The Miami task force meeting was held at the FBI’s field office in northwest Miami, a large gray building that housed most of Miami’s 380 agents—the fifth largest in the Bureau. Victoria checked in with the receptionist behind the bulletproof glass in the austere lobby on the second floor. Two plaques hung on the wall by the elevators to commemorate agents who had made the supreme sacrifice. Victoria recognized the names of Benjamin P. Grogan and Jerry Dove, two Miami agents who fell in a tragic shoot-out in which 140 rounds of ammunition were exchanged. Their deaths had prompted the FBI to ditch the traditional .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolvers as the weapon of choice and issue semiautomatic handguns that wouldn’t jam when bone fragments from an agent’s shattered hand found their way into the chamber.
The Miami task force included various branches of state and local law enforcement, from Metro-Dade police to Florida state troopers. Nearly sixty officers filled the FBI’s large training room on the ground floor. Victoria stood at the lectern in front, with a white rectangular grease board behind her. Nine FBI field agents stood along the side wall, and the local police officers and detectives working the case filled ten rows of classroom chairs with half-desktops. Looking out over the audience, Victoria noticed more gray hair than usual. It seemed that some experienced veterans had been brought back from retirement to help in the pursuit. With the Miami Tribune getting the scoop on every murder, the pressure was obviously mounting on local law enforcement to produce a breakthrough in the Miami case.
Miami was the serial killer’s third strike, an interesting one from the standpoint of constructing the serial-killer profile. The body of a happily married, forty-two-year-old successful Cuban American businessman had been found in a canal. The killer had attacked him at night, when he was closing up his hardware store, then taken the tongueless body to the Everglades to dump it. Hiding the body, Victoria knew, was generally a sign of planning and sophistication. In contrast, the first two victims had been found in their homes, badly mutilated—a sign of overkill and irrationality. Miami thus provided one of the first major signs of a “mixed” killer, one who exhibited both “organized” and “disorganized” traits—which is to say, it was yet another anomaly in a long string of anomalies that had left police scratching their collective heads.
The audience quieted as copies of a nine-page double-spaced handout circulated from left to right across each row. Victoria switched on the microphone.
“Good afternoon,” she said over the muffled sounds of shuffling paper. “Each of you should have a copy of the FBI’s latest profile on our serial killer. There are some modifications from the earlier version, but not as many as you might expect. And that’s the main message I want to deliver today: Don’t be misled by the ghoulish portrait of the killer painted in Sunday’s Tribune. You have to distinguish between what the killer looks like in the everyday world, and what he becomes when he’s committing his crimes.”
“So whatta we got?” said one of the detectives. “A modern-day Jekyll and Hyde?”
“That’s a little melodramatic, but in a sense, the schizophrenic tendencies may be stronger than we originally thought. I’ll get into that more in a minute. First, let’s talk about that profile in the Tribune.”
Victoria glanced at one of the agents by the door, who dimmed the lights. She switched on the overhead projector, then put up a transparency of Mike’s article that lit up the wall behind her in the darkened room.
“Right off the bat, we can say this so-called profile is either the work of someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or who is deliberately trying to mislead. For example,” she said, pointing to the third line, “we’re certain the killer’s not a homosexual.”
“One of his victims was queer,” said one of the gray-haired officers in the front row.
Victoria winced at the slur. “One of his victims was also a seventy-eight-year-old woman. That doesn’t make my grandmother a suspect.”
She removed the transparency, leaving the projector light shining on the wall. “I don’t intend to give a newspaper story too much credence by going through it line by line. You should focus on the FBI handout, not on what ran in the paper. There is just one other point I want to make about it, however.”
She paused for a moment, making sure she had everyone’s attention.
“The level of detail in that bogus profile reflects a great deal of familiarity with the crime scenes or, at the very least, the crime scene reports and photos—possibly even the preliminary police reports. And the terminology he uses reflects a certain…sophistication isn’t really the right word. It’s more of a working familiarity with police jargon.”
“Are you saying that the guy calling the Tribune is a cop?” said the gray-hair again.
Victoria paused and looked as far as she could into the audience, though the light from the projector had reduced them to shadows. “I’m saying he could even be sitting in this room.”
On cue, the agent at the wall suddenly switched on the lights. She’d said it for effect, as part of their prearranged plan. They’d hoped on a long shot that the unexpected burst from darkness to light might catch a face in the audience with an incriminating expression. Several officers were glancing uneasily at their neighbors, but no one seemed particularly nervous or exhilarated. Goose eggs, however, were entirely consistent with the latest FBI profile.
Whoever he was, the man knew the tricks—before she could play them.
Chapter 22
victoria parked the borrowed Mercury Grand Marquis in the far end of the asphalt lot to the east of the Airport Hilton. A group of field agents had invited her to dinner, but she preferred to decompress and prepare for the meeting with the Arkansas task force tomorrow afternoon in Fayetteville. It wouldn’t be as large a group as the one in Miami, but the pressure would be just as palpable. None of the cities in which the killer had struck wanted to see it happen somewhere else. But what really drove the local investigations was the unstated fear that the killer would come back to their town and strike again.
