Spense wheeled a standing whiteboard into the living room, and it fit right in with the stark, businesslike tone of the apartment. Polished maple gleamed on the floors, bright light flooded the room from on high, and the furniture was modern industrial. Tucking the warm, mom-made throw tighter around her legs, she sent Spense an impatient smile and watched as he unpacked markers and notepads, then powered up his laptop.
In her hands, she held one of Gretchen’s packets. Her pulse surged as she opened it and removed a synopsis of the crimes. Her palms were sweaty, her heart was beating fast, and her fingers tingled in anticipation of creating her first ever profile. The brain was a remarkable organ, and no subject interested her more. But understanding the derailment of human behavior into the realm of criminality wasn’t just curiosity for her. It wasn’t a hobby, or even a profession—it was a compulsion. A chill sank into her bones. She simply couldn’t stop herself from shoveling down into the darkness, no matter how personally painful the dig. She had to know why. What would make a man go so terribly wrong? She needed to be able to differentiate an innocent man from a killer because if she couldn’t tell the difference, she’d never be able to trust in anyone again. She shivered as a father’s words to his young daughter came back to her:
Hold on tight, Caity. Trust me.
She needed to believe in her father.
And so she kept on digging, deeper and deeper into the darkness—a strange way of searching for the light, perhaps, but it was all she knew to do. For years, she’d immersed herself in the study of deviant behavior, but her tools were limited. She needed new perspectives, new methodologies. To date, she’d only seen the criminal process from the psychiatrist’s side of a case. But working with Spense would give her a chance to observe how the other half lived.
A bloody shoeprint in the courthouse conference room had been identified as originating from a Ferragamo, and the task force now referred to the entire case by that name. Although the primary legwork for Ferragamo would be carried out by the police and the sheriff’s office, Caitlin would have a chance to familiarize herself with police reports and watch a keen investigator in action. Spense might be a profiler now, but like most criminal analysts, he’d been a field agent prior to moving over to the BAU, and from what she’d heard, he’d been one of the best. He knew how to work a case, and she was suddenly itching to learn from him.
Germinating just below the surface of her mind was a tiny seed of hope; acquiring investigative skills meant she’d be in a better position to solve the Falconer case on her own. And one thing was certain: Absolutely no one else was interested in looking back on a crime that had been put to bed so definitively.
The detectives who’d worked Gail Falconer’s murder were convinced they’d gotten their man—her father. The Innocence Project had to prioritize their cases, and a man on death row would always rank higher than a man who’d already been put in the ground. One after the other, the slew of private investigators she’d hired had come up empty. At this point, she had only two choices left. Find the real killer and bring him to justice herself, or let go of the past, knowing that proving her father’s innocence would never bring him back to her. Now the sigh she’d been holding in finally released.
Letting go was no option at all.
Spense, apparently done with his preparations, interrupted her reverie. “Can I get you a drink? Something to eat before we get started? We may be in for a long night.”
She realized he was trying to be polite, but if this was going to be her temporary home, she’d rather not be treated like a guest. And she didn’t want Spense taking on the role of nursemaid in addition to bodyguard. “Thanks for offering, but if I need something, I’ll get off this couch and get it myself. Last time I looked, I still had the two legs.”
“Those two legs gave out on you less than seventy-two hours ago. I seem to remember scooping you off the floor of Judd Kramer’s hospital room.” He grinned sideways at her. “But hey, have it your way. You wanna keep falling down, I’ll just keep picking you back up.”
That settled, he widened his stance, and her gaze went to his bare feet. She’d never seen Spense in jeans and a T-shirt. He looked like a regular guy. A regular ripped guy. Her stomach dipped, and she hurriedly refocused on the whiteboard. Nothing says good times like dry-erase markers and a table covered with crime-scene photos. An electrifying tingle, entirely unrelated to the way Spense filled out a T-shirt, swept down her spine. There was a reason her home was piled high with detective stories. Above all else, just about, she loved a good mystery.
“The Man in the Maze.” She pointed at the board. “Don’t forget to put that up.”
Spense pulled out a dry-erase marker and wrote Man in the Maze in small print on the bottom right corner of the board. What the deuce? Surely she couldn’t be the only person on the case who thought Kramer’s dying declaration was important. “I’d put that up top if I were you. That way we can branch off from Kramer’s clue. Down there in the corner, there’s no room for corollaries.”
“I knew you’d turn out to be a micromanager.” Spense did a face-palm. “Tell you what. I’ll circle the Man in the Maze in red to signify its importance, and I promise we’ll come back to it. But that’s not where we need to begin.”
Swallowing her eagerness, she resolved to listen first and speak later. She definitely had her own ideas about things, but she was also here to learn.
Spense scrawled the word Profile at the top of the board, where she had intended the Man in the Maze to go. “Once again, it’s not our job to come up with a suspect. We’ve got less than twenty-four hours to create a profile of the UNSUB, so the police know what type of animal they’re looking for.”
“Right.” She rubbed her fingers together, realizing she had little idea of where to start, despite the fact she had been reading up on profiling. “So we’ll be interpreting the mind-set of the killer, whether he’s organized or disorganized, and speculating as to his intelligence and educational background . . . any likely psychopathology.”
