I pull the cork out of a bottle of Australian shiraz from my small collection and Sam opens the pizza box. We’ve gone for marinara on a thin crust with extra cheese. She pulls a piece upward, stretching the mozzarella until the piece finally detaches from the rest of the pizza.
She takes a hearty bite and says through her mouthful, “Damn, your pizza shop’s good.”
“Thank God we got our workout in,” I say, taking a bite and pouring wine at the same time.
I place Sam’s glass in front of her and hold mine up. “Cheers.”
“What are we toasting to?” she asks, picking up her glass.
“Who knows…good health?”
“As good a toast as any.”
We clink glasses and both take a sip.
“Good wine, girl.”
“It’s an Australian shiraz. What do you expect?”
“Not biased, are we?”
“Well, maybe a bit.
We finish our first slice of pizza in silence, concentrating on filling the holes in our stomachs. We both take another piece.
“So, Sam…”
She looks up at me, midbite.
“Marco’s had lots of women?”
“Finally!”
“What?”
“You’ve been feigning lack of interest for months and finally you’ve realized you’re into him…and boy is he into you.”
“I don’t know about that…”
“’Course you do.”
I smile. Maybe I do. I’ve never told Sam about the night Marco and I nearly kissed. “So, the question?”
“Not that I know the man’s every move, but I’ve worked with him for the past year and he’s dated a few women. That I know of.”
“Yeah, and for every one you know of there’s probably another one or two you don’t.”
“Possibly. He’s a good-looking man.”
I smile, picturing Marco. Even the standard FBI dark suit can’t hide his physique, which, I must say, is pretty close to my idea of perfect. Marco is six feet tall, with broad shoulders and well-defined muscles. His upper body is complemented by a muscular torso and long, strong legs. His ass looks pretty good too. His hair is dark brown and short, the standard Bureau cut, and his facial features are broad, with a well-pronounced jawline. It gives him the classic, masculine chiseled look. You can see his Italian heritage in his coloring, especially his slightly tanned skin and rich, intense brown eyes. His one imperfection, a scar that runs across one eyebrow, only adds to his sex appeal. He’s good-looking all right. I don’t usually go for them that good-looking.
“Have you ever?” I say.
“Me? Marco? No. He’s a good guy, but not my type.” Sam takes her third slice of pizza. “Dig in, girl, before I eat it all.” She takes a mouthful and follows it with a large sip of wine. “Marco’s too serious for me. But he’s right for you.”
“I didn’t know matchmaking was one of your talents.” I hold my wineglass to my lips and give her a cheeky smile before taking a sip.
“I’ll have you know, I’ve introduced two married couples to one another.”
“Really?” I’m genuinely impressed.
“Sure. And my money’s on you and Marco.”
I laugh. “Are you taking bets?”
“I can if you want. We could run a pool in the unit. Take bets on when your first kiss will be.”
“That’d be terrific,” I say and roll my eyes.
“Just say the word.” She takes another mouthful. “Look, as far as I know, they were just dates. It doesn’t mean he sleeps around or is only after one thing.”
“They’re all after that.”
“Well, yes. But some of them realize that a good woman isn’t about conquest.”
It’s true. At least I have to hope so.
“But we work together,” I continue. “I don’t know if it’s such a good idea.”
“It’s not ideal. But if the spark is there, it’s there.”
Sam’s right.
“And you wouldn’t be breaking any rules, or anything,” she adds.
“No?”
“The official line is that it’s okay for agents to date one another.”
“That’s good to know.”
“But you would get flack from other agents. In fact, the Bureau’s even coined a term just for FBI couples.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. If you and Marco get together, you’ll both be called double agents.” She pauses. “You’d make a good double.” She laughs.
“Gee, thanks.”
I take the last piece of pizza.
Sam gets rid of the box. “Shit, it’s nine o’clock. We better get started.”
