The 7th Victim kv-1 Read online

  “I’m not putting my gun down till you put yours down, pal,” Vail said to the perp. “That’s the way it’s going to work.”

  “I call the fucking shots here, bitch. Not you!”

  Great, she thought, I got one who wants to fight. It’d been six years since she’d been a field agent, eleven years since she’d camped behind a detective shield. Though she still trusted her instincts, her skill-set was in the crapper. It wasn’t like putting on pantyhose every morning. Dealing with hostage situations took practice to know you’d do the right thing under pressure, without thinking. As Vail had often been kidded by the others in her squad, the “without thinking” part came naturally to her.

  “Since you won’t tell me your name, I’m going to call you Alvin,” she said. “Is that okay, Alvin?”

  “I don’t care what the fuck you call me, just drop the fucking gun!” He shuffled his feet some more, his eyes darting from the left side of the room to the right, and back. As if he were watching a table tennis match.

  Alvin’s hostage, a thirty-something stringy blond with a sizable rock on her ring finger, began whimpering. Her eyes were bugged out, too, but it wasn’t from drugs. It was raw fear, the sudden realization that, FBI or not, Vail might not get her out of this alive.

  And Vail had to admit that so far it was not going well. She’d already blown protocol about as well as any rookie could her first day on the job. She should’ve yelled “Freeze, scumbag, FBI!” and he would have then just pissed his pants and dropped the gun, surrendering to law enforcement and ending the nightmare before it started. At least, that’s the way it always happened in the old TV shows she watched as a kid.

  But this was reality, or at least it was for Vail. For the Alvin look-alike standing in front of her, it was some speed-induced frenzy, a dream where he could do anything he wanted, and not get hurt.

  That was the part that bothered her.

  She kept her Glock locked tightly in her hands, lining up Alvin’s nose in her sight. He was only about twenty feet away, but the woman he was holding, or rather choking with his left arm, was too close for Vail to risk a shot.

  The other part of protocol she’d screwed up was that she should’ve been talking calmly to Alvin, so as not to incite him. But that was according to the Manual of Investigative and Operational Guidelines—known throughout the Bureau as MIOG, or “my-og.” In Vail’s mind, it should’ve been called MIOP, short for myopic. Narrow-minded. And if there was one thing Vail was sure of at the moment, it was that the guy who wrote MIOG didn’t have a crazed junkie pointing a snub-nosed .38 at him.

  So they stood there, Alvin twitching and shuffling, doing what looked like a peculiar slow dance with his hostage, and the level-headed Karen Vail, practicing what was sometimes called a Mexican standoff. Was that a politically correct term? She didn’t know, nor did she care. There was no backup outside, no tactical sniper focusing his Redfield variable scope on Alvin’s forehead, awaiting the green light to fire. She’d just walked into the bank to make a deposit, and now this.

  She let her eyes swing to Alvin’s left, to a spot just over his shoulder. She quickly looked back to him . . . making it seem as if she’d seen someone behind him, about to sneak up and knock him over the head. She saw his eyes narrow, as if he’d noticed her momentary glance. But he didn’t take the bait, and for whatever reason kept his ping-pong gaze bouncing to either side of Vail. She realized she needed to be more direct.

  She turned her head and looked to his left again and, reaching into her distant past as a one-time drama major, shouted (deeply, from the abdomen), “No, don’t shoot!”

  Well, this got Alvin’s attention, and as he swiveled to look over his left shoulder, he yanked the hostage down and away, and Vail drilled the perp good. Right in the temple. As he was falling to the ground in slow mo, she was asking herself, “Was this a justified shooting?”

  Actually, she was telling herself to get the hell over there and kick away his weapon. She couldn’t care less if it was a justified shooting. The FBI’s OPR unit—Office of Professional Responsibility, or Office of Paper-pushing Robots—would make the final call on that. The hostage, though frazzled and rough around the edges, was alive. That was all that mattered at the moment.

