Maria Chavez, still seated in her chair, bent over at the waist, gagging and retching, then stood up and bolted for the door. Two other male investigators, hands held to mouth, ran after her.
Powell looked down at Bransford. “Don’t be too hard on them,” he said. “That’s not the first time that’s happened.”
A hand from the back corner went up. “Yes?” Powell asked.
“Do we have any indication of the type of weapon used?”
“Good question,” Powell said. “Unfortunately, it’s one that we don’t have a complete answer for. You’re looking for a small, thin-bladed weapon that’s surgically sharp. It could be a straight razor, a scalpel, probably not a box opener. Perhaps an X-Acto knife. And our guy knows how to use it.”
“Which means what?” Gilley asked. “Is he a doctor or something?”
“Probably not, but he may have some kind of medical training, perhaps a biology background.”
“He sure as hell has some dissecting skills,” Bransford added.
“Maybe he’s a butcher,” another voice from the shadows behind the projector suggested.
“Don’t think so,” Powell noted. “I’ve reviewed our case files on every murder committed by a butcher going back about thirty years, and in not one have we seen this degree of precision and care. So I’m not ruling it out, but it’s not probable.”
To Powell’s left, the door opened and a shaken Maria Chavez stepped into the room, still swabbing a wet, dark brown paper towel across her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said weakly.
“Please, Detective, don’t be,” Powell offered soothingly.
“You’re by no means the first.”
Chavez forced a smile. “Murray’s still in the men’s room.
I could hear him through the door.”
“Why don’t we kill the slide projector and bring the lights up,” Powell said. “We’ve seen enough of this for now.”
As Gilley stowed the projector and Hank Powell switched the lights back on, the other two ill detectives filed back into the room looking distinctly hangdog and took their chairs.
Powell stepped back to the podium and looked briefly at his notes, then up to the group.
“I’ve got a classified set of photos from the other crime scenes we’ve investigated that will be available for you to examine until I go back to Washington, which won’t be for another day or so. I also have a map of the eleven other cities, all different and apparently random, where the other murders were committed. I recommend that each of you spend extra time examining the Nashville crime-scene photos as well. What you’ll find is that there are a couple of things about this particular crime scene that are unique and different from the Alphabet Man’s normal routine.”
Powell stepped out from behind the podium, once again in the manner of a professor nearing the end of a lecture.
“First of all, this is the Alphabet Man’s first double homicide. He’s never done a twofer before, and if you examine closely the nature of the two murders, you see some obvious and profound differences. In the first set of slides, the one with the M painted on the wall in the victim’s blood, we see a degree of savagery that is in the great scheme of things quite subdued, at least by our guy’s standards.”
Powell walked over to the table by the far wall and picked up a poster-size blowup of a line drawing of the crime scene and held it out to his side.
“What does this mean?” he asked. “Here’s what we think happened. The Alphabet Man enters the business via this door and finds one of the girls …” Powell paused and looked down at his notes.
“… Allison Matthews at the reception desk. We know business is slow on Church Street, even on a Friday night, because of the intense cold. Practically nobody’s out, which is a tailor-made evening for our boy. Perhaps he was hoping to find just one girl there, or maybe for whatever reason, this time he didn’t care. His MO in the past has been to find women alone in places of business late at night. The D victim, for instance, was working alone in a convenience market. He went in there, subdued the victim, then closed the business and locked up. They found her the next morning in the walk-in cooler.”
Max Bransford turned in his seat and faced the detectives.
“We interviewed the manager, and he told us Allison had just started at the tanning parlor the week before. He also said that she was just the receptionist. She didn’t work in the back.”
“Did she know the second girl-” Maria Chavez spoke up, then looked down at her notes. “Sarah Burnham?”
“They were roommates and, apparently, best friends,”
Bransford answered. “Sarah got Allison the job.”
“The job that got her killed,” a voice from the back of the room whispered.
