The 7th Victim

by Alan Jacobson

  “Just make sure it stays in your head. I don’t want any media hounds ramming mikes up my ass asking about your involvement. Bureau’s in for enough embarrassment once they find out you beat up your husband.”

  “Ex-husband. And I’m certainly not going to talk to any reporters.”

  “They have ways of finding these things out, you know that. That’s if your ex doesn’t make the call himself.”

  Vail sighed. The last thing she needed was the newsies invading her privacy. “Sir, about vic three. I can explain why the scene’s different, why the Dead Eyes behaviors are absent.”

  Gifford rubbed at his eyes, then swiveled his chair to face the large window and his second-story view. “We’ve been through this so many times—”

  “I didn’t have proof before. Now I do.”

  “Fine. Tell it to Del Monaco, he’ll present it to the unit.”

  “Why Del Monaco?”

  “He’s been assigned the file until further notice.”

  Vail looked away. It was like a slap to the face, but in the instant it took her to process the comment, she realized it was a likely development. Someone had to take it over. “I’d like to be the one to present it. It’s my theory, it’s already . . . a volatile topic. I think I should be there to stand behind it, to give it the attention it deserves.”

  Gifford leaned back in his chair a bit and rocked, as if mulling over her request. “I really think it’s in your best interest to distance yourself from the Dead Eyes case—”

  “You mean from the Bureau.” She felt her blood pressure going up, the line of mercury rising in the narrow glass tube.

  He spun his chair around to face her. “I mean from both. Look,” he said, lowering his voice, “you’ve got enough trouble without Linwood and the police chief on your back, too.”

  “Linwood and the police chief?”

  “There’s only so much I can do to protect you.”

  “With all due respect, I don’t need your protection.”

  “Yes, you do.” He looked away. “I’ve already gotten calls. Pressure from all levels. I’m standing behind you, Karen, because I think you’re a damn good profiler. One of the best I’ve got. Now I’m asking you, don’t blow your career over this. Focus your energies on beating this rap. Then we’ll worry about Dead Eyes. If he’s still at large, you’ll get the case back.”

  “I guess I should thank you, for helping out. I appreciate it.” She sat down in the chair. “But please let me address the unit. Just this once.”

  Gifford held her gaze for a long moment, then buzzed an extension. “Frank, can you come in here for a minute?” He hit the button again. “Run your theory by the two of us. If it passes our smell test, you can talk to everyone else.”

  Vail nodded and waited the thirty seconds it took Del Monaco to return to the ASAC’s office. He walked in carrying a file folder and sat down in the chair beside Vail.

  Gifford nodded at Vail. “Talk.”

  “I have some proof to back my theory with victim three—”

  Del Monaco rolled his eyes. “Not this again—”

  “Listen to what she has to say, Frank. Then we’ll assess.”

  Del Monaco crossed his legs, then reluctantly tilted his head toward Vail. His body language said “Don’t bother me with this shit.” But verbally, he was a bit more polite. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”

  Vail resented having to justify herself to Del Monaco before being permitted to go in front of the unit. But since these were the ground rules Gifford set forth, she had no choice but to take her best shot. “There’s a crime scene unit manifest for a UPS package discovered at Angelina Sarducci’s front door. I called UPS and tracked it. It was delivered at 6:30 P.M. ME said time of death was between 6 and 7 P.M.”

  “So you think the delivery guy rang the vic’s doorbell and scared off the offender,” Gifford said.

  “Which is why he didn’t engage in most of the postmortem behaviors we’ve seen with the other vics.”

  “But this is nothing new,” Del Monaco said. “A year ago you said the same thing, that someone had interrupted him.”

  “Yeah, but now I’ve got proof.” Vail sat back and waited for a response. Both men were staring ahead, musing on her remarks.

  After a moment of reflection, Del Monaco spoke. “Karen, I know this linkage thing is important to you. And in the end you may be right. But here’s the thing: our job is to look at the behaviors left by an offender at a crime scene and make inferences based on what we see. What you’re doing is looking at an absence of behaviors and trying to create a relationship. If we later find out this is a Dead Eyes case, we can then say your UPS package theory was right on the money.”

  “It’s possible you’re right,” Gifford added, “but we can’t deal in possibilities or we’d be all over the damn map.”

  Vail was probing the inside of her teeth with her tongue, doing her best to keep her mouth shut. Now was not the time for a confrontation. Besides, she didn’t really know what she would say. They had a point.

  Del Monaco opened the file he was holding. “How about we take theory, opinion, and emotion out of the equation. Look at the numbers. For all the Dead Eyes vics, both the Safarik HIS scale and the ISS show a point nine-five correlation. Victim three doesn’t even make the cut—”

  “Of course the severity of injury to vic three is less. You can’t use those numbers—”

  “Hold it a second,” Gifford said. “What numbers are these?”

