So what?”
“So what?” Del Monaco looked around the room, as if to garner support for his consternation. Since most gazes remained on Vail, he turned his attention back to her. “So, Karen, the signature is all wrong. Just about all the behaviors are missing. You’ve got some parallel aspects between the killings but there’s no linkage.”
“We’ve been through all this before,” another profiler said.
“Copycat,” Hutchings said. “That’s all it was, if you could even call it that.”
Vail was shaking her head in disagreement. “You’re all missing the point. True, there are things the offender didn’t do with this victim, but I believe it’s the same guy. I mean, just look at the crime scene.”
“We looked, a year ago,” Rooney said. His voice was even more scratchy now. “There’s no convincing linkage there.”
“Art, there were only a few defensive wounds, and there was a lot of blood.” She stopped, then realized she should review the photos from the scene, in case the offender had left the same murals. If she recalled, there was no blood at all on the walls. If that was correct, it would do nothing to support her linkage theory.
“Were there any Impressionist blood murals?” Del Monaco asked.
“I’ll have to check—”
“And what about food? Did he eat his usual peanut butter and cream cheese ketchup sandwich at the scene, postmortem?”
“No.”
“And the incapacitating blow?” Del
Monaco was flipping pages as he spoke.
“Disabling skull wound. Same as vics one and two—”
“You can’t say that, Karen.” This from Rooney, whose eyes were fixed on a particular document. “You can’t say it was the same. Vics one and two were hit from behind, the other one from the side.”
“So she suddenly realized what was happening and turned her head at the last second.”
“When you turn your head to duck, you throw your hands up. It would’ve broken a few fingers. Hell, even a nail or two.” Rooney held up the file. “There were no such defensive wounds.”
There was quiet. Vail felt as if she’d been cross-examined and the defense attorney had just made a case-breaking point. But even as she tried to concentrate on a reply, she felt Gifford’s stare boring into her, disrupting her concentration.
She knew what he was thinking. It wasn’t the same way she knew what Robby Hernandez was thinking. She knew what to expect because she’d already gone toe to toe with Gifford about linkage of this victim to the Dead Eyes killer.
The 7th Victim Page 7