She spreads the contents of the D.C. file over my dining-room table while I move the plates and bottle onto the counter. I refill our wineglasses and hand Sam hers. As soon as I see the photos I freeze.
“What’s up?” she says.
“I…I’ve seen this girl before.” I hurriedly put down my wineglass and pick up the photo of the first D.C. murder victim. It’s the girl whose face I saw in my dream. But I don’t mention this to Sam. Instead, I rationalize to her, and to myself. “I must have seen this file before.”
“From Hunter?”
“I guess so.” I need time alone to think about this. Images of a case I’m not even working on?
Sam studies my face. “Are you all right, Soph?”
“I’m fine. I was just surprised to see the girl. Like I said, I must have seen the file before, that’s all.”
But I haven’t seen the damn file.
Sam is less than convinced, but I turn away and move toward the window. A cold shiver runs down my spine as I go to close the curtains. For an instant I think I see someone standing across the road looking up at my window. But when I look again, no one’s there. I close the curtains and return to Sam.
“So, let’s look at this case,” I say, forcing the unease I feel to the back of my mind.
We both stand over the table to get a better view of the photos. I take in all the details. The wounds, the body placement, everything, already starting to form an opinion. There have only been two victims so far. I pick up all the photos of the girl I recognize and look for the marking on her thigh. But it’s not there. She has knife wounds surrounding the area, but no tattoo. I sink into a chair. I don’t know whether it’s a good or bad thing that the tatt’s not there.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Sam puts her hand on my shoulder, worried.
“Mmm? Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about another case,” I lie.
Sam looks at me oddly.
I push the confusion away, focusing on the case. “You’ve got my undivided attention. Are Flynn and Jones on the case?”
“Yeah, they took it over as soon as the Henley case closed.”
“They’re good cops. Good guys.”
Sam starts taking me through the case. She’s reading from her own notepad, and the original files lie on one end of the table. It’s the usual assortment—the coroner’s report, police reports covering the crime scene and detailed information about the victims. Profiling is a four-step process—analyzing the profiling inputs, reviewing decision models, an assessment of the crime and then drafting the profile itself.
We start with five major profiling inputs—the crime scene, the victimology, forensic information, the preliminary police report and the all-important photos.
At the crime scene we study the physical evidence, including weapons, body positioning, and any other patterns that may be visible. Next we look at the victimology to get an insight into the victim. By getting to know the victim, we can understand the perpetrator. We consider a victim’s age, occupation, background, habits, when she was last seen and so on. The forensic information includes time and cause of death, wounds, sexual acts (pre-and postmortem), the autopsy report and lab reports on blood splatter, fibers and so on. These four things combine with the prelim police report—which gives us information about who reported the crime, anything the cops on the scene noticed, and also covers background on the neighborhood—to give us a better understanding of the crime.
Next we look at a variety of decision-process models, including homicide type and style, primary intent (for example, was the primary intent robbery or murder?), victim risk (high, moderate or low, for example, prostitutes are in the high-risk category because they’re accessible and vulnerable by the nature of their work), offender risk (did the offender take risks during the crime?), time required for the crime, and information about the location. We also look for signs of escalation—does it look like our criminal will become more violent, repeat the offense or intensify his activities from, say, kidnapping to murder?
The third step is crime assessment. During this stage we reconstruct the crime to determine how things happened and how people behaved, focusing on the interaction between the victim and perp. We classify the type of crime and look at any staging elements that may be present, like a staged robbery, and we also look at possible motivations and the crime-scene dynamics, such as cause of death, location of wounds and crime-scene location.
From here we generate the criminal profile itself. In reality, though, the first three steps are often blended together rather than looked at in isolation.
“Okay, so this was the first one.” Sam picks up a photo of my girl. In this photo she’s alive and well, smiling for the camera. “Jean Davis. She was killed five months ago. Twenty-eight years old, worked as a producer’s assistant at WX40TV. A real career gal, by all accounts. Very friendly and outgoing.”