  Del Monaco seemed annoyed his boss had interrupted. “The Safarik Homicide Injury Scale measures the degree of injury suffered by the victim. It’s a new variable for analyzing offender behavior. ISS stands for Injury Severity Score—”

  “ISS is used by CDC for categorizing triage results from automobile accidents,” Vail said.

  Del Monaco nodded animatedly. “And I’ve seen it used for homicide victims, too.”

  Vail looked away.

  “Bottom line,” Gifford said, “is no matter how you look at it, you can’t say it’s a Dead Eyes vic because behavior is absent. Your theory accounts for the lack of additional behavioral evidence, but it doesn’t necessarily point to Dead Eyes.”

  Vail kept her head down. She had anticipated resistance, but cursed herself for not thinking things through more thoroughly. Del Monaco and Gifford were right: though her theory might be correct, they can’t abandon their conventions because of something that’s not there. She sighed frustration.

  “I did get something you’ll find interesting, though,” Del Monaco said, handing her a printout from the file. “VICAP results. They were handed to me on the way over here. Haven’t even looked at them yet.”

  Vail took the report and scanned it. “I knew the number of hits would be small, but this is amazing.” She took another few seconds to look over the data, flipped a couple of pages, then looked at Del Monaco. “I did a search of murders, attempted murders, and unidentified human remains, to see how many offenders had written something in blood at the scene. Of the twenty-three thousand VICAP cases, we got a hit on only twenty-one cases.”

  Del Monaco sat up straight. “Jesus. Twenty-one out of twenty-three thousand. That’s small.”

  Vail thumbed back and forth. “Smaller than that, actually.” She spent a moment with the data, then continued: “If we eliminate two cases where blood was smeared, and only include the cases that contained writing, we’re down to nineteen cases. Those cases involved twenty-six victims. If we extrapolate out the male vics, which were gay, we’re left with nine female victims.”

  “Out of twenty-three thousand cases.”

  She flipped a page. “Looking at it from the perspective of the blood murals,” Vail continued, “if we eliminate the crime scenes that contained offender writing, we’re looking at only two cases. Two.”

  They were silent for a moment. “Okay,” Gifford finally said, “what does this mean?’

  Del Monaco said, “On the surface, that it’s extremely rar
e to find blood-based writing or painting at a scene.”

  “Yeah, but what does it tell us about the offender?”

  Vail considered this before speaking. “Well, only one of the VICAP cases is still unsolved, and that’s in Vegas. Way out of this guy’s geographic range. Besides, other than the writing, the ritual behavior is very different.” She handed him back the report. “Not only does this tell us that none of these other cases are related to Dead Eyes, I think we can reasonably assume that Marci Evers is, in fact, Dead Eyes’s first vic.” Establishing the first victim of a serial killer often provided important clues because the offender was not as sophisticated when he started killing, and thus was more likely to have made mistakes.

  “You’ll be getting a call from Kim Rossmo,” Vail said. “I sent him the case, asked him to work up a geographic profile for us.”

  Del Monaco nodded. “I’ll look for it.”

  Vail stood and glanced at Gifford. “Thanks for hearing me out.”

  “Use the time off wisely, Karen. Clear your head of Dead Eyes, even if it’s only for a few days. Get your house in order, and then get your ass back in here. We sure could use you.”

  Vail forced a half-smile, then walked out. She wanted to think Gifford was being genuine, but she could never be sure with him. She took one last peek at her empty office, then headed to the elevator.

  thirty-five

  A light drizzle fell as Vail showed her credentials then drove through the checkpoint leading to the FBI Academy. Gifford’s idea of getting Dead Eyes out of her thoughts for a while had merits. Besides, it would allow her some time to focus on the other mystery in her life, the identity of her biological mother.

  On the way out of the commerce center, she had given the front desk receptionist the photo of Emma and Nellie, and asked her to place it in intra-agency mail for immediate shipping to a buddy of Vail’s, Tim Meadows, at the FBI lab.

  Once in the car, she had called Meadows to explain the package he would be receiving. “I need a huge favor, Tim. I want a computerized aging of the woman on the right. It’s personal, not for a case.”

  “That’s bigger than a huge favor. We’re not supposed to—”

  “I know, Tim. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. The woman is my mother. I need to find her.”

  There was a few seconds of silence. Vail figured Meadows was mulling over her request. “Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll do it, but it’ll have to wait till eight o’clock, when I clock out. At least if I get caught I won’t be doing it on taxpayer time.”

  She thanked him, then left a voice mail message for Bledsoe, relaying and explaining the VICAP findings so he could share them with the task force. She told him she would call him soon.

