Postmortem (10 page)

"I'm early," Wesley apologized, following me into the hallway. "Came straight here from a dental appointment. Won't bother me if you eat while we talk."

"Well, it will bother me," I said.

His blank look was followed by a sheepish grin - as it suddenly occurred to him. "I forgot. You're not Doc Cagney. You know, he used to keep cheese crackers on the desk in the morgue. In the middle of a post he'd take a break for a snack. It was unbelievable."

We turned off into a room so small it was really an alcove, where there was a refrigerator, a Coke machine and a coffeemaker. "He's lucky he didn't get hepatitis or AIDS," I said.

"AIDS." Wesley laughed. "That would have been poetic justice."

Like a lot of good ole boys I've known, Dr. Cagney was reputed to be acutely homophobic. "Just some goddam queer," he was known to say when persons of a certain persuasion were sent in for examination.

"AIDS . . ."

Wesley was still enjoying the thought as I tucked my salad inside the refrigerator. "Wouldn't I love to hear him explain his way out of that one."

I'd gradually warmed up to Wesley. The first time I met him I had my reservations. At a glance, he made one a believer in stereotypes. He was FBI right down to his Florsheim shoes, a sharp-featured man with prematurely silver hair suggesting a mellow disposition that wasn't there. He was lean and hard and looked like a trial lawyer in his precisely tailored khaki suit and blue silk paisley-printed tie. I couldn't recall ever seeing him in a shirt that wasn't white and lightly starched.

He had a master's degree in psychology and had been a high school principal in Dallas before enlisting in the Bureau, where he worked first as a field agent, then undercover in fingering members of the Mafia, before ending up where he'd started, in a sense. Profilers are academicians, thinkers, analysts. Sometimes I think they are magicians.

Carrying our coffees out, we turned left and stepped inside the conference room. Marino was sitting at the long table and going through a fat case file. I was mildly surprised. For some reason, I just assumed he would be late.

Before I had a chance to so much as pull out a chair, he launched in with the laconic announcement, "I stopped by serology a minute ago. Thought you might be interested in knowing Matt Petersen's A positive and a nonsecreter."

Wesley looked keenly at him. "This the husband you were telling me about?"

"Yo. A nonsecreter. Same as the guy snuffing these women."

"Twenty percent of the population is nonsecreter," I matter of factly stated.

"Yeah," Marino said. "Two out of ten."

"Or approximately forty-four thousand people in a city the size of Richmond. Twenty-two thousand if half of that number is male," I added.

Lighting a cigarette, Marino squinted up at me over the Bic flame. "You know what, Doc?"

The cigarette wagged with each syllable. "You're beginning to sound like a damn defense attorney." A half hour later I was at the head of the table, the two men on either side. Spread out before us were photographs of the four murdered women.

This was the most difficult and time-consuming part of the investigation-profiling the killer, profiling the victims, and then profiling the killer again.

Wesley was describing him. This was what he did best, and quite often was uncannily accurate when he read the emotion of a crime scene, which in these cases was cold, calculating rage.

"I'm betting he's white," he was saying. "But I won't stake my reputation on it. Cecile Tyler was black, and an interracial mix in victim selection is unusual unless the killer is rapidly decompensating."

He picked up a photograph of Cecile Tyler, dark skinned, lovely in life, and a receptionist at a Northside investment firm. Like Lori Petersen, she was bound, strangled, her nude body on top of the bed.

"But we're getting more of them these days. That's the trend, an increase of sexual slayings in which the assailant is black, the woman white, but rarely the opposite - white men raping and murdering black women, in other words. Hookers are an exception."

He glanced blandly at the array of photographs. "These women certainly weren't hookers. I suppose if they had been," he muttered, "our job would be a little easier."

"Yeah, but theirs wouldn'ta been," Marino butted in.

Wesley didn't smile. "At least there would be a connection that maybe makes sense, Pete. The selection."