I pore over the other photos of Jean. The crime-scene ones. Her body is in the back seat of a car—where I can’t tell, although the area looks quite remote. She lies slightly turned, with her knees resting to one side and both arms raised to about forty-five degrees on either side of her body. Her head is turned, eyes open. Just like she was in my dream. The body positioning reminds me of a back exercise, except her head faces the same way as her knees instead of vice versa. Her body is messy, with multiple knife wounds. Most wounds are quite long, indicating the killer pulled the knife across her body rather than stabbing inward. Unusual. There are several large cuts across her abdomen and breasts, ranging between four and ten inches in length. Most of the cuts had formed scabs before her death, except one smaller cut just above her belly button and two deeper cuts on her left breast. Her throat also contains several older, shallower cuts. Similar cuts are on her upper arms and upper legs, with a heavy concentration on her thighs, in line with her crotch. There are five or six cuts that are obviously newer, quite fresh at the time of death. There must have been a lot of blood during the time he had her.
“He likes blood,” I say, verbalizing my last thought.
“Blood, penetration, or both.”
I nod—knives often represent the sexual act for killers. Although more through deep, stabbing cuts than this style of knife wound.
“Coroner reported fifty cuts in all.” Sam points out the gashes covering Jean’s body.
“But it wasn’t a blitz attack.”
“No. It was controlled, metered. And over a long period of time.”
That’s one item on the profile decided. Criminals can be broken into two broad groups, organized offenders or disorganized offenders. Organized offenders plan their crimes, often meticulously, whereas disorganized offenders act in the heat of the moment. The cuts show control and planning, two traits of an organized criminal.
“Did she die of these wounds?” I ask, standing up.
“Yeah, eventually. Our guy bled her to death, but real slow. Many of the cuts were superficial, but these two here—” she points to one of the cuts on her thigh and one on her breast “—were deeper and near arteries. Coroner says that without the intervention she would have died in about ten hours.”
“Intervention?” I lean over the table to get a closer look at the photo.
“You’ll love this one, honey. The guy bandaged her up tight around the wounds. He wanted to keep her around. Coroner estimates she was kept alive for an extra ten hours with pressure bandages.”
I tighten my grip on the top of the dining-room chair I’m leaning on. “Bastard.” I loosen my grip. This could turn out to be to our advantage. “Medical training.”
“Sure is a possibility. Strong one, I’d say,” Sam agrees.
“How long did he have her?”
“Last sighting was five days before time of death.”
“He have her all that time?”
“We think so. A neighbor was the last to see her. She took the trash out at 10:00 p.m. on June 23, but never showed for work the next day. Her best friend at the station dropped by her apartment that night and called the police when there was no answer. So our guy either grabbed her the night of the twenty-third or the next morning, four or five days before death.”
“So he likes to play.”
“Don’t they all?”
“Pretty much,” I say with disgust. “He’s a high-risk offender, given the amount of time he spends with them. Presumably he’s got somewhere private he takes them.”
“Yeah. He ties them at the hands and feet. We’re thinking spread-eagle,” she says, searching for another photo. She picks out two close-ups, one of Jean’s left leg and one of her left arm. Sam points to the ligature marks on Jean’s wrist and ankle. “Probably to a table, bed or some other flat object. The ligature marks indicate a separate binding for each limb and the marks are deep.”
I examine the indentations in Jean’s skin. “He tied her up tight.”
“Real tight.” Sam throws the two photos back on the table and grabs one crime-scene photo of Jean’s body and one of the autopsy photos. She holds up the crime-scene photo first. “She didn’t die in this position.” She brings the autopsy photo up next to it, for comparison. “Lividity indicates she died flat on her back and on a flat surface.”
I nod. The autopsy photograph Sam has chosen is one of Jean lying on her stomach. The photo clearly shows Jean’s back and upper legs.