Bransford nodded, then turned back in his seat to face the front of the room. “Allison May Matthews was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Powell turned back to the diagram and pointed. “In any case, our guy somehow gets Allison to go back to this room, which is the first one you come to.”
“To coin a phrase …” a voice in the back spoke up.
Powell cleared his throat. “Yes, to coin a phrase. So he ties her up, gags her-”
Powell ran his finger down the hallway toward the second room, where the L girl was found.
“Then he scouts out the place and finds Sarah Burnham, the second girl. Maybe he walks in on her, startles her.
Maybe he offers her, as we’ve already speculated, a bond-age bonus, and maybe Sarah figures it’s been a slow night and she can use the extra, but then decides no, she’s not into that. Anyway, it takes a bit more to get Sarah down. It looks like she may have fought him some, but our boy’s an expert.
She goes down without too much trouble. So he ties her up as well. He checks the place out, figures it’s late. The restaurant next door is closed, the block is deserted. So just for grins, he decides not to gag her. And he takes his time.”
Powell turns, sets the poster down, and faces his audience grimly. “Meanwhile, Allison in the first room has to listen as her friend is slowly tortured to death. She hears the screaming, the shrieks of agony and fear, the begging and pleading, the crying for momma, and then this awful, terrible, deadly silence …”
“And then footsteps coming down the hall for her,” Bransford interjects.
“Exactly,” Powell said. “And by the time he gets to Allison-the M girl-who will be his thirteenth victim, he’s tired and he’s spent. So there’s just the slow, exquisite mental game of torturing someone to death. It’s not the death of a thousand cuts, but it’s damn close.”
Powell stood there for a few moments in his own terrible, deadly silence. His form seemed to droop as he finished his analysis and suppositions about what had happened sometime early Saturday morning at Exotica Tans on the coldest February night in Nashville, Tennessee, that anyone could remember in a long time.
Sergeant Frank Woessner, the Homicide Squad’s senior African-American investigator, a man who’d successfully attended a half-dozen summer courses at the FBI Academy, spoke up from the back row. It was the first time he’d spoken during the meeting. His voice was low and smooth, but coldly serious.
“So,” he asked calmly. “How do we catch this mother-fucker?”
Powell straightened, reached back for his notebook, and held it out in front of him.
“With this,” he said. “With the information we already have on this guy. We already know more about what makes this guy tick than his own momma.”
Powell turned, walked back behind the podium, and opened the notebook. “In the past twenty years or so, since the Psychological Profiling Program became a part of what was then called the Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, we’ve carried psychological profiling a long way. I can’t give you this guy’s name and address, but I can give you a very accurate estimate of the type of individual that commits this type of crime. This is a tool for you to use, but it’s only one tool. You have
to use every other tool and investigative technique in your arsenal to solve this crime. And if you do, you hit the jackpot, guys. You get the grand slam.”
“So who the fuck we dealing with?” Gilley asked.
“I’ve got complete, detailed handouts for all of you, but to quickly summarize, the Alphabet Man is a classic, organized, psychopathic sexual sadist. This means that he is not-I repeat, not-a raving maniac who’s going to go nuts in the middle of traffic and start slashing people during rush hour. A psychopathic sexual sadist is, above all else, a person who is completely amoral and asocial. He has no capacity for remorse, guilt, or shame. He’s a sociopath, without a moral compass or any sense of ethics or responsibility.
He’s a charming person; if you met him at a party you’d like him, even gravitate to him, especially if you’re female. He’s intelligent, well-read, perhaps well-educated, although he’s more likely to have lots of excuses as to why he’s not well-educated.
“The Alphabet Man thinks entirely too much of himself.
His particular disorder is what the shrinks call paraphilia; sexual deviations that are marked or characterized by per-sistent sexual arousal patterns in which unusual or deviant sexual situations are required for the perp’s arousal. His fantasies revolve around completely dominating and objectify-ing his victims. While he’s torturing, having sex with, and then slowly killing his victims, he’s experiencing a kind of euphoria.”
