The 7th Victim

by Alan Jacobson

  Vail was looking at the floor. “I understand, sir.”

  “Why don’t you go wait in your office, get your desk straightened up. When OPR is ready for you, I’ll let you know.”

  She stood from her chair and headed for the door. “Thanks,” she said, without turning to face him. Then she walked out.

  twenty-seven

  Straighten up her desk, that was what Gifford had told her to do. But her desk was neat. She looked around her office, wondering just how serious this OPR review would be. She was, after all, arrested for assaulting her ex-husband. How would that play out? She was innocent, but was it merely a matter of giving Gifford an excuse to let her go? Did he want her gone? He was sometimes hard to read. Vail challenged him, sure, but she was damn good at what she did. That counted for a lot, didn’t it? She knew the answer to that was, not necessarily.

  Vail needed to clear her mind, stop stressing over what might happen. She opened Outlook and downloaded her email, not knowing if they’d allow her to keep accessing her Academy mail while on leave. She paged through the unimportant messages, dashed off a quick reply to a prosecutor on another case that was going to trial, and was about to close down when she saw one that caught her attention. The subject read “It’s in the”—and sent a shiver through her body.

  She glanced down at the preview pane, where the text hit her like a brick across the forehead. She opened the message and read:

  The hiding place smells like some musty box I once opened when I was looking for his cigarettes. It’s strong and kind of burns my nose. And it’s small and dark, but it’s mine. He doesn’t know I have it, which means he can’t find me here. And if he can’t find me, he can’t hurt me. I can think here, I can breathe here (well, except for the smell) without him yelling. I sit in the darkness, alone with myself, where no one can hurt me. Where he can’t hurt me.

  But I watch him. I watch everything he does through little holes in the walls. I watch him bring home the whores, I watch what he does to them before dragging them upstairs to his bedroom. Sometimes I even hear what they’re saying, but most of the time I just see. I see what he does.

  But I really don’t have to see. I already know. I know because he does the same things to me.

  Holy shit. He’s communicating with me. Dead Eyes sent me a message. Had there ever been a serial offender who sent the cops an email? A letter, yes, but an email? Not that she’d ever seen. Emails are inherently easier to trace—

  She looked at the sender’s name: G. G. Condon. She knew that would be a dead end, that it was easy to obtain an email account with fake information. She tried forwarding the message to the lab, but nothing happened. She clicked File/Print, yet the page came out blank.

  “What the hell?”

  She pressed the PrtScn key to take a “picture” of the screen—everything that was displayed on her computer desktop—and pasted the image into a Word document.

  Vail lifted the phone and dialed CART, the Computer Analysis Response Team, and informed the technician, Cynthia Arnot, of what she had. While she was on the line, the email vanished from her inbox.

  “It’s gone?” Cynthia asked.

  “Gone,” Vail said, furiously scrolling through her Outlook inbox. “Like it was never there. All my other messages are there, but this one just . . . disappeared.”

  “Check your Deleted Items folder. Maybe you accidentally deleted it.”

  “I didn’t delete it, Cynthia.” Nonetheless, Vail clicked to the folder. “Not there.”

  If she’d been able to retain the email, they could’ve gone into the originating server, tracked the routing information, and traced it using digital clues largely unknown or poorly understood by the average computer user. The offender may think he’s smart; the Bureau’s experts were often smarter. But without the message. . . .

  “I did get a screen shot of it.”

  “Very good, Karen. Send it over, let us take a look at it.”

  “I’m not losing my mind. I didn’t delete it. Could it be some kind of virus?”

  “Not likely. But there is some interesting stuff out there that can make messages unprintable, make them self-destruct, allow them to spy on your movements and passwords—”

  “This isn’t just spyware, Cynthia. I’m working Dead Eyes. I’ve got reason to believe this message was from the offender. This could be huge.”

  “We’ll do our best. Meantime, shut it down and unplug the PC. I’ll send someone over to get it, we’ll need to go through the hard drive. Just because a message is deleted doesn’t mean we can’t pull traces of it off the disk. But it’ll take a while.”

  Vail glanced at the clock and realized OPR would be arriving soon. “Would it help to tell you we don’t have a while?”

  “Nope.”

  Vail leaned back in her chair and sighed. “Didn’t think so.”

  “OKAY, LISTEN UP,” Bledsoe said as they walked through the door to the op center. “I hope everyone made good use of the hour off, because we’ve got more work to do. More legwork and more brain-work. I know you’re all tired. So am I.” He ripped open a box of Danish and set them on the table in front of him. “Before we get started on the new vic, I want an update on all our loose ends. This thing is threatening to get away from us real fast, and I want to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  The detectives and Hancock took their seats. Vail’s chair was conspicuously empty.

  “What about Karen?” Sinclair asked.

