Vail 01 - The 7th Victim (17 page)
“I’ve got something worth looking into,” Vail said once everyone had settled in. They each turned their bodies, or at least their attention, in her direction. “I’ve been trying to understand the significance of stabbing the eyes. It holds a lot of importance to the offender. It’s comforting to him, serves a deep-seated purpose. The fact that he does this as part of his ritual and not his MO tells me it could hold the key to understanding who this guy is.”
“Why’s that?” Bledsoe asked.
“Because he doesn’t have to do it to subdue his victim. She’s already dead,” Hancock said.
Bledsoe turned to Vail for confirmation. She reluctantly nodded.
“So why would this guy stab the eyes?”
“That’s the question. My unit floated some theories last year on vics one and two, but nothing anyone could agree on. But I’ve got this feeling—I mean, theory—that he does it because he has a physical deformity. Scarring on his face, an old wound, acne, harelip, I don’t know exactly, but it’s worth looking into.”
“I’ll do a search,” Sinclair said. “Ex-cons released in the past few years with a history of violent offenses who had a facial disfigurement. We can cross match it against anything we pick up on the blood angle.”
“It’s just a theory,” Vail cautioned.
Bledsoe frowned. “All we’ve got are theories right now.”
Vail dipped her chin in conciliatory agreement.
“While we’re on the topic of symbolism,” Bledsoe said, “what’s up with the hands, what’s that all about?”
“Symbolism ain’t gonna catch us a killer or find us a suspect.” Manette tilted her head toward Vail. “No offense,
Kari,
but why waste our time with this psycho stuff?”
Kari,
but why waste our time with this psycho stuff?”
“Behavioral analysis,” Robby corrected.
“Whatever you wanna call it, it’s like looking into a crystal ball. And we all know there aren’t no crystal balls.”
“The key is narrowing the suspect pool,” Robby said. “To give us a place to focus. With no eyewitnesses or smoking gun forensics, profiling can at least give us a direction. Tell us what kind of guy we’re looking for.”
Bledsoe leaned back in his chair and it let out an ear-piercing squeak. “Right now, we got nothing.” He turned to Vail. “The hands?”
Vail sighed, grateful Robby and Bledsoe had stepped in. She wasn’t in the mood to deal with another confrontation. Her headache had been dulled by Excedrin, but her thoughts still felt a bit fuzzy. She looked over at Manette, who appeared mollified for the moment. “He takes the hand with him as a trophy,” Vail said, “so he can relive the murder in his mind. Relive his fantasy. My guess is he’s probably got pictures, too. Of the vics after he’s done with them, maybe even of the walls, which I think he considers to be works of art.”
“So if these hands fulfill his fantasy, why does he need to kill again?” Sinclair asked.
“For serial killers, the act of killing their victims never lives up to their best fantasies. So they’re constantly refining and perfecting the fantasy. With Dead Eyes, when the hands or photos no longer bring him the excitement or satisfaction of the original act, the urges build and become overwhelming.”
“And that’s when he kills again,” Robby said.
“Exactly. Almost like an addict. Maybe more like a child who wants instant gratification and does whatever he needs to do to satisfy himself. Even if society feels it’s morally wrong.”
“Does he know it’s wrong?”
“On some level, absolutely. But he doesn’t feel any guilt. If he did, he’d cover their faces or bodies. He doesn’t. He leaves them on display, right there in their bed. He doesn’t even bother to move them to the bathtub when he eviscerates them. Doing it in bed has to have special meaning to him.”
“But a hand?” Manette asked. “How’s that a trophy?”
“Like the eyes, the hands have relevance to him. Maybe he had an abusive father who beat him all the time.”
“A left hand from each victim,” Sinclair said. “So to get to him, we find an abusive left-handed father.”
Manette rolled her eyes. “You can’t be serious, Sin. You believe this shit?”
Sinclair ignored her. “Let’s get back to the hand. These whackos really get off on severed hands? I’ve seen whips and chains and shit like that, but a whacked-off hand?”
“Dahmer used to skin the flesh off his victims and preserve their skeletons,” Vail said matter-of-factly. “When looking at the skulls and spines, he saw the victims—as if they were still alive, still there with him. He’d actually masturbate over the skeleton.”
“Jesus,” Robby said.
“And you know this, how?” Manette asked.
“He told us.”
Manette raised her eyebrows. “So naturally we just believed him. After all, he’s an upstanding citizen and all. . . .”
“Okay, let’s keep to the matter at hand,” Bledsoe said. He drew a dirty look from Robby for the pun.
“Sorry, didn’t mean it.” He sat up straight in his chair. “Karen, obviously you’ve got enough now to give us something. Right?” He seemed to be pleading, or at least hoping, that Vail would produce.
Vail looked down at her makeshift desk. A file was open and notes were scrawled on yellow lined paper. “The guy we’re looking for is a Caucasian about thirty to forty years old. Medium build, and according to forensics about five-eight. He works a blue-collar job but may be in business for himself. My bet is he puts a lot of time into stalking his victims because they’re all somewhat similar in age, marital status, and appearance. It’s likely his job gives him a flexible schedule to get all this stuff done. The job might also give him access to either photos or descriptions of the women he chooses. It’s possible he gets their addresses from a database, or he goes out hunting. When he finds one who fits his fantasy, he follows them home. I don’t know enough just yet to say which way he does it. We need to keep working the employee angle.
“He’s bright, above average intelligence. This is a guy who’s into power, so he probably drives a power car. An older German make. Porsche maybe, or Mercedes, red if it’s a Porsche and a dark color if it’s a Mercedes. It’ll be older because he can’t afford a newer one. But age doesn’t matter to him. It’s the illusion.”
