by Mike Omer
O’Donnell sighed and walked back. Gray seemed embarrassed, humility creeping in his features.
“Mind if we talk privately?” he asked.
O’Donnell crouched under the yellow tape and stepped a few yards away from the house, out of earshot.
“What is it?” she asked the agents, who’d followed her.
“We’re investigating a serial killer named Rod Glover,” Agent Gray said. “He lived in Chicago for about ten years, using a fake identity.”
“What does he have to do with this murder?”
“We’re not sure if he has anything to do with it. But Rod Glover strangles his victims. And his last known address was right in this neighborhood, in McKinley Park.”
“That sounds like a very arbitrary connection,” O’Donnell pointed out. “Do you show up at every homicide investigation with suspicion of strangulation in the area?”
Bentley snorted with impatience. “Sexual homicides with strangulation in this immediate area aren’t an everyday occurrence—”
“Sexual homicide? Did Martinez tell you it was a sexual homicide?”
“He said the victim’s clothing was torn.”
“Why the hell did he tell you all that? This case has nothing to do with him, and none of this is in any reports. He—” The puzzle pieces suddenly clicked together. “Dr. Bentley? You’re Zoe Bentley, the profiler. You worked with Martinez on the Strangling Undertaker case.”
“Yes.”
Three months before, Chicago had been terrorized by a serial killer who murdered and embalmed young women, leaving their bodies posed all over the city. Lieutenant Martinez had been in charge of the investigation, and he’d asked for the bureau’s help. Dr. Bentley and Agent Gray had been part of the task force that had finally caught the killer.
“You’re not from the FBI’s Chicago field office.”
“No,” Gray answered. “We’re from the Behavioral Analysis Unit.”
“And you just happened to be in Chicago today?” O’Donnell asked, incredulous. The BAU was located in Quantico, Virginia, half a country away.
“Not exactly. We’ve been following Glover’s tracks. We’ve been in Chicago for the past week.”
“And now you want to take over the case? Just because you think it might be related—”
“We’re not taking over anything.” Gray raised his hands in a placating manner. “We just want to assess if it’s possible Glover is related to this case.”
“Fine.” O’Donnell shrugged. “Talk to your guys at the field office. They can get the case reports from us, and you can take a look.”
“It would be much better if I could see the scene for myself,” Bentley blurted.
“Better for who?”
“Well, for everyone. We’re much more experienced in profiling these kinds of attacks. If we see the scene—”
O’Donnell got impatient with the woman’s patronizing manner. “The photos will be in the case file.”
Gray touched Bentley’s arm, just as she was about to say something, and she shut her mouth.
“Listen,” he said. “We can try and help with this case. We can allocate federal resources.”
That was what O’Donnell had been hoping to hear all along. DNA tests in Chicago had a ridiculous backlog. But if the feds got involved, volunteering their own labs? O’Donnell could use a lucky break like that.
Besides, she was curious. She’d heard a lot of people talking about Zoe Bentley and the Strangling Undertaker case. People loved talking about Bentley almost as much as they enjoyed talking about O’Donnell and the recent scandal. The profiler was depicted as everything from a sham to a genius. There had been some sort of mess in the Strangling Undertaker case. Bentley had managed to get severely injured during the investigation. She and her partner had possibly held back crucial information from the cops. O’Donnell had even heard an absurd rumor that when they’d arrested the murderer, Bentley had been half-naked. The profiler sure made people talk.
She wanted to see her in action.
“Fine,” she said. “You can have a look. But if I ask you to step away, you leave.”
“Hey, it’s your scene.” Agent Gray flashed her a smile.
She led them back to the house. Bentley and Gray signed the log and followed her inside. Garza was still in the living room, sketching. The photographer had joined him and took close shots of one of the bloody footprints. O’Donnell made a note to make sure he got a few wide shots of all the footprints together.
“Gloves and shoe covers.” O’Donnell pointed at the boxes by the entrance. She watched Bentley’s expression as the profiler noticed the large bloodstain.
