The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear.
—Krishnamurti, The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader
Instinct told Cat they weren’t going to catch this guy through normal investigative channels. Toxicology had come up with nothing in the girl’s systems. No drugs, no barbiturates, no poisons. What was this guy into?
Sitting at a Medline terminal in the UCI Science Library, Cat learned what she could about sulfuric acid.
Housed in an impressive modern structure, the science library held millions of volumes on a wide variety of subject areas in sciences, medicine, and technology. Everything from genetic engineering to environmental impact on California’s wetlands could be researched at minimal costs.
Peering over tortoiseshell glasses, Cat waited for the screen to prompt her for a search. She typed in sulfuric acid, then the words “carcinogen” and “human.” It was early, eight o’clock. At this hour, the library felt big—empty and cold. Her fingers clicked across the keyboard at a fast clip, the keys the only sound in the library other than a reference librarian who seemed half asleep, sipping a morning coffee that Cat guessed she had snuck in.
The blue screen disappeared, replaced with a gray one. The first few articles she found were not what she wanted. Frustrated, she changed her query to include the word “sources.”
Initially, the computer search found much the same. However, the fourth article was interesting. She scanned the abstract, pulled up the full article.
Scrolling through, she realized it was what she needed. Quickly she typed in the commands to print and inserted a card into the slot that would automatically deduct the costs of copies. Cat spent most of the morning doing similar searches on a variety of databases, including Toxline, Cancerline, Toxlit, and Medica. She also searched RTECS, ETIBACK, and BIOSIS. A number of the studies provided relevant information on the mechanisms that might provide an insight into where this madman was getting his stuff.
Cat used her cell phone to get a main line for the people at DuPont Labs. After a short conversation with their engineers, she was assured that they would send an update summary of the scientific literature on sulfuric acid to her, via Federal Express next day air. It was too much to send via email.
By this time tomorrow, she’d have a wealth of information on sulfuric acid, its carcinogenic effects, sources, and production throughout the United States.
Leaning back, she put down her cell phone. Above, the sun peered out from behind silver gray clouds that hung on the horizon. Robins darted from a giant elm, its branches so laden down they almost touched the ground.
For the first time in a long time, Cat felt good about this investigation.
For the time being, with so little to go on, a voice inside her told Cat someone must have seen something. A struggle, maybe one of the girls with him.
Something.
Did people just keep their mouths closed? Someone had to have had their eyes open, seeing Jane Doe with someone. Still, as far as clues, they had nothing despite putting out where she had last been seen alive. Calls came in. Everything was being checked out, but most of it seemed from crackpots and wannabees.
No letters claiming responsibility. No phone calls to the cops. Nothing.
It was time to shake up the investigation, time for a statewide task force.
Time to take this thing national.
To some extent, the local politicians had been calling the shots, orchestrating the investigation from behind the scenes. Cat would change pecking order today.
From here on in, she was calling all the shots.
At noon, Cat sat at a conference table in the mayor’s office, watching men file in, all looking very stern and serious. McGregor sat next to her, then Richmond. Needleman seemed to have swapped the seersucker for a more serious looking gray double-breasted number. Craig Gray sat, all smiling and politeness. She wondered if she’d ever have the nerve to tell him to wipe it off his face.
Sanchez plopped down at the far end of the table, a dark, striking, handsome man who seemed to have demons of his own.
Cat had also invited Mack Holston, San Diego Police Department’s head honcho, and similar men from San Francisco, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Mateo counties, and Santa Barbara.
After the men were seated and the coffee poured, Cat stood. She did not smile but came straight to the point.
“Gentlemen, I’m glad you could all make it here today. What I’m about to say makes common sense in the wake of these senseless killings. What we have out there,” she glanced toward the window, “is a savage killer, a machine set on autopilot. Right now we have nothing to go on. No way of stopping him. And he knows it.”
She met each of their eyes with a serious and deliberate stare.
“Consequently, gentlemen, we are placed at a distinct disadvantage. He knows that too. And I believe he is enjoying his little game even more, escalating the killings because he knows he can.” She paused. “Because we have nothing. Because he has given us nothing.”
The man from Riverside County spoke up. “What about the DNA, tissue cultures?”
“Mr.,” Cat glanced at her notes, “Norris, is it?”
“Yes ma’am.” He tipped his cowboy hat slightly to her. He was the guy from the Inland Empire—San Bernardino and Riverside.
“In the first three cases, the burning was so severe that the epidermal layer of skin is pretty much gone. The first two girls, the only thing under their nails was their own tissue. This last one we pulled up, well, there was nothing left of her. The only thing we have is a star-shaped group of freckles. The ocean took care of her.
She’d been floating two, maybe three days.”
“So you got nothing?”
“Well, let’s just say the tissue samples, blood, and DNA we’ve sent in hasn’t been the most favorable evidence.”
“What about this guy’s MO?” San Diego’s chief, Norman Harley, asked. He was a big man, though well proportioned. He sported the type of tanned good looks that made Cat believe he was a fisherman, an outdoorsman of some type.