  Vail chose a spot in the main parking lot and made her way toward the administration building. The Academy was laid out like a campus, with multistory earth-toned structures connected by nearly identical windowed corridors, or tubes. If you weren’t careful, you could find yourself wandering down one of the hallways without the slightest hint of where you were. Directory maps, mounted on the walls and lettered in white against a milk chocolate background, provided three-dimensional renditions of the campus. Labeled plaques above each map used oversized arrows to point you in the proper direction. The directories were especially helpful to senior law enforcement supervisors who attended the eleven-week National Academy certification program to improve their management, administrative, and investigative abilities. Without the maps, or a personal guide to take them through the labyrinthine hallways, the attendees might never find their way to class.

  Vail walked into the administration building, signed in at the receptionist desk, and passed the x-ray machine en route to the glass doors. With the darkness outside and the windowed corridors well lit, she felt like a rodent on display in a maze.

  She walked into the library’s rotunda and looked up at the second and third stories, marveling at the beauty of the large room. The architects who created the Academy were not typical government designers. This complex was functional, but like a high-end home it had a majestic flair, a feeling of grandeur and self-importance.

  She sat down at one of the computers and logged onto the system. Huddling over the keyboard, she organized the information in her mind. Emma’s maiden name was Irwin, and she had been born in Brooklyn. While Vail didn’t know anything about Nellie Irwin, she made the initial assumption she had also been born in New York. If her searches came up empty, she could then widen the parameters.

  She curled some hair behind her right ear, then attacked the keyboard. Like a fisherman, she would first troll the waters where information would be most likely to yield results: birth and death records, then real estate holdings, criminal databases, and so on until she got a tug at her line . . . something that would make her stop the boat and weigh anchor.

  The next three hours passed without thought of food. People came and went, the overcast darkness had dissipated into a rural star-lit sky, and her stomach finally let her know it was beyond late. She made her way into the closed dining hall, picked out a ready-made turkey sandwich, and devoured it in a matter of minutes. She had been checking her cell throughout the evening, hoping it would bring news of Jonathan’s improvement.

  But like a criminal facing a murder charge, the BlackBerry remained silent.

  Vail returned to the library and reviewed her notes. She had located Nellie Irwin’s place and date of birth: Rutland Road in Brooklyn, February 16, 1947. She did not have a criminal record, but had worked two jobs, from 1964 through 1967. She worked one week into 1968.

  Vail had been searching by social security number, so even if she had gotten married, she still would have been able to trace her. But there was nothing . . . not even a tax return had been filed. She widened her search to the entire United States, then waited as the computer sifted through records.

  As she reached for her cell phone to dial in to the hospital, the vibration of a text message startled her. Jonathan—

  She pulled the device from her belt and looked at the display. Not the hospital. A number in DC. Headquarters. Tim Meadows.

  AT 9:45 P.M., the drive from Quantico to the Hoover Building took forty-five minutes. She was checked against a clipboarded list of expected guests and given clearance by the FBI Police sentry standing at the mouth to the underground garage. She parked and continued up the elevator to the lab, where all was quiet except for the plucking of Andreas Vollenweider’s New Age electracoustic harp. She followed the music to a back room lit with subdued fluorescents, where Tim Meadows sat at a twenty-four-inch flat panel screen, moving his mouse across an image.

  “Don’t look,” he shouted at Vail as she neared.

  “What, this is a surprise?”

  “I would think so,” he said.

  She glanced around the room. She had only been in the back room once, about three years ago. They’d added some equipment since then, but it was nevertheless the same: a techie’s dream. Floor to ceiling electronics were mounted in steel racks that resembled bookshelves. Wires and cables snaked up and down, side to side, feeding one device and sucking from another. Reel-to-reel tape decks stood beside TV screens, VCRs, DVD players and burners; stacks of VHS tapes and jewel cases, labeled with case numbers and dates, littered the Formica desk that sat like an audience inside a three-sided stage, facing the digital and analog devices . . . the performers who put on the show.

  Vail remained ten feet behind Meadows, who had angled his body to block the screen. Her eye caught an LED clock that hung on the wall above Meadows’s head: it was 10:40 P.M. but she felt wide awake, as if she had just gotten out of the shower.

  “I really appreciate you doing this, Tim. I owe you.”

  “Yes, you do. How ’bout dinner at McCormick & Schmick’s?”

  “Whoa, that’ll place a strain on the wallet. This photo that good?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He struck a couple keys, then said, “Okay, come on over.” Onscreen was
the original photo Vail had sent to Meadows. Seeing it again—seeing Emma—sent a pang of emotion coursing through her gut. In that split second, she felt sympathy, anger, frustration, love. And distance.

  “Okee dokie. That’s the original. Now, you didn’t give me any parameters to work from, that being what year the photo was taken, so I had to do a little extra work.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Not a problem. Consider it the appetizer. How about clams on the half-shell?”

  “How about I’ve got a kid to clothe and feed?”

  Meadows winked at her. “But they’re soooo good.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Read a review.” He indicated the screen, zoomed in on the photo. “I determined, through a little chemical analysis of the paper and the approximate age of the automobile fender in the background, that this was taken around 1959 or ’60.”