Powell paused, his eyes roaming the room as some of the investigators frantically took notes while others sat staring, almost in awe, at the description of the man they were now hunting. Powell had seen all these reactions in hundreds of faces in his career, and yet it never ceased to fascinate him.
“On a more specific note, ladies and gentlemen, get your pencils out. First of all, he’s male and he’s Caucasian. He’s around thirty-two, give or take a year or two, and he’s good-looking, maybe even GQ quality. Somewhere around five-eleven, one-seventy-five, maybe one-eighty, with a body that he works hard to keep in shape. He might be married or have a serious girlfriend; in any case, he’s sexually competent and may frequently enjoy what we would consider normal het-erosexual relationships with a variety of partners. In fact, women may chase him, and those that he doesn’t torture, rape, and kill probably have a good time. He’s intelligent, maybe extremely intelligent. As I said, he may be well-educated, but-and this is probably an important key-he may have in his academic background a history of disciplinary problems. He was a firstborn child and probably an only child. His mother adored him and his father was present when he wasn’t working at his good, stable job. However, if he got any discipline at home as a child, it was inconsistent.
He wet the bed until about the age of twelve and probably was torturing cats and puppies before he graduated to college coeds and night-shift clerks. He’s spoiled, wants what he wants when he wants it, and he’s a thrill seeker. He aspires to fame and glamour and attention. He’s probably interested in cops and criminology as well. In fact, if you get any leads or communication about these two murders, I’d take a good look at where the tips are coming from.”
Maria Chavez piped up, her voice strained: “How do you guys know this?”
Powell smiled. “Years of interviews, hundreds of hours of conversations, piles of statistics, and great big computers.
But keep in mind, this is a profile. Statistically, this is what he should be like, but there may be some variations.”
“Amazing,” Gary Gilley mumbled.
“We’re just getting started,” Powell said. “He makes good money. If he drinks Scotch-and we think he does-then he drinks the best Scotch whisky. And he drinks when he kills, but never enough to lose control. He’s highly mobile. Either his job allows him to travel a lot or for whatever reason he doesn’t have to worry about money. Maybe he’s rich; maybe he married well. He plans his crimes well, but handles unexpected circumstances-like finding an extra victim-with some style. He drives a nice car, but probably doesn’t drive it when he’s on a kill. Maybe a rental, or he’s got a kill car stashed away somewhere. He almost certainly has assembled a ‘murder kit,’ and you should search very hard for it if you find him. If he’s ever caught, he’ll feign innocence so effectively you’ll be tempted to believe him. When he’s finally nailed, he’ll express remorse, but always remember: He’s not sorry for what he did; he’s only sorry he got caught.”
Woessner’s hand shot up again. “Speaking of catching him, what are the chances that he’s still around so we can nail his sorry ass?”
“Virtually nil,” Powell admitted. “He’s already on the move, long gone. But what’s left behind is his detritus. He didn’t kill those two girls, then take a cab to the airport. As organized and planned as these murders were, they were also damn bloody and messy. He’s never left fingerprints, so somewhere in the vicinity of that strip mall are a pair of bloody latex gloves. Probably coveralls and other articles of clothing as well, not to mention a weapon of some kind and perhaps a discarded small bag full of duct tape and rope and perhaps a pair of handcuffs. Find it. Find his garbage.
And use it to track his sorry ass down.”
Powell stopped, closed his notebook. “And on a personal note, I happen to ascribe to that branch of psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, theology, whatever, which factors in the component of human evil. The murders committed by this person transcend our ability to understand them or in any way rationalize them. This man is not an animal; animals don’t rape, torture, sodomize, and kill. He doesn’t kill for food or survival. He kills because he’s a predator. Remember that, above all else. He kills for one reason and one reason alone.”