  Once Vail knocked aside Alvin’s weapon, she took a moment to get a closer look at his face. At this angle he didn’t look so much like Alvin. Could’ve been because he had the blank deer-in-headlights death mask on, or because of the oozing bullet hole on the side of his head. Hard to say.

  Vail suddenly became aware of the commotion amongst the tellers and security guards, who had emerged from their hiding places. The hostage was now shrieking and blabbering something unintelligible. A man in a gray suit was by her side, attempting to console her.

  “Don’t just stand there,” Vail yelled to the closest guard. “Call 911 and tell them an officer needs assistance.”

  It wasn’t entirely true, but it wasn’t exactly a lie, either. Still, she thought the cops would come faster if they thought it was one of their own who needed help instead of an FBI agent. Sometimes they don’t like fibbies much, the locals. But with banks, the police had to share jurisdiction with the Bureau, so she didn’t anticipate much of a tiff over it.

  As she stepped away from Alvin’s body, her BlackBerry’s vibrating jolt made her jump. She yanked it from her belt and glanced at the display. Her intestines tightened. Her heart, still racing from adrenaline, precipitously slowed. The brief text message sucked the air from her breath.

  She had hoped she’d never see another day like this. She had hoped it was over.

  But the Dead Eyes killer had claimed another victim.

  three

  In six years as an FBI profiler, Karen Vail had not experienced anything quite like this. She had seen photos of decomposed corpses, eviscerated bodies, bodies without heads or limbs. Seven years as a cop and homicide detective in New York City had shown her the savages of gang killings and drive-by shootings, children left parentless, and a system that often seemed more interested in politics than in the welfare of its people.

  But the brutal details of this crime scene were telling. A thirty-year-old woman lost her life in this bedroom, a woman who seemed to be on the verge of a promising career as an accountant. A box of new business cards from the firm of McGinty & Pollock was sitting on her kitchen counter, the toxic odor of printing press ink burning Vail’s nose.

  She curled a wisp of red hair behind her right ear and knelt down to examine a bloody smear outside the bedroom doorway.

  “Whoever did this is one sick fuck.” Vail said it under her breath, but Fairfax County homicide detective Paul Bledsoe, who had suddenly materialized at her side, grunted. The baritone of his voice nearly startled her. Nearly startled her, because there weren’t many things that did surprise her these days.

  “Aren’t they all,” Bledsoe said. He was a stocky man, only about five-eight, but plenty wide in the shoulders to make anyone think twice about screwing with him. Deep-set dark eyes and short, side-parted black hair over an olive complexion gave him the look of Italian stock. But he was a mutt, some Greek and some Spanish, a distant Irish relative thrown in for good luck.

  His trained eyes took in the large amount of blood that had been sprayed and smeared, just about painted all over the walls of Melanie Hoffman’s bedroom. Melanie Hoffman, former newcomer, now dearly departed, recently of the firm McGinty & Pollock.

  All Vail could do was nod. Then, as she crouched down to get a different perspective on the scene, she realized that Bledsoe was only partially correct. “Some are more fucked up than others,” she said. “It’s just a matter of degree.”

  The photographer’s flash flickered off the mirrors in the adjacent bathroom and drew Vail’s attention. Without walking through the crime scene, she glanced up and saw that blood had also been smeared on the bathroom walls, at least the parts of them she could see.

  Profilers didn’t usually get to visit fresh crime
scenes. They did most of their work secluded in a small office, poring over police reports, photos, written or transcribed suspect interviews, victim histories culled from relatives, friends, acquaintances. VICAP forms—short for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—that were completed by the investigating homicide detectives provided background and perspective. Having as much information as possible was crucial before beginning their work . . . before beginning their journey into the depths of a sick mind.

  “So you got my text.” Bledsoe was looking at her, expecting a response.

  “When I saw the code for Dead Eyes, my heart just about stopped.”

  Another flash from the camera grabbed Vail’s attention. They had both been standing near the doorway, seemingly in no hurry to step into the chamber of death.