Lividity refers to the way the blood settles after death. Once your heart stops, blood stops pumping around your body. Gravity takes over and blood settles. Jean’s back shows pink-red discoloration evenly across her buttocks and upper back. That means she died lying on a flat surface and the blood settled evenly when it stopped flowing. If she’d died in the position her body was found, the discoloration would be concentrated and darker around her right buttocks and hip.
“Anything else from lividity?” I ask. Sometimes if the body is transported soon after death discoloration can appear in definite patterns. The body can even show you an imprint of a car jack if the body was in someone’s trunk.
“Nothing.”
“That’s something in itself, I guess.”
Sam looks at me, puzzled.
“Jean was lying on a smooth surface.”
Sam looks at the autopsy photo again. “Very smooth.”
We pause for a moment.
“He likes to get to know them,” says a voice… It’s my voice.
“You don’t think it’s just the power? To prolong the experience and have them at his mercy?”
I think about it, unsure where my revelation came from. “Not just that, this time. He’s taken a lot of care. He’s had her for the whole five days. He spends time with them. To get to know them. There was rape, I presume?”
“Yeah. But not as violent as we often see. No bruises around her thighs or hips. No tearing. The fucker was gentle,” Sam says, her nose wrinkled with disgust.
“He thinks of them as his girlfriends.” A shiver runs up my spine. “He’s not rough with them. He’s tender. They’re special to him in some way.”
“Charming,” Sam says, staring distantly at one of the photos of Jean’s body.
“So, would Jean have played along?” I ask.
“Everyone who knew her said she was smart. Real smart. So she may have if she thought it was going to save her life. The full victimology is around here somewhere.” Sam shoves the photos to one side and shuffles through the papers. The photo of Jean alive falls off the table and I pick it up. This is our only reminder of her as a living person. It’s precious.
“Here it is.” Sam hands me a typed report.
I take the document but rest it on the table. I’ve got more questions first. “Let’s get back to this later. No semen, I take it?”
“Nope. Safe sex for our guy, in every sense of the word.”
I nod, picking up Sam’s double meaning—no risk of sexual disease and no risk of DNA. “Any other trace evidence? Hairs, fibers, prints?”
“Nothing. He’s clean.”
“Let’s face it, a lot of perps know how to clean up after themselves these days, especially with all the press on DNA. Anything on the knife?”
Sam flips through the coroner’s report and paraphrases it. “Could be any sharp kitchen knife. Based on the incision length and angles, our guy’s left-handed and the knife is between seven to ten inches.”
I do the mental conversion to centimeters. Between seventeen and twenty-five centimeters. “The left-hander narrows things down.”
“You bet. Once we have some suspects, that is.” Sam pulls out a chair and sinks into it. She looks defeated, which is unusual for Sam. Even her bright green eyes aren’t as dazzling as usual. Her hair falls from behind her ear across her face.
“What about positioning when the cutting was done?” I ask.
“Angles indicate the vics were lying down and he was standing over them.”
“Supports the flat surface from the lividity.”
“Yep.”
“Nothing else?”
“Our guy’s a real pro. No fingerprints or footprints that haven’t been accounted for.”
“What about tire treads? Where’d he park when he nabbed Jean?”
“No treads, but we’re assuming he parked on the street out front or back. No one saw anything.”
“Victim’s fingernails?” I ask in a last-ditch attempt to find something, anything.
Sam shakes her head. “Scrubbed clean and clipped back. Like I said, a real pro.”
“But this is his first on record?”
“Officially, yes. It may be the first we know about, but it certainly ain’t the first time he’s killed.” She stands up again and starts pacing, glass of wine in hand.
It is too perfect, too rehearsed for a first-time kill, unless the guy had done his research and planned for months, or perhaps if he’s a cop who has decided to try murder for himself. But it’s more likely he’s killed before. One of the two thousand-plus serial killers doing their rounds in the good old U.S. of A.
“What about VICAP?” I ask.