  Bledsoe stood in front of the whiteboard at the short end of the living room. “We go on without her. I’ll brief her later.” He pulled the cap off a marker and wrote “Dental patient lists.”

  “Sin, you’re first up.”

  “Right. Vic worked for three dentists. I’ve gotten patient lists from each of them and have someone at my office crunching the names. No correlations so far, but they’re not done yet. I had them start with the most recent two years.”

  Bledsoe made a couple of notes on the board. “Good. Hernandez, you were doing the employee lists.”

  “Still gathering info. But I’ve got a few things I’m working on. Hits on three registered sex offenders. I’m running their sheets and talking to co-workers. I’ve got appointments with the personnel managers to correlate work shifts, days off, days called in sick, and so on.”

  “Interviews with victim families, friends, neighbors . . . we’re all doing that. Anybody still have open appointments?”

  “I’ve got one parent to follow up with,” Manette said. “Parents are divorced, father’s out of town.”

  Bledsoe made some notes on the whiteboard, then recapped the marker. “Ex-cons with facial disfigurements? Who’s got that?”

  “Mine,” Sinclair said. “Had thirty-five to choose from. I’ve still got a dozen to get through, but so far it’s a dead end. A few are dead, six or seven are in the slammer again, and the rest had solid alibis.”

  “Anything on the massage therapy angle?”

  “Nothing,” Sinclair said.

  “I got myself a free massage from a major hunk,” Manette said.

  “I’m happy for you,” Bledsoe said. “I owe all of you the soil analysis on Sandra Franks’s place. Lab said it was all native to the area, mainly from the vic’s backyard.” He tossed his marker on the desk in front of him. “Make sure Vail gets your VICAP forms so she can correlate all the victimologies. Maybe there’s something in there.”

  Manette snorted. “That’d be real helpful, seeing as we got dick right now.”

  “Oh,” Bledsoe said. “Something else on Franks. Autopsy and x-rays showed antemortem bruising on her right cheek as well as a broken nose. Appears the UNSUB punched her.”

  Robby leaned forward. “That’s new. Maybe something tipped her off and she and the UNSUB got into it. She was into working out, maybe she fought back and landed a good shot. Any defensive wounds?”

  Bledsoe consulted a pad in front of him. “No, but the left hand is missing. If she punched him with her
left hand, there’s no way to know.” He turned the page. “And she is—was lefty.”

  “So maybe our offender has a big, ugly bruise on his face,” Sinclair said.

  Bledsoe pursed his lips. “Without any suspects, I’m not sure that helps us. Makeup can hide shit like that, and in a few days it’ll be gone.” He tossed down the pad. “Okay, keep your same assignments for today’s vic, Denise Cranston. Anything else?” With everyone remaining silent, Bledsoe said, “Let’s get back at it.”

  twenty-eight

  He stood beside the potter’s wheel, watching the blonde place her hands on the wet clay. The last of the other students had just left, the door clicking shut behind him. The studio was quiet, except for the hum of fluorescent lights.

  The blonde looked up at him with round, sapphire blue eyes. “Can you help me with this?”

  He hesitated for a second. If only you knew, bitch, if only you knew. He put on his best smile, the one he used for his students, and said, “Sure.”

  She was new; this was only her second class, and he’d already covered the nuts and bolts of modeling, painting, and firing . . . the usual beginner’s course. He liked to hit the basics as fast as he could, then let them get their hands on the clay, because there was simply no substitute for feeling the slippery stuff slither between your fingers. He always tried to gauge his students’ artistic abilities by their reaction to the consistency of the clay. What they did with it once they got their hands on it told him a great deal about them.

  This one liked the clay’s cold wetness; he could tell that. But as to her ability . . . he didn’t think there was much promise. But she wanted to stay after class to try the wheel, which surprised him.

  It’s amazing, really, how trusting some people are. Especially the bitches. They think they’re immune to all the bad things that can happen. They go places alone at night, the supermarket or the ATM, thinking they’re safe. Thinking that nothing will happen to them. Are they just dumb, or so convinced of their immortality that they can’t allow themselves to believe they could be the next victim?

  Oh, some are, indeed, afraid to go out. He’d seen the news reports, read the papers. Experts advising single women to go places in groups. To avoid high-risk areas—as if he preyed in high-risk areas!—and to be aware of their surroundings. Yeah, that sage advice would do them a lot of good when he’s standing at their front door in a suit holding up his FBI badge and asking for assistance.

  He stood behind the blonde bitch, the sweet peppermint scent of her shampoo whispering across his nostrils. He sniffed deeply, enjoying the smell. He looked at her left hand, at the diamond ring on her finger. Such an unimaginative setting. Plain vanilla. Probably what she would produce with the clay. Not art, but something only marginally better than a gaudy, imperfect piece later tossed in the garbage—or the equivalent, sold in a garage sale for fifty cents. His impressions about her creative ability were suddenly reinforced.