  “Well, shall we?” she asked. He didn’t reply, and she figured he was mesmerized, if not overwhelmed, by the brutality that lay before them. She sometimes had a hard time reading Bledsoe and, over the years, had concluded that he preferred it that way . . . erecting a wall between his inner thoughts and someone who made her living analyzing human behavior.

  As Vail tiptoed around eviscerated body parts strewn across the floor, the criminalist poked his head out of the shower. “There’s more in here, Detective,” he said to Bledsoe, who had moved beside Vail.

  “Peachy,” Vail said. As Bledsoe headed into Melanie Hoffman’s bathroom, she took a deep breath and cleared her mind, descending into the funk she needed to get into to begin her analysis.

  Profilers didn’t try to identify who committed the murder, as the police did; they tried to ascertain the type of person most likely to have perpetrated the act. What their motivations were; why now, why here, why this victim. Each one a crucial question, an important piece to the puzzle.

  There were cops who thought profiling was bullshit, psychobabble crap that wasn’t worth the paper their reports were written on, and certainly not worth the salary the Bureau paid, plus benees, car, and clothing allowance. That talk never bothered Vail, because she knew they were wrong. She knew that, for some cops, it was a simple inferiority complex, while for others it was merely ignorance about what profilers did.

  Vail continued to study Melanie Hoffman’s bedroom. Several things bothered her about this murder. She turned to Bledsoe, who was busy puking into a barf bag he carried in his pocket. She’d seen him do this before, the last time at a particularly bloody crime scene. It was a strange thing to happen to a homicide detective, but when Vail asked him about it, he shook it off the way he brushed aside an opinion he didn’t like: with the shrug of a large shoulder. Bledsoe had said it wasn’t anything he controlled, it just kind of happened. He thought it had something to do with an “autonomic response” related to the smell of blood. Vail thought it was baloney, but what did she know? Maybe it was true, or maybe it was just male ego trying to cover up an embarrassing weakness. At the time, he seemed to want Vail to ignore it, so she did.

  Vail poked her head in the bathroom and forged ahead. Bledsoe straightened up, borrowed a plastic bag from the criminalist, and sealed off his sour stomach contents. He wiped his lips with a folded paper towel he pilfered from the technician’s utility case, then popped a Certs in his mouth. He maneuvered the breath mint toward his cheek, then nodded at the wall above the mirror. “What do you make of that?”

  Scrawled in large red strokes were the words, “It’s in the.”

  “Could mean a lot of things.”

  “Such as?”

  Vail shrugged. “I’ll need to think on it. I’m not sure we know enough yet to even formulate an opinion.”

  “You said it could mean a lot of things. You’ve gotta have some idea about it.”

  “First off, it’s not necessarily what he wrote as much as why he felt the need to write it.”

  Bledsoe chewed on that a moment, then shook his head. “You guys are gonna have a field day with that one.”

  “No doubt.” Vail stepped out of the bathroom. “Okay, what’ve we got?”

  “No signs of forced entry,” Bledsoe said. “Vic could’ve known her attacker.”

  Vail looked away, her gaze coming to rest on Melanie’s blood-soaked bed. “Could’ve met the guy yesterday evening and brought him home. Or, he could’ve used a ruse to lower her defenses. Enough to get her to open the door for him. Either way, your assumption that she knew him wouldn’t do us much good.”

  Bledsoe grunted, then stepped out of the bathroom.

  Profilers often found it difficult to have a relationship with someone, let alone have a family. They constantly thought about crime scene photos, wondering what they’d missed—or even what they had seen and misinterpreted. Or what they expected to see but didn’t. It was a perpetual state of unease, like when you keep thinking you’ve forgotten something but can’t figure out what it is.

  But, it was Vail’s job and she did it the best she could. At present, she hoped she did it well enough to help catch Dead Eyes. After three murders spread out over five months, the killer had gone silent. For several months, there was nothing. When such a pattern developed, the police figured—or rather, hoped—the offender had either died, or was sitting in a maximum security jail cell, arrested on some unrelated charge.

