“Kind of creepy down here,” Robby said.
“You get used to it. It’s a kick to visit, because of all the history and legends who’ve worked here.”
Rudnick, a sixteen-year veteran, had spent every moment of his tenure in the now-famous subbasement. On his door was a sign scrawled in black magic marker that read:Welcome to BSU—
sixty feet underground
ten times deeper than dead people
Vail knocked on Rudnick’s partially open door and waited but did not get a response. She gave it a slight nudge and it swung open with a squeal.
Rudnick was sitting behind his desk tossing a gel-filled stress-relief ball in the air. He had been doing it for years, claiming it helped him clear his mind. He had once organized a unit-wide challenge to see who could come closest to the ceiling without hitting it. Rudnick had won, but someone had monkeyed with his office chair, and much to the delight of everyone who was in on the prank, Rudnick complained the arc and force of his toss were impaired by the change in the “feel” of his chair. He remained pissed for days when he discovered the conspiracy had been organized by his special agent-in-charge.
“Well, if it’s not the Redhead Express.” Rudnick jumped out of his chair, arms up and extended for a hug.
She obliged him and then introduced Robby.
Rudnick brushed back his wild Albert Einstein hair, then shook Robby’s hand. “You’re here on a case, aren’t you?” He turned back to his desk, lifting various papers and files, as if looking for something.
“Dead Eyes,” Robby said. “Karen sent the case over to you for input.” He looked to Vail for confirmation. “How long ago was that?”
“Dead Eyes, Dead Eyes. That rings a bell.” Rudnick continued searching his desk, the movement of papers becoming a bit more frantic.
Vail crossed her arms over her chest and, with a slight smirk, shook her head.
“Is there a problem?” Robby asked.
“He’s pulling your leg,” Vail said. “He knows where the file is.”
Rudnick suddenly reached out and poked a folder from atop a pile. “Here it is.”
“See? He does this all the time. He thinks it’s funny.”
“I love playing with new agents’ heads.”
Robby took a step forward, his thick thighs stopped by the edge of the desk. He looked down at the diminutive Rudnick. “I’m not a new agent.”
Rudnick looked up at Robby, over the tops of his thick-rimmed eyeglasses. “But you’re someone of authority, I can see that.”
“Investigator with Vienna PD.”
“Vienna! The poke and plumb town over on the northwest side. Poke your head in and you’re plumb out of town.”
“We’re small, yes. Kind of like you.”
“Ooh. Okay. I think that’s enough horsing around. Time to get down to business.” Rudnick sat and opened the file folder.
“How’s your tooth?” Vail asked.
“Need a root canal. Tell ya, I think we should start including dentists routinely in our suspect pool. They’re sadists, every one of ’em, I swear.”
“Dead Eyes,” Robby reminded.
“Yes, okay. Okay. Dead Eyes . . . the serial offender who’s plugged into the information superhighway.”
“Information superhighway?” Vail asked. “Who uses that term anymore?”
Rudnick glanced at her over the tops of his glasses. “I do, apparently.” He opened the file and consulted a page on the left side of the flap. “So as I was saying, this guy is tech savvy, or at least knows how to access the information necessary in constructing the parameters by which he can make it appear that he’s tech savvy.” Rudnick looked from Vail to Robby and apparently sensed their impatience. “Let me explain. According to our cyber geeks, he—”
“You got something back from the lab?”
Rudnick’s eyebrows rose. “Didn’t you?”
Vail frowned. “Go on.”
“Yes, well, as I was saying, the geek cops said our offender used a technique that allows the email message to dissolve into its core constituents—ones and zeroes, the digital equivalent of blood and guts—to prevent us from tracking the email back to him. There’re a few things interesting about that. First, they said the info on how to do that’s available on the superhigh—excuse me, the Internet—so it’s not clear whether he possessed this knowledge or if he just followed the instructions online. But given what other information you’ve submitted, I’d have to say it’s the latter. Kind of like a fanatic who cooks up a bomb from a recipe posted on some militia webpage.”
“I agree,” Vail said. “Our offender’s no technogeek. But he’s bright and can certainly find out how to do it.”
“Second, and perhaps this goes to the point of it all, is that this vanishing act he’s playing with us means he only wants one way communication—a monologue, if you will. Either he’s not interested in what you have to say about it, or he’s more interested in what you’ll do about it.”
Vail nodded slowly, as if she were absorbing the meaning into her skin, filtering it as she mulled it through her mind.
“And the content?” Robby asked.
