by Lis Wiehl
“If that’s a pedicure, it’s not a very good one,” Irene said.
“Uneven application on the right hand,” Detective Casey said. “I’m thinking she’s right-handed and did it herself. What’s a pedicure go for around here?”
Dani blurted out, “Thirty-five dollars,” at the same time that Irene Scotto said, “Seventy-five.” It was no surprise that they didn’t go to the same salon.
“Harris, is it safe to say that up where you live there are plenty of girls who wouldn’t think twice about paying seventy-five dollars for a pedicure?” Casey asked.
“Safe to say, yes,” Dani agreed.
“So this girl does it herself. To save money?”
“Maybe she did it to cheer herself up?” Irene said.
“Maybe she was going to a party?” Dani said. “Or on a date?”
“Ah,” Casey said, pointing his finger at Dani. “I’m with Harris on this one.”
Stuart clicked to the next photograph, a picture of the victim’s upper body. There was a burned-out cavity in the center of the chest, but it was hard to tell from the photo how deep the burn had gone.
More intriguing to Dani was a marking on the victim’s stomach, and she asked Stuart to zoom in. It appeared to be a symbol, something like the letter G, and then its mirrored image, abutting at the vertical ascenders:
The four of them stared at it a moment.
“Anybody?” Casey said. “We found this on the girl’s stomach, written in blood. How long will it take serology to turn this around?”
“Depends on the backlog,” Irene said. “The FBI office is in Federal Plaza, Manhattan. If they can’t do it, we send it to Quantico.”
“So how long?” he asked again.
“A week,” Irene said. “Maybe less.”
“How many people do we think were involved?” Stuart asked.
“The crime scene guys tell me between four and ten,” Casey said. “Based on multiple partial footprints in the dirt where the grass was worn away. Whoever it was cleaned up after themselves. No cigarette butts or beer bottles or swords with the killer’s fingerprints and DNA on the handle. We should be so lucky.”
“Swords don’t have handles,” Stuart said. “They have grips, quillons, counterguards, or ricassos. I fenced in college.”
“What are your thoughts, Dani?” Irene asked. “How would between four and ten people do something like this?”
Dani paused. John Foley would normally be the one to provide analysis, but Foley wasn’t here. How she answered the question could determine the course her career would take. No pressure.
“Well,” she said, “I’d like to think there aren’t ten people in the entire country who could do something like this. And if there are, I doubt they’d ever be in one place at the same time.”
“Four to ten,” Casey reminded her.
“Even four. I wouldn’t look for four psychopaths, or ten. I’d look for one leader and nine followers. One person with some kind of power over the others. Whether that’s charisma or fear or mind control is hard to say, but I think the kind of person who could actually do something like this is fairly rare.”
“No offense, Harris,” Casey said, “but when you’ve had as many years in this job as I have, you see everything. Including guys who’ve been baked in a pizza oven.”
Now Dani felt the hairs rising on the back of her neck. She saw Stuart and Irene exchange a glance.
“Detective Casey,” she said, keeping her tone measured and in control, “during my internship in Africa with Doctors Without Borders, I worked with child soldiers who’d been forced or psychologically coerced into committing atrocities far worse than anything you could possibly have experienced. My job was to help put their shattered psyches back together, but to do that, they needed to talk to me about what they’d done. With all due respect, don’t tell me what I’ve seen in my twenty-nine years.”
The room was silent.
To Dani’s surprise, Detective Casey looked embarrassed.
“I apologize for my thoughtless comment, Dr. Harris,” he said. “I was 100 percent out of line. I hope you can forgive me.”
Dani was impressed. He understood that when an apology was in order, one didn’t say, “I’m sorry, but …”
“I can do that,” she said. “And I do appreciate your sense of humor, Detective, but I think it’s better if we can all work as a team.”
Casey gave her a nod and gestured for her to continue.
“I was saying that it’s very difficult for a normal human being to take responsibility for this kind of behavior—to initiate it. It’s not so hard to say, ‘I was just following orders,’ or ‘So-and-so made me do it, and I was afraid he’d kill me if I didn’t.’”
“You seem certain the killer is male?” Irene said.
“Certain isn’t the word I’d use,” Dani said, “but in order to do something like this to another human being, you have to depersonalize the other. Most of us have the capacity for empathy, but it’s not necessarily something we’re born with. A child has to learn it. It’s pretty well established that girls can identify and understand emotions much sooner than boys can.”
“Some of us are still working on it,” Stuart said.
“That’s why little girls are so much sneakier than little boys,” Dani said. “They’re playing sophisticated head games while little boys are still firing imaginary laser beams from their fingers. Developing empathy is essential to creating the attachment bonds we need to survive, but when the faculty is damaged, you get disorders on the autism spectrum—Asperger’s, autism, and a variety of other cognitive developmental impairments. And about 80 percent of all the children who have disorders on the spectrum are male.”
“What about the markings?” Casey asked, shifting the discussion. “And why fire? If it’s ritual, what kind? Does this guy get some sort of kick out of it?”
