Psychopath (9 page)

Clevenger looked from the woman to the boy, letting his eyes stay with the body of the sixteen-year-old, sprawled in bloody snow, wearing a puffy, down-filled jacket, blue jeans, and green suede Nike high-top sneakers.  It can end just like that, he thought.  Even for someone’s beloved sixteen-year-old son.  Even for someone like Billy or for any kid decent enough to help a stranger carry a bag of groceries to a van, or kind enough to help jump-start a car stranded in the night, or stupid enough to walk into a darkened park to buy a couple joints or a bag of heroin or a couple pirated CDs.  Then you get a call one day from a cop.  Very serious tone.  Maybe you think your son or daughter has been nabbed for speeding or —  worse — driving under the influence.  So you brace for bad news.  You might even think of a lawyer you know or the punishment you’re going to dole out.  Then the cop starts with the description, trying to let you down easy, sounding kind, not angry, which makes your heart sink, for some reason.  Did your son or daughter leave the house wearing this jacket, that pair of pants?  And maybe you still have hope when he mentions that jacket — the blue, down-filled one with the hood — and even those jeans with the frayed bottoms.  Because they could belong to anybody.  So it could be a mistake.  I mean, you’re talking a million teenagers a day in America wearing the same get-up to express their individuality.  But there is the unmistakable fact of the phone in
your
hand, that
you
have the gotten this call, not one of those other couple million parents.  So there must be more coming, another fact whizzing toward you to shatter your world.  And then the cop mentions the green high-tops.  The green
Nike
high-tops.  And all your breath leaves you and your head is in your hands and you hear the telephone hit the floor.  And you look up at the clock, maybe because you need to see the second hand moving to believe any of this is real.  And then you know that it is.  And you know you will never forget 4:24 in the afternoon, that you will dread the leading edge of evening the rest of your days, and that nothing, but nothing, will ever be the same.  Because death — the devil himself, the scourge of the universe — has come to your door.

"Entirely random," White finished up.

"I see," Clevenger said.

"One consistency," said Ken Hiramatsu, an Asian man who looked to be in his early thirties, "is the lack of signs indicating a struggle.  Relatively little bruising.  Not much in the way of torn clothing.  No ropes.  No duct tape.  These people got comfortable with the man who killed them.  They let him get very close to them."

"Drugged them?" Clevenger asked.

"No signs of that on toxicology," Hiramatsu said.

"Seduced them, more likely," Whitney McCormick said, looking at Clevenger.  Her voice was pretty seductive stuff itself, combining a soft, girlish tone with a level of self-assurance that was disarming.  "I don’t mean romantically, necessarily.  Although I’d bet he’s good-looking.  Appealing, anyhow.  A nice face.  A pleasant voice.  Well-coiffed.  Maybe obsessively so.  He dresses well.  But the main thing is that he’s smooth.  A charmer.  Somehow he gets his victims to trust him so much that they can’t quite believe he’s killing them.  They’re so shocked at what’s happening that they don’t struggle a whole lot."

"And he doesn’t have sex with them," Clevenger ventured.

"No," White said.  He glanced at Hiramatsu.

"No semen was recovered," Hiramatsu said.  "He doesn’t leave any bodily fluid inside his victims, he takes some of theirs away with him."

"Meaning?" Clevenger asked.

"On every body, we found evidence of phlebotomy," Hiramatsu said.  "A small bruise and puncture wound at the antecubital fossa, consistent with a hypodermic needle."

Bob White laid three more photographs on the table.  Each was a close-up of the crook of a victim’s arm.

"He takes a blood sample?" Clevenger asked.

"Apparently," Hiramatsu said.  "Unless he’s injecting them with something we can’t detect."

"And the venipuncture is competent?" Clevenger asked.

"He gets most of them on the first stick," Hiramatsu said.

"We’re right with you," White said to Clevenger.  "He could be a hospital worker.  A nurse.  A phlebotomist.  Even a doctor."

"He doesn’t collect anything else, so far as we can tell," Greg Martino, the VICAP analyst said.  "Just the blood.  He’s not snatching purses or wallets.  No indication he wants a lock of hair or a piece of jewelry."

"The blood keeps them close to him," Clevenger said.

"He gets close and he stays close," McCormick said.  "You start to wonder about abandonment.  Is the guy an orphan?  Did his father or mother or a childhood friend die on him precipitously?"