“Yes, yes, the content. Flesch-Kincaid Index scores it at a sixth grade level, though I’m not sure that’s worth much to us because he’s writing in a voice consistent with a child. More significantly, I’d say his writing appears to emanate from a different part of his brain than his ‘blood murals,’ which I’ll get to in a minute. Unlike the murals, which likely come from some subconscious expression of his feelings, these writings are very consciously constructed. He’s gone to considerable effort to send them to you in an untraceable form. He doesn’t want to get caught, but he’s compelled to share these experiences with you people. His use of the first person is significant—he chose it for a reason, the reason being that they’re personal accounts of actual events in this offender’s life.”
“How can we rule out the possibility he’s merely writing fiction?”
“With his flare for creativity, that’s certainly an option. But I believe there’s more going on here than just a frustrated writer at work. I think this stuff is deeply personal to him. That’s why he’s showing it to you. It’s his outlet for whatever happened to him as a youth. And I believe these writings are very closely related to what we’re seeing play out when he’s with the bodies. He abuses them, much like he was abused as a child. He’s telling you what his childhood was like, the events that made him who he is today. Maybe it’s his way of explaining his actions so you won’t think badly of him.”
Robby squinted. “You think the killer cares what we think of him?”
“I think he definitely cares how he’s perceived. Not in the same way we care about the way other people see us, you understand.” Rudnick shook his head, started to say something, then stopped.
“What is it?” Vail asked.
“There’s something more going on here.” He switched to reading glasses and looked down at the file. “I just haven’t been able to put my finger on it.”
After a long moment of watching Rudnick stare at the page and shake his head in frustration, Vail asked, “What about the blood murals?”
Rudnick’s face brightened. “Ah, okay, that’s a bit easier to explain. Let’s talk for a moment in generalities. There was a question about Impressionism.” He got a nod from Vail and continued. “Well, Impressionism is an artistic movement that was born in France and lasted from the 1860s to about 1886. It consisted of a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques—”
“I was an art history major, Wayne. I know all about its origins.”
“For your very intimidating colleague, then, since odds are good that both of you weren’t art history majors.”
“That’s correct,” Robby said.
Rudnick winked at Vail, glanced down at his notes, then continued. “Impressionism was considered an extreme departure from the previous major art movement of the Renaissance. These
painters rejected the concept of perspective, idealized figures, and chiaroscuro—the use of dark and light in a stylistic manner—”
Vail held up a hand. “I wonder if Dead Eyes is using Impressionism as a symbol, consciously or unconsciously. His rejection of something in society, his way of making a statement.”
Rudnick nodded. “That’s certainly a possibility. I’d thought of that, but haven’t had time to run it through the old gears,” he said, pointing to his brain. He turned back to Robby. “The Impressionist painter’s focus was on capturing the effect of light on the colors of a landscape. Up close, their paintings look like splashes of color. They don’t look like much of a picture until you view them from a bit of a distance.” He looked at Vail. “I’m only getting this stuff secondhand, so if you have anything to offer, cut in.”
“Nothing to offer. But I think you—and your expert—are missing the point. I said the offender’s blood murals reminded me of an Impressionism era painting. Mostly because of the strokes, the way the blood was laid out. It wasn’t merely blood spattered on a wall, like a disorganized offender would leave it. It was . . . applied in a very specific pattern. Like a painting, as if the offender looked at these murals as an art form in and of itself.”
Rudnick was nodding animatedly. “Yes, yes, that’s my point. But again, you’re jumping the gun. You on speed today, Karen, or what? Too much coffee?”
“You take forever to get to the point sometimes, Wayne.”
“Fine. Here’s the point: I checked with an expert on offender and inmate artwork. She analyzes their doodlings as well as the more elaborate sketches, including pictures drawn pre-arrest and during incarceration. It took her a while to come up with something. She took it to an art historian, who saw what you were talking about, the possible influence of Impressionist painters, but since it was ‘painted’ with fingertips and not a brush, she couldn’t analyze brush strokes, which seems to be a key indicator when trying to evaluate artistic trends. There was a suggestion of Impressionist influence, but she wasn’t willing to commit to anything more than that. It didn’t really follow the conventions of Impressionism, particularly the technique of light and color. There’s no light source and no color because there are no pigments. It’s just blood. She said it’s like trying to paint an entire rainbow with only blue or red on your palette.
“So it fell back on the desk of the offender artwork expert, whose best guess was that there was a method to the brush strokes. Very organized and planned, with an inherent order. There was a repetition in the strokes, but she was unsure it meant anything other than to make it distinguishable and unique. She couldn’t discern any hidden meaning to the murals but was sure it was the work of the same ‘artist.’” He flipped a page of the report and concluded: “She did say the suggestion of Impressionistic influence was likely not coincidental or accidental.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that it’s likely our offender does have a background in art history, or is an artist of some sort.”
Robby looked at Vail. “You’d already figured that out.”