He shook his head. "It's peculiar."

"So what does Fortosis have to say these days?" Marino asked, referring to the forensic psychiatrist who had been reviewing the cases.

"Not a whole hell of a lot," Wesley replied. "Talked to him briefly this morning. He's being noncommittal. I think the murder of this doctor's causing him to rethink a few things. But he's still damn sure the killer's white."

The face from my dream violated my mind, the white face without features.

"He's probably between twenty-five and thirty-five."

Wesley continued staring into his crystal ball. "Because the murders aren't related to any particular locality, he's got some way of getting around, a car versus a motorcycle or a truck or a van. My guess is he's stashing his wheels in some inconspicuous spot, going the rest of the way on foot. His car's an older model, probably American, dark or plain in color, such as beige or gray. It wouldn't be the least bit uncommon for him to drive, in other words, the very sort of car plainclothes law-enforcement officers drive."

He wasn't being funny. This type of killer is frequently fascinated by police work and may even emulate cops. The classic post offense behavior for a psychopath is to become involved in the investigation. He wants to help the police, to offer insights and suggestions, and assist rescue teams in their search for a body he dumped in the woods somewhere. He's the kind of guy who wouldn't think twice about hanging out at the Fraternal Order of Police lounge clacking beer mugs with the off duty cops.

It has been conjectured that at least one percent of the population is psychopathic. Genetically, these individuals are fearless; they are people users and supreme manipulators. On the right side, they are terrific spies, war heroes, five star generals, corporate billionaires and James Bonds. On the wrong side, they are strikingly evil: the Neros, the Hitlers, the Richard Specks, the Ted Bundys, antisocial but clinically sane people who commit atrocities for which they feel no remorse and assume no blame.

"He's a loner," Wesley went on, "and has a difficult time with close relationships, though he may be considered pleasant or even charming to acquaintances. He wouldn't be close to any one person. He's the type to pick up a woman in a bar, have sex with her and find it frustrating and highly unsatisfactory."

"Don't I know the feeling," Marino said, yawning.

Wesley elaborated, "He would gain far more satisfaction from violent pornography, detective magazines, S M, and probably entertained violent sexual fantasies long before he began to make the fantasies reality. The reality may have begun with his peeping into the windows of houses or apartments where women live alone. It gets more real. Next he rapes. The rapes get more violent, culminating in murder. This escalation will continue as he continues to become more violent and abusive with each victim. Rape is no longer the motive. Murder is. Murder is no longer enough. It has to be more sadistic."

His arm extended, exposing a perfect margin of stiff white cuff, he reached for Lori Petersen's photographs. Slowly he looked through them, one at a time, his face impassive. Lightly pushing the stack away from him, he turned to me. "It seems clear to me that in her case, in Dr. Petersen's case, the killer introduced elements of torture. An accurate assessment?"

"Accurate," I replied.

"What? Busting her fingers?"

Marino posed the question as if looking for an argument. "The Mob does shit like that. Sex murderers usually don't. She played the violin, right? Busting her fingers seems kinda personal. Like the guy who did it knew her."

As calmly as possible I said, "The surgical reference books on her desk, the violin - the killer didn't have to be a genius to pick up a few clues about her."

Wesley considered, "Another possibility is her broken fingers and fractured ribs are defense injuries."

"They aren't."

I was sure of this. "I didn't find anything to send me the message she struggled with him."

Marino turned his flat, unfriendly eyes my way. "Really? I'm curious. What do you mean by defense injuries? According to your report, she had plenty of bruises."

"Good examples of defense injuries," - I met his gaze and held it - "are broken fingernails, scratches or injuries found in areas of the hands and arms that would have been exposed had the victim attempted to ward off blows. Her injuries are inconsistent with this."

Wesley summarized, "Then we're all in agreement. He was more violent this time."

"Brutal's the word," Marino quickly said as if this were his favorite point to make. "That's what I'm talking about. Lori Petersen's different from the other three."