“The victim was bleeding,” Bentley muttered as she put on a pair of gloves.
So far, O’Donnell wasn’t particularly impressed by the woman’s deductive skills. “Martinez didn’t mention that?” she asked innocently. She knew he hadn’t. It wasn’t on the initial report of the first officers on the scene.
Bentley ignored her and put on the shoe booties. She approached the bloodstain. Without even pausing, she leaped over it, landing in the living room.
O’Donnell was irked. Zoe Bentley was even shorter than she was, but she had managed to jump over the bloodstain with the grace of a damn gazelle.
CHAPTER 3
Zoe scrutinized the large bloodstain and the footprints that crisscrossed the room’s floor. At first, it was hard to make sense of the mess; the footprints were smeared and cut across each other. Slowly she managed to untangle them in her mind. Someone had paced in a circle near the room’s entrance several times and had gone to the far corner and back. He’d stepped in the pool of blood several times, which probably indicated he was confused or distraught.
The bra, discarded on the floor, had been torn by force, the metal clasp on the back twisted. What about the rest of the clothes? Torn as well? She tried to keep the obvious question from clouding her judgment. Could this be Glover’s work?
If she kept focusing on Glover, she’d invariably morph the facts to match what she wanted to see. But she wasn’t sure she could avoid the question. Glover grew and filled her mind like a parasitic vine, crawling into every nook and cranny, suffocating every other thought.
For the past few weeks, she and Tatum had meticulously traced Glover’s footsteps, going back ten years, like a movie in rewind. They’d started in the place where he’d last been. An apartment in her own building. He rented it under the name Daniel Moore and stalked Zoe and her sister, Andrea, for over a month. When Zoe left to investigate a case in Texas, Glover struck. It was pure luck that Andrea managed to escape unharmed. Glover was shot in the process and hunkered in his dank apartment, recuperating. The forensic team estimated Glover nearly died but managed to stop the bleeding. And once he could stand on his feet, he ran.
There was more. Glover was dying. Not from a bullet, but something much more mundane. He had a terminal brain tumor, and that made him more dangerous than ever. A dying beast had nothing left to lose.
She turned to O’Donnell. The detective stood on the far side of the room, her dark eyes following the photographer. He half knelt as he took a series of shots of the bloody footsteps.
“Can I see the photos of the body?” Zoe asked Detective O’Donnell.
O’Donnell frowned, contemplating it for several seconds, as if the request was unreasonable. Finally, she asked the photographer to show them the images.
He stood up, straightening his wide-framed glasses with a thin finger. He then began fiddling with his camera, frowning as he scrolled through the images.
Tatum stepped into the living room. “There are some bloodstains in her bedroom.” He pointed at the doorway over his shoulder. “More footprints and some bloody finger smears on her night table and on the wall.”
“Fingerprints?” Zoe asked.
“I don’t think so, not anything I could see with my naked eye—just smears. The forensic guy in the room said it looks like whoever left them wore gloves.
”
“Gloves indicate planning, but this mess looks like a complete blunder,” Zoe said.
“There are also bloodstains on the bathroom sink and floor.”
“He washed himself there?”
“Looks like it.”
Zoe was trying to imagine the events unfolding, when the photographer said, “There we go.” He walked over to them and showed them the screen on the back of the camera.
For a second Zoe had difficulty understanding what she was looking at. “Is that the body?” she asked. “Was it covered?”
“Yeah,” O’Donnell answered behind her. “She was covered in a blanket.”
“Who found the victim?” Tatum asked.
“Her father, Albert Lamb,” O’Donnell said.
“Was he the one who covered her?”
“He said he didn’t, that he found her that way,” O’Donnell answered. “And the evidence corroborates it. See those stains on the blanket?”
The photographer flipped through the images, finding a close-up of two large brown spots.