Spense nodded. “I see you’ve done your homework. You’re going to be a tremendous help, especially in the crazy department.”
“Psychopathology department.”
“You say potato . . .”
Her mood was upbeat. Solving a puzzle with Spense held a certain appeal—sex appeal, a little voice whispered. She wet her lips. No harm in enjoying his company, as long as she kept her boundaries firm.
“Anyway, as I was about to say, we also need to determine things like estimated age, gender, and ethnicity. Even geographic location.”
His words put her back on track but also gave her pause. How were they going to determine the killer’s age, or geographic location? How many times had she scoffed when a prosecutor stood before a jury and made outlandish, unsupported claims: The killer is a twenty-three-year-old white male who lives within a three-mile radius of Tenth and Vine. He drives a red Camaro and recently had his oil changed using a Groupon. He flosses his teeth in the mornings, but not at night. Next would come the kicker: And therefore, you must find the defendant guilty as charged.
Spense made a fulcrum of his fingers and wobbled a marker between them. “I know what you’re thinking, Caity. But the Bureau’s amassed a lot of epidemiological data—statistics we can put to use to help construct the most accurate profile possible. Anytime you feel we don’t have the goods to make a claim, just shout it out, and I’ll fall in line. Not looking to railroad the wrong guy here.”
Statistics sounded good to her. She was an empiricist to her very core. Whether it was because of what had happened to her father, or simply because of her scientific training, she needed facts to support her conclusions.
“Relax, Caity. I promise you. We’re not going to sit around and pull a profile out our asses. This is too important. If we make a mistake, that could send the investigation off
course, and the UNSUB could get away with murder. We’ll have to make use of our experiences and instincts at some point in order to build a complete profile, but I’d suggest we begin with some cold hard facts. Then we can go off on a wild hair later if it’s warranted.”
If by wild hair he meant the Man in the Maze, she wasn’t going to argue. “Okay. I’m guessing the killer’s age would be something you could use epidemiologic data to estimate.”
“Bull’s-eye.” He drew a target-shaped circle on the board. “Unfortunately, age is one of the hardest inputs for a profile, and in this case, it’s even more difficult to determine than usual.”
“In what way?”
“Epidemiology tells us an UNSUB usually chooses victims similar in age and ethnicity to himself. Unfortunately, in this case . . . the victimology is problematic. There’s too much discrepancy among the targets to make their ages a useful predictor. How do we pigeonhole the UNSUB with victims ranging in age from their late twenties to their late fifties? Now ethnicity is easier. I think it’s safe to assume the UNSUB is Caucasian, since all the victims were.”
When he wrote Caucasian Male in the upper-left-hand corner, she nodded her agreement. She hadn’t seen the shooter’s face . . . or had she? She couldn’t remember, and yet her gut was pinging, confirming they were on the right track. It was possible she had seen his face, and it would all eventually come back to her. Maybe her gut was telling her something her memory refused to reveal. Suddenly, she had an idea about how to estimate the killer’s age.
“It’s true, the victims varied in age, but we both agree Judd Kramer was the primary target.” Labeling herself a victim left a bad taste in her mouth, but if they were going to do this, she couldn’t let emotion get in the way. She didn’t have to live her life like a victim, no matter what had happened in that courthouse, but for purposes of this profile, that’s exactly what she was. Her vital statistics, her social history, her secrets might figure into this case, and they had to be taken into account the same as all the other victims’. To stop her little finger from twitching, she clasped her hands in front. “Wouldn’t it make sense to assume the UNSUB is more similar to Kramer than to the other targets?” The admiring look Spense aimed her way made her chest puff. She was getting the hang of this.
“That’s just exactly what I was going to propose. That we use Kramer as our primary prototype, with the understanding, of course, that we’re making an assumption, and the profile may need to be adjusted. So there’s our beginning—we already have the UNSUB’s likely race, age, and gender. Gender is typically easy to figure. A crime like this one was almost certainly committed by a male. Besides, we have an eyewitness, who actually saw the shooter—you.”
“I only saw shoes. It’s possible the killer could’ve been a woman disguised as a man.”
“But you told Baskin you thought you’d seen a man, and even though you don’t remember seeing his face, your first instinct is the most likely to be correct. Besides which, the UNSUB used a gun and a knife on his victims. Statistically speaking, our UNSUB is likely to be a male.”
Something was clicking in her brain. “Sticking with the shoes for a moment, I’d add upper-middle class, employed, and college-educated.”
A grin spread across Spense’s face.
She supposed he understood how she’d come to that conclusion, but to double-check her reasoning, she explained. “We know, from the bloody footprint, the shoes I saw were Ferragamos—expensive, but not so expensive they’re out of reach of someone who cares about making an impression—the kind of shoes a professional wears. Someone like a banker, or a professor.” Her breath caught. “Or an attorney.”
“Or a psychiatrist,” he teased.
A tickle started up in her throat. “Maybe we should amend the profile to say attended college and possibly graduate school. We’re dealing with a highly educated, intelligent man. I mean these crimes were well planned. The killer ingeniously circumvented security at both the courthouse and the hospital, then got away without anyone noticing.”