“That worries me. His MO is developing, as I believe his killing fantasy is.”
“How so?” Harley said.
“Initially the girls were beaten into unconsciousness, mutilated, burned, and left for dead in the middle of bush country. At some time during the killing ritual, I think it was likely each one woke up, but by then he had already started cutting. Shock sets in as the body loses blood. There was little they could do. You all know that?”
The men nodded.
“The first two, if they are the first two…” Cat believed there were more bodies in the California hills waiting to be discovered… “were killed over a long period of time. I think this guy enjoys watching them suffer. He may inflict the cutting over hours, even days, slowly weakening the victim. This is the reason the cuts are so precise. If he goes too deep, he kills them too quickly and his fun is over.”
“Bastard,” the detective from San Bernardino muttered under his breath. Harley’s ice-blue eyes glittered with anger. “So this guy’s a control freak, is that what you’re telling us?”
“Very much so. At least initially that’s what appears to be the case. He likes to be in control. My belief is that the first two killings were very controlled and that he had been planning out the mechanics of the attack, if not the identity of the victims, for a very long time, months perhaps.”
“You keep talking about the first two girls like they’re in a class by themselves. Why is that?”
“Because they very much are.” Cat had an assistant dim the lights and flip on the overhead projector. “The third girl is quite different.” A photo slide of Jane Doe’s corpse, shot from overhead, loomed large on a screen in front of them. Some of the men seemed alarmed, but Cat knew she had to get their attention. This was the way to do it.
“Gentlemen, meet Jane Doe. This is our guy’s latest victim, this young woman washed up in Dana Point. The reason I called you all here is to inform you that no one who knows this girl has come forward. We got nada.”
Cat’s eyes focused on the screen. “As a result, I believe it is important at this point to coordinate a statewide task force. I also believe a national press conference is in order. My motives are threefold. Number one, this girl needs to be identified. If we ID her, we might find someone who saw something suspicious. We also need to give her a decent burial. Right now she is being held in refrigeration in the OC coroner’s offices. Number two, no one has come forward to claim her. This leads me to believe she is from out of state. That worries me. If our guy is mobile, well, the resources that will need to be devoted to this case increase twentyfold. It’s also a reason to go national.”
Cat’s forehead wrinkled. “Third, and probably most disconcerting, is the fact that this body”—Cat used a laser pointer circling the mass of bloody pulp on the screen—“is entirely different from the other two.”
“We got a copycat?”
“No. I don’t think so, although I’ve considered that possibility. In all three cases, the lacerations are almost identical, with the largest wound to the abdomen. There is no way a copycat could know that. We haven’t released that kind of detail to the media. And the skill needed to make abdominal cuts like this, without piercing vital organs, is extraordinary.”
“What else concerns you about this Jane Doe?”
“Notice the ligature burns to the neck here.” She circled the laser’s red pinpoint. “And to the midsection, ankles, wrists. Distinctive circular marks. This girl was tied down, unlike the others. I believe standard nylon rope was used. None of the marks appears fresher than the others. She was tied down to something as he began to cut.”
Harley was scratching his head. “What’s the significance?”
Cat stood in front of the screen, the ghastly image projected on her white linen suit.
“He is escalating, his violence intensifying. As the fantasy develops, fleshes out in his mind, it is becoming more violent. He is losing control of himself, little by little over time, and the result is a more vicious attack. All three girls so far have not been touched in the face.”
“Why is that?” San Bernardino’s chief homicide detective spoke up this time, apparently taking the words out of Harley’s mouth.
“He likes to watch their faces. This sonofabitch, this man, deliberately leaves their faces alone. At our most basic, we are all animals, hunters. Evolution has shown nothing less. Rather than subduing that urge, this guy encourages it, and in doing so their faces are like his trophies. Watching their repeated struggling, watching them bleed, the slow process of shock, then the acid. He enjoys the pain etched on their faces for hours, maybe days.”
Secretly, Cat believed he videotaped each one of the murders. Or photographed them. So far she had nothing to prove it, so she kept it to herself.
“What a freak.” Harley shook his head.
“You see, by killing them in this manner, he is in control. Able to cheat death as it comes knocking for them, or at least slow its advance. What could be more exhilarating? The control of life and death.”
She stepped aside, allowing the men to focus on Jane Doe once more. “One other thing, we found evidence of manual strangulation as well. Notice the wider laceration and bruising about the neck.”
“So he hung them and strangled them?” San Bernardino’s guy was confused.
“No, the third girl only. Looks like he choked her with his hands first, probably into unconsciousness. Looking closely, you can see that with the rope marks, that thinner bruising is deeper and fresher than the wider bruising to the neck. What this tells us is that he choked first, then tied her down.”
“Okay.”
Cat continued. “And this was not a hanging. There is no inverted V-shaped bruise to the neck. The bruising line here is inverted in the opposite direction, downward. She was most likely tied to something, an eyehook or something, down below her waist. He dragged the rope down to her waist then used a slipknot to tighten it even further. See the star-shaped bruising to the back of the neck?” Cat circled the bruises as they came up on the slideshow, her voice keeping perfect time with each slide. “He used more force than was needed.”