I suppressed my fury. The first three victims were tied up, raped and strangled. Wasn't that brutal? Did they need to have their bones broken, too? Wesley grimly predicted, "If there's another one, there will be more pronounced signs of violence, of torture. He kills because it's a compulsion, an attempt to fill some need. The more he does it the stronger this need becomes and the more frustrated he gets, therefore the stronger the urge will become. He's becoming increasingly desensitized and it's taking more with each killing to satiate him. The satiation is temporary. Over the subsequent days or weeks, the tension builds until he finds his next target, stalks her and does it again. The intervals between each killing may get shorter. He may escalate, finally, into a spree murderer, as Bundy did."

I was thinking of the time frame. The first woman had been murdered on April 19, the second on May 10, the third on May 31. Lori Petersen was murdered a week later, on the seventh of June.

The rest of what Wesley said was fairly predictable. The killer was from a "dysfunctional home" and might have been abused, either physically or emotionally, by his mother. When he was with a victim, he was acting out his rage, which was inextricably connected to his lust.

He was above average in intelligence, an obsessive-compulsive, and very organized and meticulous. He might be prone to obsessive behavior patterns, phobias or rituals, such as neatness, cleanliness, his diet anything that maintained his sense of con trolling his environment.

He had a job, which is probably menial - a mechanic, a repairman, a construction worker or some other labor-related occupation . . .

I noticed Marino's face getting redder by the moment. He was looking restlessly around the conference room.

"For him," Wesley was saying, "the best part of what he does is the antecedent phase, the fantasy plan, the environmental cue that activates the fantasy. Where was the victim when he became aware of her?"

We did not know. She may not have known were she alive to tell. The interface may have been as tenuous and obscure as a shadow crossing her path. He caught a glimpse of her somewhere. It may have been at a shopping mall or perhaps while she was inside her car and stopped at a red light.

"What triggered him?" Wesley went on. "Why this particular woman?"

Again, we did not know. We knew only one thing. Each of the women was vulnerable because she lived alone. Or was thought to live alone as in Lori Petersen's case.

"Sounds like your all-American joe." Marino's acid remark stopped us cold.

Flicking an ash, he leaned aggressively forward. "Hey. This is all very good and nice. But me, I don't intend to be no Dorothy going down no Yellow Brick Road. They don't all lead to Emerald City, okay? We say he's a plumber or something, right? Well, Ted Bundy was a law student, and a couple years back there's this serial rapist in D. C. who turns out to be a dentist. Hell, the Green Valley strangler out there in the land of fruits and nuts could be a Boy Scout for all anybody knows."

Marino was getting around to what was on his mind. I'd been waiting for him to start in.

"I mean, who's to say he ain't a student? Maybe even an actor, a creative type whose imagination's gone apeshit. One lust murder don't look much different from another no matter who's committed it unless the squirrel's into drinking blood or barbecuing people on spits - and this squirrel we're dealing with ain't a Lucas. The reason these brands of sex murders all profile pretty much the same, you want my opinion, is because, with few exceptions, people are people. Doctor, lawyer or Indian chief. People think and do pretty much the same damn things, going back to the days when cavemen dragged women off by their hair."

Wesley was staring off. He slowly looked over at Marino and quietly asked, "What's your point, Pete?"

"I'll tell you what the hell my point is!"

His chin was jutted out, the veins in his neck standing out like cords. "This goddam crap about who profiles right and who don't. It frosts me. What I got here is a guy writing his friggin' dissertation on sex and violence, cannibals, queers. He's got glitter crap on his hands that looks like the same stuff found on all the bodies. His prints are on his dead wife's skin and on the knife stashed in one of his drawers-a knife that also has this glitter crap on the handle. He gets home every weekend right about the time the women get whacked. But no. Hell, no. He can't be the guy, right? And why? 'Cause he ain't blue collar. He ain't trashy enough."