Red Death

by Alan Jacobson

  Phillip frowned, then went back to his handset and was engrossed in the game when suddenly Scott spoke. His voice was raspy, perhaps because he had hardly spoken in so long.

  “I want to kill her. That’s what I want.”

  Phillip swung his gaze to Scott. His answer was as succinct as it was surprising: “Not unless I do it first.”

  15

  They arrived at the home of a middle-aged woman in the small town of Wahiawa. There weren’t a lot of streetlamps, and they were miles away from Honolulu, so there was not much in the way of light pollution. The sliver of a moon was muted by the deepening cloud cover.

  Before they got out of their vehicle, a text came through from Robby:

  your instincts were right as usual

  asked around my old buddies at vienna pd

  ferraro was a colleague of

  wait for it

  chase hancock

  remember him

  Vail texted back:

  can never forget him

  or the dead eyes case

  for obvious reasons

  so what

  Vail tapped her index finger on her thigh. Robby’s response:

  so like i said

  ferraro was a colleague of hancocks

  and

  Vail thought about it some more. Was it enough to cause intense dislike of someone, even if she and Hancock had a contentious relationship? Probably not.

  and what else

  “You about ready?” Russell asked.

  “Just a minute.”

  He sighed.

  Robby’s reply vibrated in her hand.

  hancock is ferraros bro in law

  Vail sighed. So this was personal.

  crap

  ok thanks honey

  ill take it from here

  talk soon love u

  “All right,” Vail said, shoving the phone in her pocket. “Let’s go.”

  Vail got out of the Ford and saw a sedan parked just outside the cordoned off crime scene, a newspaper logo printed on a yellow placard in the windshield above the word press. A man was leaning his buttocks against the fender of his vehicle, but upon seeing their car pull up, he pushed off and made his way to the taped-off boundary.

  Vail made an end run around the reporter, using a couple of large officers as offensive linemen clearing a path for their running back.

  As she and Russell approached the front door, Vail stifled a yawn and Russell badged Ty Palakiko, the first cop on scene.

  “Aloha,” Palakiko said.

  “Aloha.” Russell glanced around. “Where’s our vic?”

  “Inside. Living room, near the back door.”

  “Name?”

  “Let me guess,” Vail said. “Mary.”

  Palakiko looked up from his spiral pad. “Yeah. Mary Grant. You know her?”

  “I know the ritual.”

  Palakiko narrowed his eyes. “The what?”

  “Never mind,” Russell said. “What else can you tell us?”

  The young officer looked down at his notes. “Sixty-six. Works at Macy’s.”

  “Which department?” Vail asked.

  Palakiko glanced at Russell, then back at Vail. “Huh? I didn’t ask. Is—is that important?”

  Vail slipped on her left bootie. “Nope. Just yanking your chain.”

  Palakiko frowned.

  “Go on,” Vail said as she moved to her right foot. “What else do you have for us?”

  Palakiko waited until she stood up, then said, “You know about ‘aloha,’ Agent Vail?”

  She snorted. “Of course. Means hello and good-bye.”

  “No,” the officer said with not a hint of respect. “In Hawaiian, the true meaning of ‘aloha’ is love, peace, compassion—a way of life where you try to influence others with your spirit.”

  “That’s a helluva lot of meaning packed into one five-letter word.”

  “And yet you continue to be disrespectful.”

  Who the hell is this guy?

  “Respect our customs,” Palakiko said. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

  “I thought I was in Hawaii.” She grabbed Russell’s arm and whispered in his right ear. “Did I say that out loud?”

  Russell fought back a smile.

  Palakiko shook his head. “Sarcasm has no place here.”

  “I’m a native New Yorker. Sarcasm is our ‘aloha.’ It’s also in our spirit. It can mean ‘I love you, man’—like ‘aloha,’ that’d be the peace and compassion part. It can also mean, ‘Don’t fuck with me, asshole.’ That’d be—well … hmmph. There’s no parallel to ‘aloha’ for that.”

  Russell cleared his throat. “Who discovered the body?”

  Palakiko frowned at Vail—again—then tore his gaze away and faced Russell. “Co-worker. Ms. Grant went home for lunch but never returned. Co-worker called, got no answer, so she came by. Went around back and saw the vic on the floor through the living room window.”

  “Co-worker still here?” Vail asked.

  “It’s late. Sent her home. Got her cell.” He jotted it down and tore the page off his pad, then handed it to Russell, ignoring Vail’s outstretched palm.

  Guess I hurt his feelings.

  “Good work, officer,” Vail said. “And I’m sorry for being sarcastic. Aloha.”

  Palakiko was not buying it. He frowned again.

  Someone’s spirit needs an attitude adjustment.

  They proceeded down a narrow hallway to where Mary Grant was located. She was lying face down near a door. They knelt and took a closer look at her face. From what they could tell, she had sustained an abrasion from the fall, but no overt signs of trauma indicative of a violent altercation.

  Of course there wasn’t. The offender was miles away.