Powell paused once again, this time plainly and openly for dramatic affect.
“He likes it.”
CHAPTER 5
Monday afternoon, Manhattan
Taylor Robinson’s office at Delaney amp; Associates was on the northwest corner of the second floor of the renovated East Fifty-third Street brownstone that Joan Delaney’s second husband had left her. Joan’s third husband had tried to get a piece of the brownstone in their divorce, but Joan’s attorney-who later became her fourth husband-managed to chase him off. After the fourth died two years later, Joan’s claim on the house was forever uncontested due to her resolve to never marry again.
The four-story brownstone, located on the north side of East Fifty-third between Second and Third Avenues, was a short two-block walk from Sutton Place, where Taylor often sat on a bench and ate a sack lunch on warm days. She would stare out over the East River, the Queensboro Bridge towering over her left shoulder, and for a few short moments leave Joan Delaney’s shrill voice behind her. The screeching of modems and fax tones, the smell of toner and burnt coffee, the background din and chatter of a busy office became just a memory blocked from her mind, at least for a while.
As Taylor sat in her tiny, high-ceilinged office on a Monday that had already seen more than its usual share of crises, she longed for a warm spring day and the benches of Sutton Place that overlooked the blue-gray ribbon glimmering in the sun that was the East River. Unfortunately for her, this was still February. A bitter wind poured down the av-enues, its momentum only slightly broken by the concrete and plate-glass forest of Manhattan. The temperature wasn’t expected to reach twenty degrees today, and the wind chill/
agony factor was well below zero.
Taylor was frazzled and already weary before her normal one o’clock lunchtime. She felt as if she had been locked in a room full of hungry, yapping Chihuahuas, not one of which could actually bring her down and finish her off, but all of whom together could wear her down and frustrate her nearly to the point of screaming.
Her state of mind and morale weren’t helped by having a houseguest all weekend. It wasn’t that Michael Schiftmann was such a bother. In fact, he was the most low-maintenance houseguest she’d had in months. But there had been the party she’d thrown for him Saturday night, and on Sunday afternoon she’d accompanied him down to the
Village for his signing at a small mystery bookstore. After the book signing, she had taken Michael, the bookstore owner and his wife, and a couple of other hangers-on out for a dinner that lasted until nearly ten. By the time she got home, decompressed, and got Michael all squared away in the guest room, it had been past midnight before she collapsed into bed herself.
Sundays were almost always sacred to Taylor; a day when she often didn’t even bother to get out of her bathrobe until dinnertime. It was a day of lounging around reading the Sunday Times, catching an old movie on cable, drinking hot herb tea in the middle of the afternoon, and perhaps even taking a nap. Sundays restored Taylor Robinson, centered her, gave her that calm place deep inside herself in which to rest and recharge. She knew that by the end of the week, the loss of a Sunday was going to leave her ready to shut down completely. In essence, she’d already worked eight days without a day off, with at least four more to go.
Even tonight was shot, as Michael’s publicist had set up a signing at the Barnes amp; Noble superstore on the Upper West Side. It never occurred to Taylor not to accompany her star author to the signing; that sort of thing simply wasn’t done in Taylor Robinson’s way of conducting business.
Taylor heard a knock on the doorjamb of her office. She turned as Neil Macher, the head of contracts for the agency, stuck his head in. A lock of thinning, greasy black hair hung down over his forehead as he stared over the top of his smudged glasses.
“Bad time?”
Taylor looked around her tiny twelve-by-fifteen office, its floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and its one visitor’s chair piled high with manuscripts.
“Sorry I can’t offer you a seat,” she said, shrugging helplessly.
Neil stepped in, a stack of papers in his left hand. “Who’s got time to sit, anyway? Is Michael coming in today?”
“Probably not,” Taylor answered. “I’m meeting him for drinks and a quick dinner before his signing tonight.”
“And then he’s flying out tomorrow, right?”
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