A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery Book 1)

by Mike Omer

  “I have a dead body, and her throat is cut. I was wondering . . . would that make embalming problematic?”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just trying to understand this wound. It was done postmortem, and—”

  “Is it a cut to the common carotid artery?”

  Zoe blinked. “I have no idea.”

  He sighed. “Is there an image you can send me?”

  “Uh . . . sure. What’s your email?”

  He gave her his email. As she sent him the photo of the victim’s throat, Scott walked into the room and waved hi. She smiled at him.

  “Okay,” Abramson said. “Got it. Yes, this looks like a cut to the carotid artery.”

  “So . . . what does that mean for the embalming process?”

  “Well, I assume it was made during the embalming process,” Abramson said.

  “What?”

  “The common carotid artery is one of the preferred places to cut when embalming to inject the embalming fluid. Though he seems to have messed it up—the drainage spurted all over the throat.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Like I told you before, it means you are dealing with an amateur.”

  “But the body isn’t embalmed.”

  “Then he probably stopped before he was done.”

  “I see.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “No . . . thank you, Mr. Abramson. You’ve been very helpful.”

  She put down her phone, her mind trying to assemble the sequence of events.

  The killer had walked in, seeing Lily trying to get the police to help her. He had disconnected the call and strangled Lily to death. Then . . . he had decided to embalm her.

  Why didn’t he simply get rid of the body and get another prostitute? Surely he realized how risky this was. Embalming a body took about two hours. The police, as far as he knew, were on their way . . .

  This body was very important to him; that was the only explanation she could think of. He really wanted it embalmed.

  He had begun, then stopped during the process, which he had mucked up. He had taken the body with him . . . but then discarded it in an alley when he had seen the roadblocks.

  It was erratic behavior. He became erratic when he was under pressure. She made a note of that.

  She returned to the first time stamp. The muffled word.

  “Hey, Scott, can you come here for a sec?” she said.

  He got up and walked over. “What’s up?”

  “Can you listen to this and tell me if you can understand what she’s trying to say?”

  She played the sound bite.

  Scott frowned. “Can you play that one more time?”

  She did. He asked again. She played it a third time. Then, when he still frowned, she played it on repeat, and they listened to the dead prostitute trying to identify her killer over and over again. One word. It seemed as if it slowly became more intelligible the more they heard it, instead of the other way around.

  “You know,” Scott said, “I think she might be saying trucker.”

  Zoe nodded. “I was actually about to say she said Hummer, like the car.”

  She played it again.

  “Yeah, I can hear Hummer too,” Scott said.

  “I just thought that it sounds a bit more like trucker.” Zoe smiled.

  “So . . . he’s either driving a Hummer or some sort of truck?”

  Zoe nodded. “Thanks.” She made a note.

  “You think this profile will help us nail this guy?” Scott asked, glancing over her shoulder at the paper.

  “I really do,” Zoe said, hoping he couldn’t hear the doubt in her voice.

  CHAPTER 43

  Harry’s editor, Daniel, was occasionally a man of inspiration. A good example was his inspiration when Harry had hinted that he wasn’t doing his job properly. He had responded by requesting an article from Harry titled “Nine Reasons America Loves to Hate Justin Bieber.”

  Harry did the only thing he could. He went looking for a story that would overcome Daniel’s need for revenge—namely, what he had asked to do in the first place. He would write about the Strangling Undertaker.

  But he needed a good angle. Daniel was very clear about not wanting Oprah’s opinion about the murders. And Oprah probably wouldn’t talk to Harry anyway after the viral article he had written two years before, “Ten Great Celebrities Who Would Make the Worst Presidents.”

  He decided to go to the site where the body of Monique Silva had been found. He remembered he had heard about a memorial shrine erected for her at that spot. That could be his angle—talk about the everyday citizens’ reactions to the killings, instead of the murderer and the police hunt. People wanted to read about themselves.

  He approached the bridge, looking at the water lilies by the shore. It was a beautiful spot, doubly so on a sunny day like this one. A young couple walked by, the man pushing a baby stroller, the woman leaning against him. Harry immediately thought of a paragraph that would star them, a couple in love, struggling to make sense of the terrible violence enacted on this spot.

  The memorial shrine was on the other side of the stream. Pleased, he crossed the bridge, hoping for some tear-inducing descriptions of baby pictures, handwritten letters, and candles.

  The shrine was actually a mound of rocks on which people laid flowers. Harry wondered if they had picked them in the park, when he spotted a man selling them, not far from the shrine. Harry grinned and approached the flower salesman. He was dressed in black, surrounded by several buckets in which somber roses were wilting. His face wore an expression of deep, endless grief.

  “Good day, sir,” the man said. “Would you like a flower to lay on the shrine for Monica Silva?”

  “What a thoughtful idea,” Harry said. “The poor girl, her life plucked away at such a young age.”

  “Terrible,” the flower vendor agreed. “Just one dollar. Five dollars for a respectable bouquet.”

  Harry took out his wallet, thinking the man’s cynicism was worth ten dollars at least. “Her name was Monique Silva, by the way,” he said as he handed the bill to the vendor.