  A moment later, Vail stood up. “Let’s go check out her bathroom. But I think we know what we’re going to find.”

  “CSU is on the way.” Russell consulted his phone. “Two minutes out.”

  Vail did not want to risk contaminating the area, so she waited in the hallway as Russell visually inspected the bar of soap and trash can contents.

  “Looks like the others. Let’s leave it alone and let CSU bag it and do their thing. I doubt we’re going to find anything unusual.”

  They walked outside to get some fresh air and stood on the porch, about thirty feet from the crime scene tape, which was stretched across the edges of the postage stamp lawn.

  A moment later, the forensics technician was exiting her vehicle.

  “Process the scene normally,” Russell said, “but we’re fairly confident there’s a wrapper or two in the bathroom garbage that we need to be very careful with. And the bar of soap.”

  “Rush on this stuff,” Vail said.

  “Isn’t there always?” the tech asked. “Do my best.”

  “Agent Vail?”

  Vail turned and saw a man in his fifties looking directly at her—the journalist she had spotted earlier. He was holding a digital recorder and a lanyard with press identification bearing the same newspaper logo as the one emblazoned on the sedan.

  “Agent Vail,” he repeated. “Can you comment on the victim?”

  “I can’t, sorry.”

  “But—just a few questions.”

  Vail growled internally. “Sorry. I can’t.”

  “But if you’re here, does that mean there’s a serial killer on the island?”

  This guy knows me somehow. But he doesn’t look familiar.

  “Please,” the reporter said. “Just give me a minute of your time.”

  If I pull my Glock, I’ve got a clear headshot. Problem solved.

  Instead, she grinned and said, “Aloha.”

  The man was not prepared for this response. He closed his mouth and tucked his chin ba
ck.

  Vail slipped back into the house with Russell and peered out the living room window through a gap in the camel-colored drapes. “We’re losing our advantage. Once they go public with this, the UNSUB’s gonna realize we know it’s murder and not a natural death.”

  “Nothing we can do about it. But that guy seemed to know you. Wanna ask him if he’ll bury the story? At least for a few days?”

  “You ever know a journalist willing to delay a story he’s broken? One that’s potentially big, involving a serial killer on Oahu?”

  “Not personally. Nope.”

  “Didn’t think so. Let’s make better use of our time. We have an army. Let’s deploy them.”

  “Army? Oahu’s got a huge military presence, but—”

  “Not that kind of army. The Honolulu police force. We can draw up a list of stores and send cops to see which sell the kind of soap our UNSUB makes.”

  “I’ll make a call.”

  As she waited for the phone to connect, Vail said, “I just had a disturbing thought. What if she doesn’t make the soap at all? What if she buys the soap and rewraps certain bars with the toxin?”

  Russell’s face went blank as the line was answered. He refocused and made the request, then hung up and faced Vail. “Yeah. What if?”

  “Didn’t mean to freak you out. It’s a possibility, but we can’t consider all possibilities. We have to determine by reasonable inference what’s the most likely scenario and pursue that. If it doesn’t bear fruit, we back up and start expanding our assumptions. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “An offender like this, if he’s a male, would not be getting as much satisfaction from the kill because it’s more removed.”

  “Because he doesn’t see the victim die.”

  “Right. He doesn’t feel her die. He needs to get that connection to the kill in some other way. Again, this is extremely unusual—if not the first offender I’ve encountered like this. But if we accept this as an aberration, at least for now, his connection to the vic might come, at least in part, from him personally making the soap and wrapping specific bars with the toxin.”

  “I’ll buy that. If it’s a male.”

  “That’s not all I’m selling.” Vail’s gaze drifted off into the dark streets of Wahiawa. “I overlooked something.”

  Russell waited a moment, then shifted his feet. “You gonna keep it to yourself?”

  Vail groaned, then rubbed her temples. “Dammit. I need to figure out if the offender’s male or female. This is too confusing.”

  “No shit.”

  She rocked her head back and stared at the sky. Closed her eyes. “The UNSUB needs to choose the right Mary, hand the bar to her personally. But Kuoko said that the victim’s name is written in marker on the outer wrapper. Same person wrote the name in calligraphy on all the wrappers.”

  “So she pre-marks all the bars. Like it’s the name of the soap.”

  “But the offender is writing their first and last names on the bars, so to do that you have to personally ask each woman her name at the time of sale, then write it on the wrapper. Right?”

  “Good point.”

  Vail dropped her chin and yawned widely before answering. “Sorry. It’s three hours later for me. Or actually six. My body’s not sure what time zone it’s in.”

  She sat down on the stoop and took a deep breath.

  “You okay?”

  “Thinking.”

  “That’s good. I’ll just stand here and look stupid while you … think.”

  “Yeah. Great … thanks.”

  A moment later, Vail got to her feet. “He’s a guy.”

  “Who is?”

  “The offender.”

  “Okay. You sure?”

  “Don’t start that again.” She yawned, then shook her head, trying to wake up. “Here’s my sleep deprived, confused, but entirely clear-headed thinking. The—”

  “You realize that makes no sense.”