“Kind of like sleight of hand, like this hocus-pocus profiling shit,” Manette muttered.
“Go on,” Bledsoe said.
Vail glanced down at her notes. “He’s got some deep-seated issues, as we’ve discussed. First on the list is an abusive childhood. I’m guessing the father since that’s the case ninety percent of the time. The father’s probably left-handed—” she shot a look at Manette—“and he probably beat the offender with his hand. There’s something with his face—maybe a facial deformity, as I mentioned. Maybe even caused by the father during one of the beatings. The eyes are a bit tougher. Could be symbolic, too. Like the father put him down all the time by telling him everyone
sees
him as a fuck-up.”
sees
him as a fuck-up.”
Vail looked down at her pad. “There might be something with the blood murals. It’s unlike anything I’ve personally seen before, and VICAP should have a printout for us soon. There’s something there, I know it. Just a gut feeling . . . but we have to keep on that angle. Either this guy had formal art training, or he works in the art field. He might even be a frustrated artist. Painter is the most obvious. But I wouldn’t rule out jobs involving manual labor, where he could tap his creative side. Sculptor, carpenter . . . hell, even poet, musician, or massage therapist.” She stopped for a moment, turned to Bledsoe. “We’re checking out habits common to all the vics, right? Maybe see if they all visited the same massage therapist.”
“Manny and I got that,” Sinclair said. “So far, the only thing we’ve come up with is that two of ’em shopped at the same supermarket chain. Different stores, though. We’re still working on it, there’s a lot of ground to cover.” He flipped the page on his yellow pad and made a note. “We’ll add massage therapists.”
Robby asked, “Make any sense to create a list of people in the fields you mentioned above—sculptors, painters, that type of thing?”
“We’ll end up with a huge database if we don’t narrow it,” Bledsoe said. “Go for it, but don’t give me grief when the computer spits out five thousand names.”
“We can cross-reference it against the other lists.”
“Fine. Do it.”
Sinclair asked Vail, “You said this guy had above average intelligence. How do you know that?”
“First, he gains access to the vic’s houses with relative ease. He either knows them or has found some slick way of disarming them verbally. Typically, offenders who tend toward organization are socially adept; they’ll use slick talk to approach and calm the vic. He might role-play with them, impersonating a cop or security guard to earn their confidence. I’d expect him to be well groomed and in the uniform of the role he takes on.”
“We should continue talking with the vics’ neighbors,” Robby said. “Maybe they’ve seen a stranger in some kind of uniform.”
“So tell me, Kari, what set him off? What happened a year and a half ago to put this guy on the map?”
“Could’ve been a lot of things. Most likely, there was some stressor in his life prior to Marci Evers’s murder. A job change, a relationship gone sour. Some other type of situational stress that happened right before the first murder that set him off. Whatever it was, he reached maximum capacity and popped.”
“You said he was organized,” Sinclair said.
Vail nodded. “He’s what we call an organized offender. There’s thought and premeditation to everything he does. There’s no evidence of a struggle and only minimal defensive wounds, if any. That indicates he did a significant amount of planning. If we look at each of the victim’s houses, we see that the front door has sufficient cover from the street. That allows him to interact with the vic without anyone seeing him, just in case a neighbor is passing by at the time. Or, could be it’s a safety net in case she denies him admittance and he has to force his way in. Either way, there’s planning involved.
“At the other end of the spectrum are lower IQ killers. They’re usually
disorganized.
The killing is more impulsive, they use weapons of opportunity, or those already in the victim’s apartment, and they make a great deal of mess by mutilating the victim and smearing her blood around the crime scene.”
disorganized.
The killing is more impulsive, they use weapons of opportunity, or those already in the victim’s apartment, and they make a great deal of mess by mutilating the victim and smearing her blood around the crime scene.”
“Hold it a second,” Hancock said. “Your profile indicates organization but the crime scenes show the opposite.”
Vail sighed. She was tired and didn’t feel like justifying her opinions to Hancock. But his confusion was understandable, and she figured that if he hadn’t asked the question, someone else would have.
“There’s a lot of blood, I know. That usually points to disorganization. But if we look at the blood not by volume but by what he does with it, the painting, the artistic nature of the images, then I think we have to consider it to be purposeful. Purpose indicates organization.”
“What about weapons of opportunity—”
“Every person has steak knives of some sort in their kitchen. Fact that he didn’t bring the knives to the vics tells me he’s smart. Why risk getting caught with knives that can be traced to other victims? He uses what’s there because he knows it’s likely going to be there. To me, that’s another sign of organization. But beyond that, stabbing the eyes is not how he kills these women, asphyxiation is. The knives are merely used for his postmortem behaviors.”
“What about the evisceration? That’s mutilation, disorganization for sure, even going by your own definition.”
Vail tapped her foot and hesitated before answering. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it, except to say that maybe this guy is a mix. Elements of organization blended with some disorganization. More often than not, that’s the case anyway.” Vail rubbed at her painful brow. “Wish I could give you more. I might be able to refine it a bit once I have time to go through it again, run it by my unit.”
“A lot of mights and maybes,” Manette said.
Vail closed the file on her desk. “Hey, a profile is just a tool, like an alternative light source or a compound microscope. It’s not going to give you a suspect’s name and number. You think you can do better, have at it.”
There was silence for a moment before Robby spoke. “I heard one of the forensics guys saying they found some dirt in Sandra Franks’s house.”
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