The sun had set an hour ago, and the airport lights flickered in the darkness on the other side of the expressway. Large ficus trees cast shadows beneath the yellow lamps that lighted the parking lot. She locked the car door and started toward the hotel, watching the blinking red lights of a 747 landing in the distance.
The parking lot was full, and she was almost two hundred yards from the hotel entrance. She clutched her purse as she walked alone between cars. As she neared the sidewalk she heard footsteps behind her, matching her step for step. She quickened her pace. The footsteps quickened. She glanced over her shoulder and saw a lone, shadowy figure. She kept walking but stepped off the sidewalk. Behind her, the sound of the footsteps changed from the clicking of concrete to the dull thud of asphalt. She stepped back on the sidewalk—so did the footsteps. She readied herself to reach for her gun, then stopped quickly and wheeled around.
“Fancy meeting you here,” came the voice in the darkness.
She sighed and relaxed her trigger finger. “That’s a good way to get yourself shot, Posten.”
“Sneaking up on you?” he said as he pulled an envelope from his pocket. “Or carrying around the latest FBI profile of our serial killer?”
“Where did you get that? We haven’t released anything to the press.”
“A guy doesn’t work the crime beat for thirteen years and not make a few friends on the police force. How do you think I knew it was you in the Bucar?”
“So what are you doing, showing off? Am I supposed to be impressed that you can get your hands on the profile and follow me to a parking lot?”
“Easy, Victoria. I’m not here to make trouble, okay? I know the FBI doesn’t like its profiles to be made public. All I want to know is whether you geniuses at Quantico think the guy who called me on Saturday to give me that profile is the same guy who called me yesterday to complain how inaccurate it was.”
She swallowed hard, fiddling with the car k
eys in her jacket pocket. “Let me put it this way. The description of the killer in your story was so ugly and unflattering that in some ways it actually reinforces the view that the informant is the killer. He’s the same man, and he hates himself for what he can’t stop himself from doing.”
“Come on,” he scoffed. “The guy who called yesterday acted like a totally different person.”
“Nothing’s conclusive, but the consensus so far is that we’re not looking for two different men, but one psychopath with a schizoid personality. He’s psychologically at war with himself, playing both killer and informant, speaking to you in two different voices.”
“They think he’s schizophrenic?”
“Not a true schizophrenic. More like a schizoid personality disorder with compulsive features.”
“Why do they think that?”
“I’ve seen studies saying that forty percent of serial killers have schizoid personality disorders.”
“But why do you think that in this case?”
“Please,” she said uneasily. “Don’t ask me to reveal everything.”
“I’m not. Just give me something, dammit. I’m not looking for a story. I just want to make sense of all this. I’m risking much more than my career here. You owe me that much.”
She sighed. Seeing the anguish on his face made her feel like she did indeed owe him something—even if it was mostly the FBI’s point of view rather than her own. “All right. But this has to be totally off the record.”
He nodded.
“From what our experts have gathered, both the killer and the informant appear to be sociopathic personalities, though very different types. The killer is the antisocial psychopath. Theoretically, that should make him easier to catch, because this type is less cunning, tends to have messy murder scenes and leaves behind clues. The informant, however, is not antisocial. He’s the kind of guy who could be your next-door neighbor. Very smart, very difficult to catch. The fact that the informant is the Ted Bundy type could explain why we’ve had such a difficult time catching the killer. If the killer and the informant are one man, the more savvy side of this schizoid personality may be covering the tracks left behind by his less sophisticated side.”
Mike nodded slowly, taking it all in. “The idea of my informant being a sophisticate troubles me a little. Granted, over the phone he sounds pretty smooth. He’s computer literate, because he was able to reprogram my screen saver to tell me about Timothy Copeland. But then there’s the videotape from the ATM machine in San Francisco you told me about. He was dancing a jig like a lunatic, dressed like a crack addict who sleeps in the gutter.”
“The analysts don’t think that was a true manifestation of his killer personality, if that’s what you’re asking. That was purely a cover. He knew he was going to be videotaped when he used the cash machine, since most ATMs have security cameras. That’s why he wore a ski mask. He’s no dummy, Mike. Apparently he even knows something about wiretaps, because he’s cut off every one of your phone conversations just in the nick of time to prevent us from tracing the call. We’re dealing with a very complex personality disorder—if our experts are right.”
“And you aren’t troubled by the fact that the electronically garbled voice in the last call sounds like a totally different person.”
“Our guy in the Signal Analysis Unit over in the Engineering Section says he could have been using some kind of variable-speed control device. Even beyond that, however, voice inflection can change drastically when different schizoid personalities emerge.”
Mike mulled over what she’d just said, then shook his head. “I don’t buy it—the informant and the killer being one person. Call it street intuition but I think there’s a lunatic out there who’s smarter than the killer, sicker than the killer, and who understands these murders better than you do. That scares the hell out of me. And I think it scares the hell out of you, too.”