  “The UNSUB needs to interact with these women so he can choose which one he wants to kill. The interaction is extremely important to him, right? As we discussed, offenders feed off contact with their victims. Our UNSUB doesn’t physically interact with his, so he needs to do it on some other level, another way of connecting with them. I shouldn’t really say ‘connecting,’ because psychopaths—assuming he is one—don’t really experience emotions like you and I do.”

  “Okay.”

  “So he relates to each woman on some level that has meaning to him. The victim being named Mary is extremely important to him. It’s a big part of why he chooses that particular target. So he has to ask her name when she’s in front of him. His excuse—so that it doesn’t seem weird that this stranger is asking a woman her name—is that he personalizes the soap by writing her name in calligraphy on the wrapper. When he comes across a woman named Mary, if she fits his image of his mother, he gives her one of the bars that has the toxin.”

  “Mary’s obviously an incredibly common name.”

  “Definitely helps in victim selection.”

  Russell nodded. “Okay. And what’s convinced you he’s a man and not a woman?”

  “A woman wouldn’t need to interact with the vic like our UNSUB does. She’d find some other way of poisoning her victims because the one-on-one contact is less important. And riskier. Plus, there’s no connection with the vics.”

  Vail stopped and thought a moment. “This isn’t set in stone. There are exceptions.”

  “Nothing is absolute.”

  “I just want you to realize that there were one or two female serial killers who did need the physical contact. Males have unfortunately given us a rather large database to study. But women, there’ve been so few of them that it’s hard to craft an accurate profile. Like, one, Juana Barraza, in Mexico, she physically punished her victims, who were all women sixty and over. She brutalized them, strangled and bludgeoned them. They reminded her of her mother.”

  “Just like our killer.”

  “Yeah. Barraza was a professional wrestler, a large, strong woman who had no problem overpowering her victims. So she isn’t the best example to study.”

  “Because someone like her can kill like a man. Overpower the vic.”

  “Right. So let’s throw Barraza out.”

  “Happy to.”

  “If we follow the facts—the best facts we have—that leads me back to my belief that the UNSUB is a man.”

  “Great. Since that’s settled,” Russell said with an eye roll, “how long does he have to be in contact with people before he not only finds a woman named Mary but one that ‘fits’ his mother?”

  Vail shrugged. “The answer might simply be ‘long enough.’ I have a feeling he’s been doing this for a while. And he’s apparently good at what he does because he’s had success finding victims. If this method didn’t work for him, he’d have to find them some other way.”

  He nodded. “You make a good point.”

  “It happens sometimes.”

  Russell laughed.

  “And ‘fitting the image’ of his mother doesn’t necessarily have to be physical. Could be a way she says a word, a look she gives him. A phrase she uses, perfume, food that she—”

  “I get the point. Could be something we may not associate with the real object of his violence. Not that we know who that is, anyway.”

  “Not yet. But we may figure it out—and when that time comes, I don’t want to be blind to the fact that there are other things that can set him off besides physical appearance.”

  “Got it.”

  “And I think red is important to him.”

  “Red. Representing blood?”

  “I don’t think so. I think it’s got to do with the color. He writes their names in red marker on the wrappers. And there was a trace amount of red dye in th
e soap.”

  “Unless it was contamination.”

  “Can’t say just yet, but I’m betting it wasn’t an accident.”

  “Because?”

  “Red has meaning to him. For some reason, he associates it with his mother. He’s incorporated it into his ritual.”

  “Because it’s got nothing to do with him being able to kill the women.”

  Vail nodded. “For whatever reason, adding the dye to the soap while he’s making it is important to him.”

  “If your theory is correct.”

  “If it’s correct. Yeah.” Vail yawned again. “Sorry.” She shook her head vigorously, trying to knock away the cobwebs. “He’s missing out on the actual kill, the physical, personal violence that so many of these offenders crave. So interacting with the woman at the point of sale, and possibly even the hunt for the right victim, has to be what fuels him and feeds his anger.”

  “You realize you’re repeating yourself.”

  She looked at him with glassy eyes. “Huh?”

  “Sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself of something.”

  “I’m thinking out loud. I’m out on a limb here, so yeah, maybe I’m having some trouble accepting it.”

  “I don’t think I want to know what an argument sounds like inside your head.”

  “Worse thing is that because he doesn’t interact with the body—which is key to understanding what makes him tick—there are fewer behaviors for me to evaluate.”

  “What you’re saying is that you could be so wrong about this we could be wasting precious hours. Days.”

  “It’s possible, but I don’t think so. Thing is, I don’t want to disregard what we’ve found at the crime scenes. I have to fight the urge to make my profile fit the evidence. The profile has to come from the offender’s behaviors and my analysis of what’s going on with the … uh … the UNSUB.” She closed her eyes. “Okay, I think my brain is officially powering down.”

  “Let’s get you to your hotel room.”

  “Not yet.”

  “You can hardly think straight.”

  “Nice try, but this is the way I usually am.”