“Oh, don’t tell her that,” Rudnick said. “It’ll just go to her head.”
Vail rose from her seat. “Confirmation is always nice to have,” she said. “The way things have been going, it’s good to have someone like Wayne at my back.”
“I’d much rather be at your front.” He winked. “Oh, excuse me. I’m not supposed to make those kinds of remarks. Workplace etiquette. Sexual harassment laws and such.”
“Did your expert say anything about what the murals said about the offender?”
“The fact that he paints in blood is sick.”
“Yes, Wayne. Something useful.”
Rudnick’s face hardened, as if he suddenly realized the gravity of her question. “We both feel the blood is deeply arousing to him. It follows closely with the intense relationship he has with the body. He spends an incredibly long time with the victim. First he eviscerates them, then he grooms them to match some skewed image he has of women, making them ugly, almost repulsive. Then he takes their blood and paints on the wall. In a very deliberate fashion. There is definitely artistic talent there, but it’s abstract. No one I showed the photos to could ascertain anything useful from the patterns and shapes. And despite this repetitive ‘internal order,’ overall they’re different from crime scene to crime scene. So whatever he’s painting isn’t a consistent image, which makes me think it’s not borne of a fantasy. The act of painting on the wall may be, but what he’s painting . . . no one seems to know.” Rudnick grabbed his gel ball and began squeezing it. “In sum, your guy is consistent with what we’d expect to see in this type of offender: the themes of dominance, revenge, violence, power, control, mutilation . . . they’re all there.”
Vail took a second to absorb this, then nodded. “Thanks for the help, Wayne. Stay sane.”
His face brightened again into a mischievous smirk. “Hard to do around here. I sometimes think they’ve buried us down here for a reason, like it’s some secret insane asylum. Like we’re the inmates, but in telling us we work for the FBI, they’ve calmed our murderous instincts.”
“Uh huh. Take care, Wayne. And thanks again.” Vail led the way out, Robby fast on her heels. As soon as the door clicked shut, he asked, “Stay sane? That implies he’s sane to begin with.”
Vail tilted her head and nodded. “Guess you’re right. Down here, such assumptions might be a bit of a stretch.”
WHEN THE ELEVATOR DOORS spread open on the main floor, Vail handed Robby her keys and told him to wait for her in the car; she forgot to ask Rudnick something on a prior case of hers and had to run back down. She appeared in the doorway to Rudnick’s office a couple minutes later, and there was the bushy haired analyst, reclining in his chair tossing the ball at the ceiling.
Vail cleared her throat and the ball skittered off his fingertips onto the floor.
He looked over. “Am I having one of those déjà vu events or are you back for something?”
“I’m back,” Vail said.
“You like it when I speak French? The people are a bit uppity, but the language does kind of roll off the tongue.”
Vail stepped into the room and shut the door behind her.
Rudnick sat up in his chair. “Uh oh. This is serious. Either you’re going to work me over or you want some privacy.”
“I want some advice,” Vail said.
“Okay. I haven’t practiced psychiatry in a gazillion years, but—”
“I’m serious, Wayne.”
“Right. Serious. Okay, what do you need?”
Vail looked down, then up at the walls—everywhere but at Rudnick’s face.
Finally, he said, “You know, your body language suggests you’re uncomfortable with what you’re about to ask me.”
Vail nodded, then finally met his eyes. “I’m having dreams. Strange dreams.” She recapped the gist of the nightmares but saved the best for last. “So the killer’s straddling the woman’s body, he drives the knife into her eyes, then looks up into the mirror.”
Rudnick nodded thoughtfully, clearly engaged and sitting on every word. “And you saw yourself.”
Vail felt herself step backward. “Yeah. How’d you know?”
“Because, my dear, you stare at mutilated bodies day in and day out. You live and breathe serial murder. It has to affect you deeply, even when you turn your brain off and go to sleep.”
“But I’ve never had these kinds of dreams before.”
“Yeah, well, don’t bog me down with details.”
She sighed. “I thought you’d be able to help me.”
“Look, Karen, are you worried that you may be the killer?”
Vail forced a laugh. “Of course not.” She chuckled again. “Yes. I mean, I don’t know. I can’t be, right?”
“No, you can’t be. You spend all day around people who analyze behavior. Don’t you think one of them would be looking at you if it were even possible?”
“Former agent, you say? Must be a reason why he’s a former agent, Karen. Point is, you’re entrenched in a very challenging case, probably the most challenging one you’ve ever had because you’re intimately involved in it. Most of the time, you don’t even get to visit fresh crime scenes, let alone investigate them personally. That guy in your unit—Mark Safarik—what’s that saying he had?”
The 7th Victim Page 31