VICAP is the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a nationwide database that contains details of murder cases and other violent crimes around the States to analyze patterns and track criminals that may cross law-enforcement boundaries. Pretty effective too. Cops enter in the details and the database comes back with any similar crimes. Of course, it relies on all law-enforcement officers entering their cases into the database in the first place, something that doesn’t always happen. Some cops think VICAP is just more red tape and paperwork.
“Flynn and Jones entered in both D.C. murders and got two matches in Chicago. They followed up with Chicago Homicide. It looks like it was our perp, but there weren’t any significant leads or suspects in Chicago, so it was a dead end. I talked to the VICAP guys myself and they’re going to get someone onto it. Do a fresh, more detailed computer search and then get one of their best analysts to look at the cases manually. Should have the results in a couple of days, but the guys are swamped down there. Our perp could have been active in states that don’t use VICAP, so he could have been getting away with murder for years.”
“True.” I move back to the table and pick up my glass of wine. I take another sip.
Sam also takes a contemplative sip. “I think the perp has moved here recently. God knows how many he’s done in other states. I’ll bring it up at tomorrow’s meeting and see if anyone recognizes the MO.”
“Good idea. I don’t think he’s transient, though. I think he’s set up shop here.”
“Well, I’m not complaining about that. Those wandering bastards are hard to pin down.” She takes another sip. “How about a work transfer? Or maybe the cops were getting too close for him and he decided to move on?”
“Possibly.”
“Pretty stupid to move to D.C. near all the profilers.”
And then it hits me. “Maybe that’s the point. Maybe he wants to see if he can get away with it under the Bureau’s nose. Under our noses.”
“A thrill killer? Living on the dangerous side?”
“This might be his idea of fun. And the evidence does point to a high-risk offender.”
“Soph, this could be disastrous.”
I nod. “He’ll hit hard and fast to show us up.”
“But he’s only done two in five months.”
“He may know it takes a little while before the Bureau steps in.”
“Waiting until he has our attention?”
“Could be.”
“We need to get this guy sooner rather than later.”
I’d like to get them all sooner rather than later, but Sam is right. If he has come to D.C. for the thrill of killing under the Bureau’s nose, he’ll step things up once he knows we’re involved.
“We need to get to know Jean a little better,” I say.
An hour later we’ve reread the victimologies for both girls, analyzed every crime-scene photo and double-checked the coroner’s reports and all the police reports. We both sit at the table.
“So what do you think?” Sam plays with her empty wineglass.
“He hasn’t left us much.”
“Time to pull a rabbit out of a hat.” Sam laughs.
“This is a science,” I say, playing along. Since its inception nearly twenty years ago, the unit has been struggling with the notion that profiling is all subjective mumbo jumbo. It’s really a sensible combination of psychology and the profiler’s ability to walk in the killers’ and victims’ shoes. To give your mind over to them—their lives, their habits, their actions and responses.
“Okay. So the second victim, Teresa Somers,” Sam says. “She was abducted in the parking lot of her apartment building. Her car keys were found on the ground and we’re assuming she struggled.”
My mind replays my dream of a girl walking to her car, but the girl in my dream was a redhead and Teresa’s a brunette—not the same girl. I push the image aside.
Sam puts the photo of Teresa, alive, on the top of the pile. “She was strong and fit. She put up a good fight.”
“Besides the keys, anything else to indicate a struggle?”
“She was already decomposing when we found her, but the coroner noted a cracked rib.”
“From the struggle?”
Sam looks at the photos of Teresa’s body. “Possibly. The perp may have got more than he bargained for.”