Clevenger thought of Billy, again.  He’d lost his baby sister to murder, his father to life in prison.  How would those losses ultimately play out in his life?  He shook his head and shook the question out of his mind.  "Or did
he
? Clevenger said.

"Did he, what?" McCormick said.

"Die," Clevenger said, looking at her.  "Did something make him feel dead?  Maybe that’s what he wants to watch — the reason he needs to get so close to his victims in the first place.  Maybe they’re substitutes for looking at the dead parts of himself."

"Sexual abuse?" Kane Warner asked, from the head of the table.

"Possibly," Clevenger said.  "But the fact that he doesn’t violate his victims sexually argues against it."

"The penetration of the needle could be a sexual equivalent," McCormick said.

That was high-end psychological reasoning, and it told Clevenger that McCormick was no lightweight.  "Could be," Clevenger said.  "No question.  But what’s clear to me is that he’s searching for comfort, not thrills.  Intimacy, not excitement.  This isn’t a power trip for him. It’s something he’s driven to.  He’s not enraged.  He’s not looking to maim or disfigure.  He kills with a minimum of violence.  A single laceration.  He takes the time to bury his victims when he can, not so much to hide the evidence, but because he feels badly for them, and probably feels badly about what he’s done.  But he’s not going to risk anything to be a nice guy.  He’s cool and collected, even after the kill.  When it’s too chancy to take the time to bury a body, he leaves it exposed.  He doesn’t want to be caught."

"They all do," Kane Warner said.  "Deep down."

Clevenger disagreed, but said nothing.  Plenty of killers would be happy to go on killing forever.  They didn’t want to get caught.  But they did wish to be known.  That’s what seemed to trip them up every time.  Good old ego.  A killer content to remain anonymous forever just might be able to.

Warner nodded toward Dorothy Campbell, a bookish woman in her fifties who ran the PROFILER system, a database of millions of facts about serial killers, including the behavioral patterns and geographic locations of known violent criminals.  "Obviously, by statistical probabilities, we are dealing with a male offender," she said.  "Above average intelligence.  Probably college educated.  Maybe more. He’s extremely socially competent — likeable — but a loner at heart.  He’s more of a traveler than a vagrant, someone who very much wants to keep moving, given the highway as his hunting ground.  And he doesn’t kill on the outskirts of Manhattan or L.A, He doesn’t like cities.  He can’t stay anonymous enough.  He goes close to the mountains in Vermont or near a state park in rural Kentucky or close to the Iowa plains.  He needs his space.  He may be an outdoorsman — a hunter or hiker or camper."  She looked at the lighted map, then back at Clevenger.  "The part that doesn’t make sense is that he blurs the boundaries between the organized criminal and the disorganized criminal."

"Forget ’blurs,’ " Bob White said.  "He
shatters
them."

Clevenger knew the distinction Campbell and White were drawing.  An ’organized serial killer’ would be likely to plan out the murders, to target strangers, to require submission by his victims, to restrain them before killing them, and to kill them in a very gruesome manner.  A ’disorganized killer,’ on the other hand, would strike out much more spontaneously, exploding at people he knew, speaking little to them, not using restraints, possibly having sex with his victims’ corpses, and generally leaving a weapon at each crime scene.

"This is someone," Campbell said, "who doesn’t seem to plan his murders, but somehow comes to know his victims — or behaves toward them as though he has some intimacy with them."

"He’s been destroyed," Clevenger said.  "He knows what they’re going through.  He feels their pain." That line made Clevenger think of Jesus Christ.  "He probably considers himself religious, or in touch with God, much more than the devil.  He may think he’s doing God’s work."

McCormick nodded.

"He leaves the bodies pretty much where they fall," Campbell said, "as if he’s horrified by what he’s done.  Yet he wants a reminder of them.  Another dichotomy."

"The only thing that seems crystal clear," Kane Warner said to Clevenger, "is that the paradigms we’ve developed in-house don’t yield a clear picture of this guy.  So what I’m suggesting is that Whitney get you fully up to speed on the case over the next couple of days and that you join the investigation, reporting directly to me.  It’s probably best you stay right on the base for the time being?"