“I agree that it seems ritualistic,” Dani said. “What somebody might get out of it varies. Psychologically, people with OCD, for example, use ritual to control the chaos that threatens them. Sociologically, human beings have always needed rituals. Some mark the passage of time or some special event, like putting candles on a birthday cake. Some designate a group identity, ‘We-are-the-people-who-always-do-this.’ Some mark an initiation or rite of passage—like a bachelor party where the groom goes out with his buddies to a strip club where he’s supposedly tempted, and then in front of all his friends he resists the temptation and says, ‘Sorry, guys, I’m getting married tomorrow.’ He shows the world he’s willing and ready to become a husband.”
“I can think of two guys off the top of my head who didn’t get that,” Stuart said.
“So what kind of ritual do you think this one is?” Casey asked.
“I can’t be specific,” Dani said, “but I think it might mean the killer had some sort of fantasy he wanted to act out, and the ritual has meaning within the context of the fantasy. I can make some generalizations. The person who did this probably has a history of mutilating animals as a child. It starts with squishing bugs and then it moves up to frogs or fish, then bigger animals. They’re testing themselves to see how big an animal they can destroy before they start to feel anything. In a way it’s like the rest of us, trying to figure out what life means, but a psychopath is missing something normal people have.”
“A conscience?” Casey said.
“Basically,” Dani said. “He’s missing the voice that says, ‘Don’t hurt that animal—it has feelings too.’ The Bull’s Rock killer clearly had no regard for what his victim might have been feeling. That said, I don’t think he was angry at her. This wasn’t a crime of sudden impulse; this was planned. The way the body is displayed also speaks to acting out some kind of fantasy. Serial killers often arrange their victims’ bodies to conform to some prewritten script.”
“You think this is a serial killer?” Irene asked.
“I can’t say that,” Dani said. “I’m just saying that one indicator o
f a serial-killer mentality is ritualistic body display.”
“What about the symbol on her stomach?” Casey asked.
“No idea. Another indication of ritualistic fantasy, but what it means specifically, who knows? It might mean something only to the killer. It could be something he saw in a comic book.”
There was a knock at the door, and a uniformed officer told the district attorney that Liam Dorsett’s mother had arrived, along with her lawyer.
“More to come,” Irene said, turning to Casey. “Let’s talk to the boy and see what he can tell us. Interrogation Room 1. Good work, Dani. Could you write up a one-page brief summarizing what you just said?”
“No problem,” Dani said, feeling like she’d passed the test. “But, Irene? I know Liam. I babysat him until he was four. It might be useful if I sat in.”
The DA looked at Casey, who thought a moment, then nodded.
“Detective Casey is the lead,” Irene reminded her, “but I think you’re right. The boy might feel more comfortable if you were there. He’s the only witness we have.”
“Other than Lady Woo-Woo,” Stuart added, pointing at his head and making a circular gesture.
“Who?” Dani asked.
“They found an old woman wandering around in the vicinity, lost in space,” Stuart said. “Apparently she saw little green men landing in the woods. We’re sending a man to Mars to see if her story checks out.”
“I thought little green men came from Ireland,” Dani said.
“This one’s so weird, it wouldn’t shock me if leprechauns were involved,” Casey said. “I’m not ruling them out.”
7.
Tommy recognized the lawyer who arrived with Claire Dorsett only because he knew him as a local real estate attorney who’d helped one of Tommy’s friends close on a house. Claire’s mascara was smeared from crying. The waiting room was stark and featureless, without magazines to read or art on the walls to look at, and the bare linoleum floor gave it the feel of a veterinarian’s clinic.
When a policewoman led Liam in, Tommy stepped aside as the boy rushed to hug his mother, burying his face in her chest and sobbing. At the same time, Dani stepped out of the elevator with three people Tommy didn’t recognize.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked her. “Liam would probably be more comfortable if he had someone there with him. Either me or his mom.”
“He probably would, but no friends or family present during questioning,” Dani said. “Just his lawyer. Did Claire find a good one?”
“She did if you’re trying to sell your house,” Tommy said.
Don’t try to be clever. Just be yourself.
“This is the preliminary investigation, not the trial,” Dani said. “Still informal. Liam’s not yet a person of interest. I’ll look out for him. What you could do is be with Claire. You can watch in Room 2 on closed circuit if you want.”
The interrogation room was windowless, with a plain desk, chairs, a TV camera mounted in the corner, and a television monitor on a stand. As Dani showed Tommy and Claire where to sit, the monitor showed Liam taking a seat in Room 1, his lawyer beside him.
“I don’t know how long we’ll be,” Dani said. “Liam’s not a suspect. He’s a good kid, Claire—don’t lose sight of that. He needs to know you believe in him.”
Claire sniffed and nodded. When they were alone, she turned to Tommy. “Thank you for being here,” she said. “I’m sure you have better things to do with your time.”
“Can’t think of one,” he said.
“My husband’s in Patagonia, on a fishing trip.”
“I know,” Tommy said. “Liam told me. He was a little hurt because his dad didn’t want to take him along.”
Claire looked surprised. “Liam hates fishing.”
“Not the point,” Tommy said.
On the monitor, he saw the district attorney look to Dani and then gesture toward Liam, asking Dani to begin. Impressive. She’d apparently done well for herself.