“This guy likes a challenge. For the moment, let’s assume he’s chosen D.C. for a reason. For us. He’s pushing his ‘skills’ to the limit.” I stand up and start pacing, on a roll. “He doesn’t go for the easy targets. He chooses a woman, a professional woman, and stalks her, waiting for his opportunity. He gets to know her routine. So I think he knew Teresa worked out every day. That she’d done self-defense classes. That she was a strong woman.” I stop in front of Sam and lean closer to her. “I mean, for God’s sake, she was a high-level manager at CIBC Bank. And that’s what turned him on. She was smart, educated, self-sufficient. Yet he could still get her.”
“That would fit in with Jean, too. Professional. Hardworking. Only difference is that she was at the start of her career rather than the pinnacle.”
“Well, she was five years younger.”
“Did you notice they look the same age, though. Teresa was thirty-five, but she looked about thirty, thirty-one,” Sam says, selecting the two photos of our victims when they were alive.
I look at the photos again. “Yeah. I think our guy’s in his late twenties or early thirties.”
“And he’s been killing for a while. If he’s like most serial killers, he probably started between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, so he’s probably been killing for quite a few years.”
“So, how would Teresa have reacted?” I say out aloud, verbally going through the process I usually go through in my head.
“She would have fought. All the way. She was hard. Tough. In business and pleasure, by all accounts.”
“Yes, but she would also have tried to negotiate. She was a businesswoman. It’s one of the things she did best,” I say, sitting back down.
“So she was tied up to a table or something, being sliced, yet she was still trying to bring the dynamic around.” Sam keeps pacing. “The fucker would have thought it was amusing. He wouldn’t have been threatened.”
I nod. “He’s experienced. He’s worked his way up to women like Teresa. He would have loved it. Got off on it even. Ultimately he knew he had all the power. He knew that, deep down, she must have been scared shitless, despite the business front.” I finger two photos of Teresa—one from the crime scene and one from when she was alive. It’s hard to recognize her features in death.
“So he played with her. Maybe even made her think he was coming around. That he was going to release her,” Sam says.
“Yep. He would have beaten her down. He wanted her to go from believing she still had some sort of control over the situation to admitting defeat.”
“At his mercy.”
“Then as soon as she broke, he killed her. He’d won and the challenge was gone.”
In Teresa’s case he’d inflicted multiple cuts, like Jean, but the cause of death had been one massive knife wound across her throat.
I look at the photos, then at Sam. “How long did he have her?”
“The body wasn’t found for a while, but the coroner’s time of death puts us at eight to twenty days after abduction.”
“The lower end sounds more likely, given the pattern with Jean.”
“I agree,” Sam says.
“That whole time was a war between their minds. After eight days or so, she finally begged him for pity. For mercy.”
“And he gave it to her, in a form. The son of a bitch killed her.”
We both pause for a moment.
Sam sits down on the sofa. “It looks like he raped her several times. Again, the coroner says it’s hard to say because of the length of time and the lack of bruising and other signs of sexual violence.”
“How do you think she would have responded to the rape?”
“Maybe used it in her negotiations. Made him think sex was something she could offer him. A bargaining tool.”
“She was tough, all right. She lasted through eight days of torture. I think we can assume that after the first struggle, she may have stopped struggling. She would have been planning her escape. Looking for a way out. Maybe even trying to convince him to undo her hands and legs under the pretense of being able to sexually satisfy him.”
“But her tied up at his mercy was what aroused him.”
“Yeah. Still, I reckon she tried damn hard to get out,” I say.
“Concentrating on getting out alive. Negotiating or escaping.”
“She would have distanced herself emotionally from what was going on, so she probably didn’t struggle too much with the rapes. This would have fed his fantasy of her as the girlfriend.”
I’m drawn back to Jean by a photo of her. I pick it up and look into her eyes. They are open in death, and the killer has chosen not to close them. It’s the same with Teresa. Jean stares back at me and I can imagine her tied down, wondering if she is going to live or die and praying for release. Just as she looked at the killer and begged for mercy, now she looks at me and begs for justice.
I answer her call. “Let’s go back to Jean.”