Talk about being put on the spot.  And Warner’s tone reminded Clevenger of yet another thing North Anderson had warned him about.  The FBI wasn’t likely to set him loose on the investigation.  Warner wanted Clevenger on a leash, and he wanted to be the one holding it.  That’s what the whole
reporting to me
clause was about, not to mention the one about sleeping in an FBI dorm.  It was as good a time as any to show he didn’t train well.  "You already made that offer on the phone two days ago," Clevenger said.  "Except for the room and board.  But I’m still not convinced you’re ready to catch this guy."

"Excuse me?" Warner said, never losing his politician’s smile.

"I mean you’ve got the fancy map and everything, and these people have done impressive work on the computer and in the lab.  Whitney is probably dead right about some of the killer’s psychological characteristics.  But you’re still going at him from a distance.  And this is a guy you might be able to reach — if you’ve got the stomach for it."

"Be more specific, doctor?" Warner said.

"The killer gets close to his victims before he kills them," Clevenger said, looking at the people around the table.  "He makes them feel that he cares about them.  And he probably does, or at least he thinks he does.  The trouble for him is that he can only take intimacy in small doses.  That’s why he has to keep moving.  No long-term relationships.  Which causes him great pain, as it would anyone."

"We always want what we can’t have," McCormick said.

Clevenger looked at her.  "Always," he said.  He looked slowly back at Kane Warner.  "The key to making this guy mess up, the way to trip him up psychologically, is to keep his victims in his face.  Trot out their relatives.  Show pictures on the television news of them as kids.  Bring the relatives together for meetings every month somewhere.  Let the public know about each reunion.  Now our man is excluded.  He’s an outsider who really feels it.  He may have thirteen blood samples, but these people on television have much more.  Photographs, memories, real tears.  And they have each other.  His need for closeness — his brand of closeness, whatever it is — will increase.  He’ll start getting hungrier and he’ll start making mistakes.  Maybe he’ll feel the need to revisit one of the murder scenes.  Maybe he’ll make a call to a grieving mother or brother.  He might even let us catch him, if only to lay eyes on his extended family, to sit in the same courtroom as the families of his victims."

"Interesting," Warner said, without much feeling.

"I think Dr. Clevenger is right," McCormick said to Warner.  "It’s almost like this guy is so good at keeping people away that he’s keeping us away.  We have to reach out to him."

Dorothy Campbell nodded.

"I’ve been saying we should take the fight to this animal for months," said John Silverstein, from the Criminal Investigative Analysis Program.  It was the first time he’d spoken during the meeting.  "There’s no traditional pattern here to figure where he’s from or who he is or where he might strike next.  We’ve got to flush him out."

"But that could be dangerous," Bob White said.  "What if you increase his need to kill and he
doesn’t
get careless?  I mean, this guy can wait between feeds.  Thirteen bodies in three years.  If he picks up the pace a hundred percent, he can still pick and choose his spots."

Warner nodded in agreement.

"You might find that out," Clevenger said to White.  "And then you notch up the psychological pressure even higher.  You have to be willing to accelerate his violence until he crashes.  It won’t be pretty.  But it’s the price you have to pay to stop him."

There was a knock at the door.  It opened.  A twenty-something woman stood in the doorway.  She looked at Kane Warner.

Warner stood and walked to the door.  The woman whispered something to him.  Warner let out a long breath, shook his head.  Then he turned around and closed the door.  "Number fourteen," he said.  "In a pond twenty yards off Route 7, in Utah.  A handicapped man — in his wheelchair."

A weightiness filled the room.

Clevenger looked at Whitney McCormick, who shared the kind of glance with him that he remembered from medical school, when he would be standing with a nurse over the bed of a patient about to die, knowing that being so close to the end of life had suddenly dissolved all the usual boundaries between them.  And that single glance from McCormick nearly enticed him to commit to the investigation then and there.  In it was an invitation to let his personal and professional lives become one thing, to let his need to live fully and to love fully and to be loved completely express itself in the only forum he had ever really found — the hunt for a killer.

"According to the local pathologist, the body is at least three months old," Warner went on.  "The remains are on the way here."  He looked at Clevenger, and his politician’s mask suddenly dropped.  "Just so you know," he said, with no hint of a question in his voice, "I sleep and eat this case.  I want this guy more than you can imagine."  His mask was back just as suddenly.  "Let’s take whatever time we have today to give you have all the information you’ll need to make your decision about joining us."