  The vendor nodded distractedly as he fished one of the sorry-looking bouquets from the bucket. As he wrapped it in paper, Harry looked for his cigarettes, placed one in his mouth, and lit it. He held the pack toward the flower vendor.

  “Cigarette?”

  “Thank you, sir,” the vendor said, plucking a cigarette. Harry gave him the lighter.

  They stood in silence for a moment, each enjoying the feeling of the tobacco filling their throats and lungs. Harry watched the tendril of smoke rising from his cigarette until a gust of wind blew it away. “Would you mind if I ask you a few questions?” he asked.

  Fifteen minutes later he had a spirit-lifting article about the way people were brought closer together by the tragedy. It was not Pulitzer Prize material, but it had a measure of accessibility that Harry felt made it shine. Readers of the article would be proud to be part of the Chicago community. They would, possibly, like and share the article so that their friends could see what a great city they lived in. Embedded in the article were a few tweets about the horrendous murders, by people with many followers. Maybe those people would tweet about the article, generating even more readers.

  Pleased with his progress, he walked away from the flower vendor, planning the headline for the article. He would either go with a cliffhanger clickbait—“Third Victim of the Strangling Undertaker Found, and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next”—or he would go with the list clickbait, “Five Courageous Ways Chicago Is Resisting the Strangling Undertaker.” He would have to work on it some more. He knew better than most that the article’s headline was usually make or break.

  He approached the shrine, looking at it with renewed interest, wondering if he should get a photographer to take a picture of it. He was about to put his respectable bouquet on it when he spotted an envelope on the ground. It was a simple br
own envelope, and the wind had knocked it off the shrine. Harry picked it up, wondering if he could open it before placing it back on the mound of rocks. He was a cynic but sometimes felt as if there were some lines he shouldn’t cross. Unless he had a really good reason.

  The envelope was addressed to a woman. To his surprise, the woman was not Monique Silva. But he recognized the name.

  Harry had sharp instincts when it came to good stories, and as he held the envelope in his hand, he began to suspect this story was about to turn out much better than he had thought it would.

  CHAPTER 44

  In retrospect, Zoe was sorry she hadn’t gone to the autopsy. Sure, she’d get the report later, and she believed Tatum would tell her if anything interesting came up, but this was the best link they had to the killer. Did she really have anything more important to do? She looked morosely at the sketch of the crime scene that Martinez had forwarded to her. What could she really deduce from this sketch? The killer had needed to get rid of the body before driving through the roadblocks, so he had dumped her in the alley. No elaborate posing, nothing that matched his signature. For a moment, she almost wondered if it really was the same killer. There was no shortage of men who killed prostitutes, after all.

  But the postmortem cut to the carotid artery was unusual. The theory that it was a hurried, unsuccessful attempt at embalming rang true.

  Fine. She looked around at her desk. Wherever she worked, she always managed to accumulate mounds of paperwork, and here was no different. Copies of the case files, reports of taxidermied animals, and printed-out transcripts of the interviews with the victims’ families and friends were all jumbled together, limiting the actual space she could work in.

  She decided to clear her workspace and start fresh. She piled up all the case files, put the transcripts on top of them, and shoved them into a drawer in the desk. The animal reports she would throw away. There was nothing more to be gained from them; there were copies of them in the case file, and they were very sparse in detail anyway. She grabbed them and crossed the room to the paper shredder. She fed the papers two by two into the slot, enjoying the view of the papers turned into narrow white ribbons. Shredding was great. She should do it more often.

  As she shredded the last three pages, her mind focused on a new question that hadn’t occurred to her before.

  What had caused the killer to start practicing on animals?

  It made demented sense, if he was interested in preserving his victims, but what prompted him to do that? A book he had read? A film he had watched?

  The embalming process itself was not crucial to the killer. The fact that at first he had tried taxidermy proved it. He was only looking for a way to preserve the victims. The purpose was preservation.

  Why?

  Because he needed time with his victims without the effects of decay.

  Why?

  She couldn’t answer this question yet. She tried to shift the question in her mind a bit. Suppose he began to obsess about killing a woman and keeping her body. Would he really make the leap in his mind and decide he had to embalm it? Embalming was a complicated process. He had to have decided there was no other way.

  She thought of the cycle again. The learning curve of the killer. He kept adapting so the act would better match the fantasy in his head. In this case, there was an obvious learning curve, as she had already noted. The killer had gotten better at embalming. But what had prompted him to start embalming in the first place?

  Had there been another murder? Had he killed someone before Susan Warner?

  “Hey, Scott,” Zoe said. “Can you help me with one more thing?”

  “Sure,” he said from his seat, swiveling his chair halfway to look at her. “What is it?”

  “I want to check out some murder reports from a couple of years ago.”

  “Okay.” Scott nodded. “I’ll do it on my computer. I have CLEAR access there.”

  “Clear access? What do you mean?” She got up and walked over to him, looking over his shoulder. His desk had several pictures of two young children. She studied them for a second, noticing their resemblance to Scott.