I will have to think about the case properly later, when Sam isn’t here. Usually about now, once I have all the facts, I close my eyes and imagine the killer. I see the killer. I become the killer, stepping into his world. Somehow my subconscious takes over, and I find myself so fully immersed in the process that I don’t usually come to for hours. I don’t know whether it’s like that for the others or not. I probably shouldn’t get so involved in the cases.
Sam stands over the dining table. “Jean was ambitious. In fact, this baby wanted to work in front of the cameras. She was working her way up, trying to get noticed within WX40. She wanted to be an anchor someday and had a pretty good reel together.” Sam picks up her notepad. “Everyone who knew her described her as…” She reads from her notes, “‘Outgoing,’ ‘fun,’ ‘gregarious,’ ‘funny,’ ‘entertaining.’” Apparently she liked everyone and everything, and always saw the positive in any situation.”
“I wonder if she managed to do that on the table.”
Sam continues. “She was also very charming and quite a flirt. She had a boyfriend she saw a couple of times a week, but he says it was casual. Says Jean liked to play the field. Her female friends corroborate this.”
“So, did she flirt with our guy? Did she know him before he abducted her?” I say, not expecting any answers.
“They think he nabbed her from her apartment. Inside.”
“Forced entry?”
“Didn’t look like it.”
“So we’re thinking he knew her, or there was some other reason why she let him in.”
“Must be.”
“Any sign of a struggle?”
“No. But the guys found a bottle of wine, which was almost empty, and one glass with her lipstick.” Sam shuffles through the photos and finds the one of Jean’s kitchen. “There was enough saliva for a DNA test. It was positive for Jean. The glass on the sink—” she points to a wineglass that’s upturned on the draining board, “—was clean—no prints, no saliva, no DNA. We don’t know whether it was from the night before or if she was drinking with the killer and he had the good sense to wash the glass after him.”
“Could be either. What about the boyfriend? When did he last see her?”
“Two days before. His prints were at the apartment and we found a couple of hairs that have been confirmed through DNA as his. But he’s got an alibi for the night she went missing.”
“Good one?”
“Solid.”
Sam glances at her watch. “It’s getting late.”
I look at the clock. It’s 11:30 p.m. “He’s taking shape.”
“Yeah, I’m starting to get a real good picture.”
“Let’s sleep on it. We can talk again in the morning.”
“Okay, Soph. Listen, thanks for your help. I know you’ve got a heavy load at the moment.”
“No problem. As the saying goes, two heads are better than one.”
She grins, a tired smile. “Can’t argue with that. I’m going to work on the profile tomorrow, then you can have a look at it.”
“I’ll see if I’ve got anything to add. God, we didn’t even get to the dump sites. Where were the bodies found?”
“Jean was found dumped in a stolen car on Roosevelt Island, under the Keys Bridge.”
I know that area. The island is quite isolated and not many people visit it.
Sam gathers up the photos and documents and puts them back in the file. “Coroner estimates she died about four days earlier.”
“So the killer couldn’t have been too worried about physical evidence.”
“No.”
“What about the stolen car? Whose was it?”
“The car belonged to some old lady in Garfield Heights. Looks like the car was dumped well before the body.”
“What about Teresa? Where’d they find her?”
“She was a bit different. She was found about four weeks after her death and farther out, in Cedarville State Forest.”
“That’s strange. Nothing else turned up at Cedarville?”
“No bodies, if that’s what you mean.” Sam yawns, puts the file in her briefcase and grabs her handbag. At the door she gives me a kiss on the cheek. “Good night, honey.”
She bobs her head back around the corner just before I close the door. “And Marco—go for it.”
I laugh. “Get out of here, you.”
“Sweet dreams.”
I don’t respond. I wish I could dream about Marco instead of murder.
I close the door.
The apartment feels so empty now. I quickly do my pre-bed security check, even though Sam has been here, before collapsing on my bed. As soon as my head hits the pillow I see the redhead from my dream. But this time she’s screaming.