“Hi, Liam,” Dani said. “How you doing?”
“Okay,” Liam said, drying his eyes with a tissue and then dabbing at his nose. “I mean, not really. But I’m okay. I guess.”
“Do you know why you’re here?”
“No.”
“Did they tell you what your rights are?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Kind of weird, huh?” she said. “Being read your rights. Just like you’ve seen on TV a thousand times.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s important that you understand them. You do, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“Do you have any questions?”
“Am I under arrest?”
Dani looked at Irene, who shook her head.
“No,” Dani said. “We’re just trying to clear things up and figure out what happened.”
“Okay,” he said. “I don’t know if I know anything, but I’ll try.”
“This is Detective Casey,” Dani said. “He has some questions for you. If you have any questions about how to respond, you can ask your lawyer what the right thing to do is. Right now, we’re just trying to collect information so we can sort it out later.”
Claire took her eyes from the monitor in Room 2 and turned toward Tommy. “Do you know this man Casey?” she asked.
“Never saw him before now.”
Liam told the detective that he’d been to a party the night before. He knew his mom wouldn’t wake up when he got home because she’d taken one of her sleeping pills and had two glasses of sherry, which you weren’t supposed to mix.
“She always has trouble sleeping when my dad’s out of town,” he said.
“I did not have two glasses of sherry,” Claire said.
“You don’t have to convince me,” Tommy said.
Liam told the detective it was just a party. Yes, there was alcohol at the party, and marijuana too, but he didn’t smoke any pot because he was an athlete, and he’d heard high schools were talking about implementing drug testing for sports and he didn’t want to be kicked off the team.
“It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to be caught,” Liam said. “I don’t like pot. It makes me hyper.”
“You’ve tried it?” Casey asked.
“Sure,” Liam said. “Once. But I hated it. Really. You can ask anybody.”
“Can I ask the other kids who were at the party?” Casey said. “Who else was there?”
Liam hesitated.
Tommy saw Claire lean forward in her chair, silently urging her son to tell the truth.
“I understand that you want to protect your friends,” the detective said. “They probably want to protect you too, but if we don’t know who they are, we don’t know who to talk to. You know how this works, don’t you? If only one guy says he didn’t do it, we don’t take him at his word, but if six guys, independent of each other, tell me Liam Dorsett had nothing to do with it, then we pay attention. But if we don’t have those other names, all we have to go on is what you tell us.” He paused. “I’m sure they’d like to get all of this cleared away, just like you do. You want to go home again, don’t you?”
“They can’t hold him overnight, can they?” Claire asked.
“They can hold him for twenty-four hours as a material witness,” Tommy said. “After that, they have to either charge him or let him go. Or take him into protective custody.”
Claire looked doubtful.
“I took a criminal procedures class,” he explained, hoping to reassure her.
“Dani told me you went to high school together,” she said.
“Middle school too. And part of grade school. But we ran in different circles. Correction—I ran in circles and she ran in a straight line.”
Liam looked like he was going to cry again. It appeared to be dawning on the boy, Tommy guessed, that he was in bigger trouble than he’d thought.
“You know, Liam,” Dani interjected, “we’re going to learn the names eventually, so it would be a lot better if
you told them to us now.”
“She told me she used to babysit Liam,” Tommy said to Claire.
“She was our favorite,” Claire said. “I think she was the only babysitter we ever had who did the dishes once Liam was asleep. Never had any boyfriends over either. Never had any boyfriends, period, as far as we could tell.”
Tommy had always assumed Dani must be dating somebody older and smarter who didn’t go to East Salem High.
Liam hesitated, then rattled off a list of names: “Logan Gansevoort, Terence Walker, Parker Bowen, Amos Kasden, Julie Leonard, Rayne Kepplinger, Khetzel Ross, Blair Weeks.”
Tommy recognized three of the last names from reading the New York Times financial pages. And Khetzel was the daughter of Vivian Ross, actress of stage and screen. Tommy had met Vivian several times, though he doubted she’d remember.
Liam told the detective the party had been at Logan Gansevoort’s house because his parents were out of town.
“And you guys were just getting drunk or high?” Casey said. “Nothing more than that?”
“That’s all,” Liam said.
“What was it? Beer? Wine? Hard liquor?”
“Liquor,” Liam answered, running his hand across the top of his close-cropped head and scratching behind one of his large ears.
“You ever drink hard liquor before?” Casey asked.
Liam shook his head.
“Did you drink hard liquor at the party?”
Liam nodded. “But I had too much,” he said. “I thought I was going to throw up.”
“That’s not why we’re here,” Casey said. “You understand that, don’t you? I don’t care if you did or didn’t drink alcohol as a minor. That’s nothing anybody has to worry about.”
“I understand,” Liam said.
“So what happened after you all got drunk?” Casey continued.
“I don’t remember,” Liam said. “Honest to God, I don’t remember. I passed out.”
“You don’t remember anything getting a little crazy?” Casey said. “A little out of hand? Somebody got mad at somebody? Or somebody wanted to go do something stupid? That’s part of the fun of being drunk, isn’t it?”