“Bloodstains.” O’Donnell pointed. “She was covered when the blood was still fresh. But the body was in advanced rigor mortis when we got here and the blood dry. She’s been dead for a while. Whoever covered her did it soon after she died.”
Did O’Donnell contemplate the alternative? The father could be the killer. He might have covered her body and called the police hours later.
“So he found her covered and just left her like that?” Tatum asked in disbelief.
“No. He took the cover off, saw she was dead and stiff. He still tried to wake her up, according to his initial statement. Then he covered her again and called nine-one-one.”
The photographer scrolled through a few more shots of the covered body from various angles. Then he paused. The image on-screen displayed the body without the cover.
It was easy to see why the father had covered her again.
The woman’s body was folded, her knees bent backward, her skirt pulled down to her ankles. Her shirt was torn, her left breast exposed. She wore no underpants. Even if the father had wanted to protect his daughter’s modesty, he would have found it hard to pull up the skirt, the way the legs were bent.
Zoe glanced at the torn bra that lay on the floor, marked with an evidence marker. “Did you find her underpants?”
“Not yet. We’re still looking through the trash.”
“If they weren’t here, you probably won’t find them,” Zoe said. “He took them. It’s a trophy.”
She examined the picture closely. The body’s arm was covered in blood, and the woman’s face was spattered as well, clumps of her hair clinging to her bloody cheek. Blood was smeared on her left leg, but it looked like it didn’t originate from a wound. At a certain point, the victim’s leg had probably brushed against the blood on the floor. Bruises marred the woman’s neck—possibly ligature marks, but it was hard to be sure on the small screen, particularly in that wide angle.
The photographer kept scrolling through the pictures, speeding the pace, as if he found it hard to look at them, which Zoe found strange. He had taken the pictures himself.
“Wait,” she said. “Go back one.”
He scrolled one picture back. It was a close-up of the marks on her neck. They really did look like ligature marks, but Zoe still wasn’t entirely sure. What had caught her attention was a delicate silver strand on the woman’s neck.
“Did she wear jewelry?” she asked.
“A silver necklace with a cross. Her father said she wore it all the time,” O’Donnell answered.
“Why didn’t he take that as a trophy?” Zoe muttered.
“Maybe he’s not into jewelry,” Tatum suggested.
Zoe nodded. It was possible, though serial killers who took trophies usually took jewelry. Especially if, like in this case, she was strangled, and the necklace was on her neck. Surely the killer would have noticed it. Could he have used it to strangle the girl? She examined the image closely. It didn’t seem likely. The necklace would have snapped. It was much too delicate.
“You said there were finger smudges on her night table,” Zoe told Tatum. “Any jewelry there?”
“I don’t know.”
“There was a jewelry box there,” O’Donnell said. “With two bracelets.”
“Two bracelets and a necklace,” Zoe asserted. “The killer probably searched through her stuff, got the necklace, and put it around her neck after she died.”
“I doubt it,” O’Donnell said. “Her father said she always wore it. Much more likely that the killer was simply looking for anything valuable he could take. The bracelets were cheap trinkets, so he left them. We’ll ask the father if she had any valuable jewelry.”
Zoe felt a flash of irritation, but she didn’t argue the point. She kept looking as the photographer scrolled through the rest of the images, perhaps observing Glover’s handiwork again for the first time in a while.
When she and Tatum had found Glover’s alias, they’d traced his steps. They already knew he’d lived in Chicago for the past few years. They found his old apartment in McKinley Park, where a couple of students now stayed. They also traced his old job as a support technician, a position he’d lost six months before. They spent a few days just talking to his old coworkers and managers, trying to glean any piece of information. Most of his coworkers said he was a great guy. Always happy to help, quick with a joke or a laugh. His manager had actually used the phrase full of teamwork spirit.
Two of his female coworkers had thought there was something creepy about him. But they couldn’t put their finger on the reason.