  When doubt intensified that the third victim was the work of Dead Eyes, it left the offender with only two murders to his credit. He suddenly didn’t appear to be as prolific, and thus the threat he posed was not as potent. With escalating police department budgets always a concern, the task force was mothballed.

  For Vail, it was good timing: nine months of working in close proximity with Bledsoe was enough. Vail liked him, but anytime you were around someone so much, you tended to make that person’s problems your own. And with a failed marriage—and serial killers bouncing around inside her head—she had enough stress without Bledsoe’s issues invading her thoughts as well.

  Vail knelt beside Melanie Hoffman’s bloody, mutilated corpse and sighed. “Why did this happen to you?”

  four

  Vail stood at the foot of Melanie Hoffman’s bed. After the criminalist briefed her on his findings, Vail asked Bledsoe to leave her for a few moments so she could be alone with her thoughts. Alone with the corpse. Some would think this was a morbid request, but for a profiler it was a priceless advantage.

  As a new agent going through training, Vail had read all the papers written by the original FBI profilers, Hazelwood, Ressler, Douglas, and Underwood. For a profiler, getting inside the offender’s head was exciting, almost sexy. The way they figured things out, the way they could put their finger on the offender’s personality traits was uncanny. What a rush it must be, she had thought, to write up a summary of an UNSUB, or unknown subject as the Bureau’s procedural manual calls them, and discover later that not only did your assessment help nail the killer, but that it was spot on.

  As was usually the case, in practice things were a lot different than it seemed they would be. The romantic notions of catching a serial killer were long gone. Vail spent her time in the trenches where psychotic criminals roamed, peering into minds of men who deserved to be gassed. Better yet, to be sliced and diced and tortured like they often did to their victims.

  Vail settled into a chair in the corner of Melanie Hoffman’s room and took in the scene, looking at its entirety. The blood all over the walls, the grotesque mutilation of the victim. She slipped a hand into her pocket and removed a container of Mentholatum and rubbed the gel across her top lip, masking the metallic blood odor and reek of expressed bodily fluids.

  As she sat there, she tried to get into the mind-set of the killer. Though there were a couple dozen FBI profilers who traveled the world educating law enforcement personnel on what profiling could and could not do, word of mouth was slow. And defunct TV shows, where the FBI agent could “see through the killer’s eyes” only made their job of education more difficult, their credibility more suspect.

  Two years ago, a cop asked Vail to touch a piece of the vic
tim’s clothing so she could “see” the killer’s face and describe it to him. He seemed genuinely disappointed when she told him that was not the way it worked.

  In reflection, Vail now found herself smiling. In the middle of a brutal crime scene, she was smiling. Smiling at the stupidity of the cop, at the irony and ineptitude of her own skills at times, and how sometimes she could not see even the obvious tangible things right in front of her . . . let alone phantom images through a killer’s eyes. Profilers don’t see what the offender sees. But they do symbolically get inside his head, think like he does, imagine what he felt at the time of the murder—and why.

  But that was not to say she did not get something from being in the same room as the killer. She did, though she had never been able to classify these feelings, be they intuition, an intense perception or understanding or identification with the offender and what she thought he’d felt at the time. But whenever possible, she spent a few moments alone with the body. It beat color photos, videotape, and written descriptions.

  She shifted her attention back to the victim. To Melanie—Vail always felt it was better to use their names. It kept it personal, reminded her that someone out there did this horrible thing to a real, living, formerly breathing human being. It was too easy to slip into the generic “vic,” or victim reference, and sometimes she wondered if the law enforcement brain did it by necessity, as a self-protection mechanism against emotional overload . . . the mind’s way of forcing them to keep a distance. To stay sane.

  Bledsoe’s comment that the killer might have known his victim, if correct, would mean it was a relatively easy murder to have committed. The offender could get close to her without much difficulty. And if he’d gotten to know her so he could increase her comfort levels and decrease her defense mechanisms, that said a lot. It meant this killer was smart, that he had spent considerable time planning his crime. If that was the case, it would indicate an organized offender.