She stared back, then blinked. “I’ve got five cities to hit in the next three days. I’ll be in touch.” She turned and started toward the hotel, all too aware that she hadn’t denied the accusation.
Chapter 23
mike left the Hilton at seven-thirty and headed toward Zack’s condo in the Grove, his home-away-from-home. At the T-shaped intersection at the end of Virginia Street, his headlights shined directly into the big picture windows of a dark green building that was Señor Frog’s, a Mexican restaurant that, according to the sign above the door, had been in business SINCE 1109. That was actually its street number, but it was a Grove landmark. He and Karen used to go there for nine-layer nachos, margaritas, and laughs. That wasn’t in the twelfth century, but sometimes it seemed that long ago.
His car phone rang as he rounded the corner. He finished the turn and answered it.
“Karen, hey,” he said with a smile. “I was just thinking about you.”
“Mike, you’ve got to get over here.” Her voice sounded strained, almost agitated.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s nuts. The phone hasn’t stop ringing all night, and now they’re parked outside the house.”
“Who?”
“Who else? Your fellow sharks in the media. Congratulations. Tonight’s lead story is my husband the journalist—the checkbook journalist.”
His gut wrenched. “I’ll be right there.”
Mike pulled a quick U-turn and raced south to Coral Gables, past the University of Miami campus. A quick turn off Granada Boulevard and its walled-in estates put him a half-block from home, in the heart of a neighborhood that he and Karen could afford only on both their salaries. A canopy of leafy ficus trees and oaks laden with Spanish moss blocked out most of the moonlight. The lone streetlamp on the corner cast a dim yellowish light over his front yard. Squinting, he could make out the news logos of Channels 4, 7, and 10 on three satellite vans parked on the street. Another was blocking the driveway. Covering the sidewalk was a tangle of wires connected to a handful of men toting camcorders on their shoulders. Several others moved about in shirtsleeves in the warm night air. Mike recognized the woman with the big blond hair and microphone fixing her makeup in the side mirror of a van.
It seemed hard to fathom that the manner in which he’d reported the news had actually become the news. But being in the biz, so to speak, he knew that not even Miami had near enough crime to fill the expanded news hours of local TV shows.
To avoid the commotion, he drove to the next street that ran parallel to his. The houses in the Riviera subdivision were laid out in rows of two, so that the fronts faced the street and the backs faced each other. He parked in front of the Old Spanish–style house that backed up against his own backyard. Quietly, he got out of his car and walked behind his neighbor’s house, praying not to get shot. He walked faster as he approached the iron picket fence that separated the two backyards; then he jumped it and tumbled to the ground on the other side, on his own turf.
He picked himself up and stood in the darkness, looking across the kidney-shaped swimming pool and through the wall of French doors that ran across the back of his house. With the lights on in the family room he could see everything inside, including Karen sitting on the couch. She was wearing a blue knit sweater and shorts, with her legs extended and feet up on the coffee table. She was reading some magazine and sucking on—if memory served him—a Weight Watchers chocolate mousse fudge pop. He felt like he could have stood there all night, watching, and never been detected. He felt like anyone could have stood there all night—and the thought chilled him. He dashed across the lawn and tapped lightly on the French door.
Karen jumped at the noise and nearly shrieked, until she recognized his face through the little windowpane. She unlocked the door and let him in.
“Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t come in the front. There’s an army out there. Where the hell is your protection anyway?”
“They’re parked out front. They’re using a media van to look less conspicuous.”
“Fat lot of good that does.
What if I’d been—”
“A crazy serial killer?” she said, finishing his sentence. “They gave me an alarm in case anything goes wrong.” She held up her wrist and displayed what looked like a watch, except that where the face should have been was a tiny red button. “They didn’t want to be intrusive.”
“Well, my fellow newshounds don’t seem to have any qualms. Looks like our separation isn’t common knowledge yet.”
Karen frowned. “This story sure is common knowledge. It was all over the evening news: Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist pays off an informant who may be a serial killer. Where are they getting this stuff?”
“It has to be Brenda Baines. She overheard me on the phone with the guy that night you came by the newsroom, and she must have heard more than I thought. I’m not exactly on her Christmas list, you know. She’s the only one I know who’d be vicious enough to leak something outside rather than take it up with the Tribune.”
“It’s terrible, what they’re saying. Haven’t you seen any of it?”
“No, actually. I was, uh, over at the Airport Hilton. With Victoria.”
“Great,” she said. “It’s not enough that I have to overhear the two of you arguing like boyfriend and girlfriend in our own house. Now you’re meeting at hotels.”
“C’mon…”
“Sorry,” she said with heavy sigh. “Listen to me, I sound like somebody out of a soap opera.”
“Yes, you do,” he said, smiling.
“I guess this is all starting to get to me. The FBI’s on my tail. The media’s on my doorstep. My husband’s on a first-name basis with a serial killer.” She turned and ran a hand through her hair, glancing at her reflection in the mirror. “And now this jealousy thing. I hate this.”
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