“Tied her down like a hog,” Harley observed, shaking his head back and forth.
“And he likes to use his hands,” the homicide detective from Santa Barbara said, speaking up for the first time, his voice deep.
“Yes, at least on the last one. Not on the others. In the first two killings, he was very meticulous. Not this last one; he went to town on her. Rope, hands-on. That’s what concerns me. With each day, he is more dangerous.”
Cat looked down, gathered her thoughts, then lifted her head again.
“And one more thing. We can’t verify it based on this last victim, but my guess is that the sexual component of his fantasy will escalate also.”
“You mean he’s gonna start raping them?”
“No. Right now he gets off after the killings. We found semen on the first two girls. The last one we can’t tell. No penetration. My guess is it is his culmination of the killing fantasy, the ultimate feeling of power. Perhaps it is his way of sharing his victim’s voyage between life and death. Maybe in that split second of death, he feels the ultimate sexual…” She hesitated, searching for the proper word out of respect for the dead. “Gratification.”
Harley spoke softly now. “So start looking for a rapist?”
“No, I don’t think so. He does not rape, and we have no reason to believe he will now. I believe, without killing like this, he is impotent. However, he may attempt digital penetration.” Cat stopped speaking, deciding how to answer. “He may reason that if he is inside of them, with his hands, or some other object that he is touching at the moment of death, the bond between himself and the victim— between death and life—becomes even more real, more intoxicating.”
“But he is not going to rape them?”
“No, as crazy as this sounds, I don’t think he is able to out of respect for them.”
“Huh?” Even Gray seemed stumped by that one.
“As much as he brutalizes them physically, he does so because of a tortured relationship in his past. Someone he loved and trusted brutalized him. Out of that love and respect, as much as he mutilates their bodies, he is unable to, well, unable to have sex with them.”
“So the guy’s been pussy-whipped,” the detective from Riverside blurted out, then bit his lip, remembering who he was speaking to.
“In a manner of speaking.” Cat would not justify the comment with anything more.
She amplified her voice. “So, gentlemen, that is why I have brought you all here today. The FBI has been authorized to create a statewide task force. In a matter of hours, we will be going national with what we have now, with some details left out of course, to prevent copycats.”
Sanchez nodded, already knowing this was coming down the pike. Cat’s work with the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit in profiling, and correlating that information with what she had learned from a PhD in criminal psychology, made for a potent combination. The addition to her advanced knowledge in forensic medicine meant this bastard better watch out. This triad combination had not failed Catherine Powers yet.
Gathering all the FBI resources, with a backbone of statewide and national informants, meant Cat could put together a picture of murder from the victims’ and the killer’s perspectives. Everything from each victim’s character, physical traits, age, sexual preference, habits, and personality would be reexamined. From this, a correlative match with the killer’s likely characteristics would arise. Where the two pictures overlapped is where they would find their man.
“What I want each of you to take away from this meeting is the fact that this guy’s killing mechanism is changing. I want all of you aware of that. Consequently, if any of you come upon a young female body that fits either of these MOs, especially a floater, I want the information relayed to me immediately. Understood?”
The men nodded.
“And get the word out to other agencies. We will of course be sending out FBI notices via email to all agencies across the state today. That’s pretty much it. Any questions?”
There were none. As the men got up to leave, Cat remembered one more thing. “Hold on a minute. If any of you finds a body, floater or not, I don’t want it touched. Don’t drag it up on the beach. Just leave it. And call me right away.”
They nodded and filed out of the room.
Chief Richmond stayed behind. “That was very impressive, Catherine.”
“You can call me Cat, like everyone else,” she said casually.
“I like Catherine better—far more refined.”
“Whatever.” She was busy packing away the projector and slides. He held her forearm, stopped her movement. When she looked up, his deep-set, penetrating eyes were fixed on her with the most sincere look. “Do you really think we will catch him?”
“I don’t know, chief. I sure hope so.”
Her answer seemed to dispel some of his concern. “Would it be too forward to ask you to have dinner with me tonight?”
She stopped moving, taken aback by his frankness.
He wore no wedding ring, she noticed. “I don’t really think that would be…”
“Catherine, for once don’t think. I just want to have dinner. Nothing covert, no hidden agenda. I figured you’d be getting tired of room service by now. And you’re wound tight as hell. I could take you out, show you around a little.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just…” She was flustered, not knowing what to say.
He spoke as though he had rehearsed what he was saying in front of a full-length mirror, each word and pause measured and precise.
“I know. It’s been a long time for me too. Ever since Emily passed away a year ago, well, let’s just say I’ve been out of commission.” Hearing his words, his inflection, Cat was sure he had rehearsed them in front of a mirror a thousand times before. The man was heartbroken.
Sincerity returned to his tone. “I know you’re the head of this investigation. I think since we are turning a new leaf in it, it would be best if we talk informally, off the record.”
Cat didn’t understand what he was getting at, but her natural curiosity was piqued. “All right then, what time?”
“I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty.”