“And don’t forget, other than the one bloody shoeprint, he left no trace evidence at either scene. Not that we’ve found so far. He’s a hell of a planner, I’d say.”
An ingenious determined killer . . . and he was after her. She wrapped her arms around her waist, staring at the profile they were building brick by brick. “Something’s bothering me.”
“Good.” Spense took a seat beside her on the couch. “Something should be bothering you.”
“A minute ago, when you said UNSUBs pick victims near their own age, you were speaking of serial killers, right?”
“That’s where the data comes from, yes. The Bureau’s amassed a lot of statistics on serial killers.”
“If we’re operating off the assumption our guy’s a vigilante and not a serial killer . . . would the data even apply?”
“I’m glad you brought that up. Once we make the assumption he’s a vigilante, it takes us down a limited path as far as our profile. So maybe we should put that issue to rest before we move on.”
“You don’t believe the shooter is a vigilante.” It was written all over his face.
“The truth is our UNSUB defies classification, and that’s something we don’t run across often.”
She thought about that lecture she and Spense had attended a few years back—the one about the difference between spree killers and mass murderers. “You’re right. The courthouse shootings would put him in the category of a mass murderer—at least they would if Kramer and I had succumbed on the scene. But the hospital murders technically make the UNSUB a spree killer. And then, there’s the matter of the temporal-bone trophy, which suggests something entirely different.”
“Bull’s-eye again.” Spense retraced the target on the board in bold black marker.
A new idea bubbled to the surface. Kramer might have been the primary target, but the pharmacy tech was also key to the profile. Darlene Dillinger’s throat had been slashed, and a piece of her temporal bone had been taken. Given the time it would take to carve out the bone, and the tools . . . and the skill . . . this UNSUB had to have fantasized and mentally rehearsed, or equally likely, actually performed the act beforehand. He’d known exactly what to do when the time came.
“Let’s go back to the question of a vigilante. What argues for that theory, Caity?”
The more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed the vigilante theory would stand. And yet, if it hadn’t been a vigilante’s hatred for Kramer that motivated the murders, what had? She didn’t know—yet. That would be their challenge. “Only one thing I can think of, but it’s a humdinger.”
“Exactly. The question of motive is best answered by the vigilante theory.” He got up and began pacing in front of the board. “And you’re right about that being a humdinger. No other motives that can connect the dots among all the victims spring to mind. But I know this man is not a vigilante because even though I don’t know who he is, I’m absolutely sure of what he is—a serial killer.”
Her chin bobbed furiously. Spense was right. Of course he was right.
“Tell me how I know that, Caity.”
Spense was mentoring her. Making sure she understood how they arrived at their conclusions, and that was good. “Because of Darlene Dillinger. Her murder has to be the work of a sexual sadist. Her body was posed in a shaming position, with her clothing removed and her ankles tied to her wrists to display her genitalia. The UNSUB used her undergarments to gag her, stuffing them down her throat before he cut it. The UNSUB is a misogynist with detailed fantasies, and he couldn’t resist acting on those fantasies when he had the opportunity.”
“And don’t forget the temporal bone. It’s the same signature as in the Cartwright murder. So if you’re asking me if this is the work of a vigilante, the answer is hell no. Either we have a copycat on our hands, or Kramer
really was innocent like he claimed, at least innocent of Sally Cartwright’s murder. Either way, there’s a sexually motivated serial killer loose in Phoenix.” He stretched his arms behind his head. “You sure you’re not hungry?”
Strangely enough, she was. All this profiling talk had somehow improved her appetite. The thought of tasting real food again made her mouth water. With the all the white rice and tapioca pudding the hospital had been feeding her, she could go for a nice big slice of a pepperoni pie about now. And there was no Nurse Jenny around to stop her. “Starved. Should we order pizza . . . ooh . . . or maybe Arizona Mexican?” A Navajo taco would hit the spot for sure.
He grinned. “I was thinking I might whip us up some kung pao tofu if you’re game. I’ve got edamame, too.”
Struggling not to make a face she said, “Perfect. That sounds very . . . nutritious. How can I help?”
Thirty minutes later, she found herself sitting across the kitchen table from Spense, facing down a bowl of gray curd dowsed in a spicy peanut sauce.
He stuffed a gob of tofu in his mouth and made an exaggerated noise of enjoyment. “Delicious, even if I do say so myself.”
She looked at him, wondering if he really liked this stuff or if he was watching his diet for some reason. He certainly didn’t need to mind his weight, but maybe he was in training or had some sort of issue with his cholesterol. It’d be a miracle if tofu could fill up this big man. Spense appeared to her to be well over six feet, and after seeing him in a T- shirt, she knew for sure he was all muscle.
A few mouthfuls later he slowed down and sent her a look that was even more surprising than the menu. It was the same look he’d had on his face that night he’d put the moves on her, and it gave her a fluttery feeling in her gut that made her uneasy. She suspected their earlier conversation about Baltimore might have stirred up old memories for him—like it had for her.
Judgment Page 8