  “It’s a database thing we use,” Scott said. “CLEAR is an acronym for, uh . . . something . . . Law Enforcement . . . something and Reporting.”

  “Current Law Enforcement Access and Reporting?” Zoe suggested.

  “No. That sounds dumb. No, the first word is Crime . . . no . . .”

  “Custard?”

  “Citizen. It’s Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting,” he breathed in relief.

  “Okay. Is it any good?”

  “Yeah. It’s the bee’s knees. What years are we talking about?”

  The first animal taxidermy report was on July 2014. “Try . . . 2013 up to July 2014.”

  He fiddled with the digital form. After a moment, a list of names showed up onscreen. Over six hundred names.

  “Just female victims,” Zoe said. “And, uh . . . I think you can remove shootings.”

  She wasn’t certain; it was definitely possible that the killer had moved from firearms to strangulation. But all his killings seemed up close and personal. Even if strangulation were a new MO for him, she was willing to bet he had previously used a knife or some other sort of weapon that would require physical contact with the victim.

  “Okay,” Scott said. “Fifty-three cases. The majority of Chicago killings are shootings, so that makes sense.”

  “Thanks, Scott,” Zoe said. “I can take it from here.”

  “Glad I could help,” he said and got up from his chair. “Tomorrow I’ll try and get you CLEAR access from your own computer.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure. Just log off my computer when you’re done. And don’t read my emails.”

  She grinned at him, and he left. She sat down in his still-warm seat and began to check the cases one by one.

  She found what she was searching for in case number twenty-three.

  On April 21, 2014, Veronika Murray, a twenty-one-year-old woman, had been found dead and decomposing in an alley. There were indications of postmortem sexual intercourse, and the cause of death was strangulation. The body had been found six days after the estimated time of death, and it was clear she had been dumped there the night before. The case was still open. The killer had not been found.

  She had been found a few blocks from her home, in West Pullman, where just three months later, pets began to disappear.

  CHAPTER 45

  Maynard, Massachusetts, Monday, December 15, 1997

  Zoe’s heart pounded as she sat in front of Officer Will Shepherd. He was busy writing something down, and when she tried talking, he asked her to wait. He was a plump man with a black, droopy mustache and a red nose. He kept sniffing and coughing, occasionally wiping his nose with a tissue. Zoe tapped her foot anxiously, waiting for him to finish.

  “Okay,” he finally said, putting the form aside and laying the pen in front of him. “How can I help you?”

  “I know who the serial killer is,” Zoe said in a rushed voice.

  On her way to the Maynard Police Department, she’d had some time to imagine how this conversation would transpire.

  In one version, the officer listened to her, writing down her testimony, then went to get an urgent search warrant for Rod Glover’s home. The police found all the evidence in his room, probably matched the underwear in the shoebox to the victims, and arrested Glover.

  In the second, less optimistic version, the cops didn’t cooperate so well. They pointed out that it was a crime to break into Glover’s home. They said the evidence she found there was inadmissible. They interrogated her in a small room for hours, intimidating her. Finally, she got them to consider that what she said was true. They investigated Glover for a few days, maybe followed him around, and finally got what they needed to get a search warrant for his home. Underwear, shoebox, arrest.

  What she didn’t expect was the tired, uninterested look the officer gave h
er.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “Our neighbor,” she said. “Rod Glover.”

  If anything, he seemed even less interested. “How do you know?”

  She laid it out carefully. She didn’t want him to think she was just some airhead teen who saw her neighbor doing something weird and decided he must be a serial killer. She explained how she had researched the subject carefully. She detailed the ways that she had figured out how Glover matched the psychopath traits. She told him about Durant Pond and then quoted the interview of “Son of Sam,” where he explained why he used to return to the scene of the crime. By that point, the officer seemed a bit disgusted—but interested, which was encouraging. She went on to explain how she’d poked around in Glover’s home. She stressed that she had the key, so essentially she hadn’t really broken into the house. She was pretty sure that wasn’t how it worked, but it felt like something that would cast her in a better light. She told him about the porn. The underwear. The shoebox.

  “Uh-huh,” he said when she was done.

  She blinked. She knew it was her word against Glover’s. She hadn’t taken anything from his home, but she assumed it was enough to capture the police’s interest. All they needed was to search Glover’s house.

  “He might know I’ve been in his house,” she said. “So he could decide to get rid of the evidence.”

  Officer Shepherd sighed deeply. “You shouldn’t go poking around in other people’s homes,” he said.

  She was ready for this. “These were special circumstances,” she said. “I had good reasons to think he’s the killer.”

  “Yes,” Officer Shepherd said. “You saw him in Durant Pond, where many people go every day, and then he told you about an office fire, which you think was a lie, but you can’t be sure. And, of course, you’ve read all those books, and so you got excited.”

  Zoe’s face heated up. “There was no one in Durant Pond except me and him, and he was acting weird . . . but okay, never mind. His room—”

  “Has porn and ladies’ underwear,” Shepherd said.

  “The underwear had mud on it.”