  But more important than the horrid design of the ring was the fact that she was married. And blonde. With blue eyes. Clear eyes that reminded him of the sky.

  He leaned into her, his arms extending out alongside hers, then took her hands in his. The wheel was spinning, the clay a lump of formless material. He asked her if she realized the power she held in her hands. “To transform this hunk of clay into a work of art, to be able to shape it, to be able to create, is something you mustn’t take for granted.”

  She didn’t get it, but she evidently found it funny and giggled, her shoulders jumping a bit. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think she was flirting with him. But maybe it was just him and his skewed view of things. If only she knew.

  If only she was brunet, if only she had evil eyes. He could take her right here and now. If only.

  twenty-nine

  The office of P. Jackson Parker, attorney-at-law, was sparse, with worn industrial carpet, metal-framed reproductions of Monet and Manet on the walls, and molded white plastic lawn chairs in the waiting room. The seats were surprisingly comfortable, but strangely out of place in an indoor environment. The reception area consisted of a museum-piece PC that could not even run Windows, and a two-line phone that had seen better days . . . ten years ago.

  His office was on the outskirts of Washington, in a not-so-desirable patch of real estate near Union Station. Vail had gone up against Parker on two occasions, with one being most notable. She was called to testify as an expert witness, having been the agent who profiled his client. He proceeded to ridicule the work of the profiling unit, calling it a blanket of suppositions and assumptions woven together in a veil of crystal ball psychology. The case against serial killer Bobby Joe Dunning was largely circumstantial, but Vail knew the accused was the offender. There was not an ounce of doubt as far as she was concerned. But you couldn’t base a case solely on a profiler’s analysis because there could be thousands of people who fit the profile, and thus no compelling reason for the jury to believe the accused man the police were parading before them was the guilty party.

  Parker had done a magnificent job of injecting doubt into the jury’s bloodstream . . . but the prosecution prevailed. Regardless of the positive outcome, Vail never forgot how masterful Parker had been in picking apart the district attorney’s case. It was largely responsible for her ending up in the man’s waiting room today.

  P. Jackson Parker poked his head through the beat-up wood door and caught Vail’s attention. “Agent Vail, come on back.”

  Vail nodded at the empty receptionist chair. “A one man show? I wouldn’t have thought it.”

  “I sent my receptionist for coffee. Our coffee maker’s on the fritz, and I can’t work without my java. Opens the arteries, helps me think.”

  She followed him down a short hallway, passing a couple of rooms with equally beat up doors. They entered Parker’s office, and he meandered around piles of overstuffed files and clipped groupings of papers. Vail’s head turned, panning the surroundings, her trained eyes taking everything in.

  She realized she was still standing, looking at the room’s disarray, while Parker was seated, his long, delicate fingers pressed together in a triangle in front of his lips.

  “Please, take a seat.”

  Vail sat. She was on the edge of the chair, her back rigid, her eyes still moving.

  “You know, I took some courses in body language many years ago. The courses taught me how to read juries, to evaluate what they were thinking. And it proved to be as important as any courses I took in law school. Maybe more so. But it had an added side benefit, Agent Vail.” Her eyes met his at the mention of her name. “It also taught me how to read my clients. And in criminal defense, it’s nice to know when your client is lying and when he’s telling the truth. We don’t always get the straight scoop, if you know what I mean.”

  “I think I can gather the meaning.”

  “You’re uncomfortable, apprehensive.”

  “The attorney profiling the profiler.”

  “Sometimes we wear many hats. I’ve been a counselor, a psychologist, a tax advisor, a conscience. I do what it takes.”

  Vail nodded.

  “You’ve got something on your mind. Why don’t you say it?”

  “What’s there to say?”

  “That you don’t like me.”

  Vail squirmed a bit, then moved her buttocks back into the chair to cover her apparent fidgeting. “I don’t think that’s a fair statement. I don’t like criminal defense attorneys. You just happen to be one.”

  “I see. I guess that’s a common malady amongst your kind.”

  Vail conceded that point with a nod. “You might say we perceive ‘your kind’ as the enemy.” She forced a smile.

  “We’re not the enemy, Agent Vail. We’re purveyors of justice. We try to make sure the laws of our land are enforced. Our constitution provides for protection of the accused, to make sure the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ get a fair trial.”

  “I don’t have a problem with fair trials. I h
ave a problem when your kind manipulates facts into false truths, manipulates our statements, our witnesses, into making it appear as something completely different from what it really is.”

  “I see. And you’re telling me the police, the prosecutors never do that? Planted evidence, hidden documents that surface years later—”

  “I can’t sit here and tell you it doesn’t happen. But it’s rare. You people do it all the time.”

  Parker’s eyebrows rose. “By ‘you people,’ do you mean people of color? African-Americans?”