Zoe knew the feeling. She’d experienced it herself when she was fourteen years old, and Rod Glover was her neighbor. At first he seemed like a nice guy, charming and funny. Then, strange, unsettling behavior patterns began to emerge. And around that time, young women began to die.
“That’s the last one,” the photographer said, lowering his camera.
“Any signs of the weapon?” Tatum asked, turning to face O’Donnell.
“Well,” O’Donnell answered. “I’m assuming there were two weapons. The marks on her neck look like ligature marks, so he used some kind of rope or a belt. And the bleeding came from an ugly cut on her arm. So some sort of blade was involved as well. Also, her shirt looks like it was partly cut with a blade. But we found nothing that fits either of those.” She pointed at the footprints. “It looks like the killer crossed the room to pick something up from the floor. See how the prints stop just before the wall? I’m betting he stopped to crouch there.”
Zoe’s opinion of the detective improved slightly. “You think it was the knife?”
“I’m almost sure it was. If you go over there, you’ll see a few drops of blood, just by evidence marker sixteen. I think they came from the blade.”
Zoe stepped over to the corner of the room and crouched to look at the floor. There they were. Several perfectly round brown stains. Tatum crouched beside her.
“Vertical blood drops,” he said. “That’s why they’re circular and not elliptical. That means it couldn’t have been spattered from the other side of the room. It’s likely that the weapon was dropped here.”
Zoe nodded, trying to imagine it. “He could have walked here, knife in hand. Then stopped for a few seconds. That would account for the drops as well.”
“I’m not a forensic expert,” Tatum said carefully. “But see how there’s no spatter pattern around the drops? If they had dropped from the height of one or two feet, you’d see a small circular spatter around each drop. There’s none, meaning the blood dropped from the height of just a few inches. I think Detective O’Donnell is right. The weapon lay here, dripping blood, and the killer crouched to pick it up.”
Zoe agreed. It was the simplest explanation. She imagined it. The killer attacked the victim, threatening her with the knife. During the struggle, the knife cut the victim’s arm. Then what? Had the victim managed somehow to disarm the kille
r, throwing the knife to the corner? Maybe.
She straightened and tried to think. There were conflicting behavior patterns in the entire scene. Stepping in the blood, covering the body, leaving blood smears all over the apartment. That all reeked of confusion, fear, maybe shame. But wearing gloves spoke of planning. The missing underwear was a trophy. The necklace fit nowhere. Had the death been accidental? It was impossible to guess; Zoe wasn’t even sure if the victim died of blood loss or asphyxia.
Usually she could picture the possible scenarios in her mind quite easily. But here, the different details didn’t mesh well.
They were missing something.
CHAPTER 4
Tatum scanned the room again, trying to get a feel for the victim.
In a way, it was his comfort zone. He’d seen Zoe slip into the mind of a killer, as easy as if she were putting on a sweater, and it never ceased to impress and slightly unnerve him. It wasn’t the same for Tatum. Sure, he knew the statistics; he read endless research papers and serial killer interview transcripts, had studied serial killer profiles until he dreamed about them almost nightly. But to use his own sweater analogy, for him slipping into the mind of a killer was like putting on a straitjacket two sizes too small. It was uncomfortable, almost impossible to do and left him aching and exhausted.
But a lot of their work revolved around knowing the victim. Understanding the victim’s routine indicated what attracted the killer to them. Figuring out how the victim reacted when attacked also helped, and that often had significant implications about the killer’s psyche. Some killers became more violent when facing a meek victim, while others became deadly only when the victim struggled. Know the victim, and you were already halfway to understanding the killer.
Catherine Lamb had been distracted, perhaps depressed. There were signs of recent neglect throughout the house—unwatered plants, dusty windowsills, an overflowing laundry basket. Sure, this could also mean she was a slob, but there were endless indications that she wasn’t. Her clothing was folded neatly; the bathroom, aside from the recent bloodstains, was clean; the food in the fridge was fresh. The mess and neglect were superficial, recent, a thin layer of unhappiness.
