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Fiona was practically prancing as she pulled out her Chromebook and began hitting buttons. After a moment, she looked at Kimberly.
“This is a good news, bad news situation,” she told the detectives that were assembling around her.
“Always start with the good news, it makes the bad news seem less awful until later,” Kimberly told her.
“I don‘t think you have a serial killer on your hands,” Fiona told her. “And I don’t think this crime is connected to your other weird and bizarre crimes.”
“That is good,” Kimberly agreed.
“The bad news is, you did have a second serial killer in town, but I’m sure they were long gone before you even got the call about the noise complaint.” Fiona turned her little tablet, laptop, combo thingy around for us to see. On the screen was a picture of a man who had the same tattoo on his chest, and while this victim might be missing a head, the picture still looked convincingly like the dead guy.
“Who is he?” Lucas finally asked.
“Nick Bacon, international thief and elite criminal,” she told him. “A little over a month ago we got a notification that Bacon had kidnapped a set of fraternal twins in Bohemia. If Bohemia was still a monarchy, the twins would be the heirs to the throne. He also kidnapped their nanny. King Gustav paid the ransom and one child was returned, with a note pinned to her basinet, to a hospital in London. The other was not recovered.”
“Fraternal? I don’t suppose one child was male and one female?” Kimberly asked.
“As a matter of fact, they were. Zelda Adele was returned, but Uwe Wolfgang has not been.” Fiona stated.
“That explains the rooms,” a man in a suit that I hadn’t been introduced to said.
“What rooms?” Lucas asked.
“Baby rooms and a prisoner containment room,” I told him.
“I would DNA test every abandoned male infant in the country against the DNA of Zelda Adele,” Lucas said. “My guess is he came here to dispose of the male child because the US has lax drop off laws and he would be unsuspected of having come here with a child and a nanny he had kidnapped.”
“Bacon was tortured, psychologically at first and then physically, trying to get him to tell where he had dropped off Uwe.” I added. “This was a professional killing made to look like the work of a madman.”
“I would find out the time line of when the ritual murders started here and when Zelda Adele was dropped off in London,” Lucas said.
“Why?” Another man in a suit asked.
“Because Bacon might have lived here a long time, simply because within a community heavily diversified, he would fit in and no one would get curious enough to intrude on his privacy. I bet he returned here within a day or two of the first ritual murder.” Lucas said.
“That doesn’t answer the question of why are the two related?” The man reiterated his question.
“The two aren’t,” Lucas said. “The ritual murders were a smoke screen used by the contract killer that killed Bacon and Bacon returned because no one in Tallahassee is going to show much interest in a kidnapping from Europe with couples being dissolved by acid. The two things are related only because they aren’t related.” Lucas theoretically clarified.
“Essentially, Bacon came back with Uwe because he was sure no one here would be paying attention to the kidnapped twins from Bohemia in Tallahassee where a serial killer is striking down some of the city’s most prominent citizens. The drawings on the floor and the dissection is a result of the media. I’m sure if you check the internet someone has mentioned the writing on the wall, but it didn’t say what was written and it didn’t explain that it was written in blood, just like there’s been no in-depth coverage of how the victims are being murdered, just that the internal organs are gone. As a European, Bacon’s killer wouldn’t know much about the Tallahassee murders, except that there is a ritual aspect and there’s some stuff written near the victims, and the internal organs can’t be analyzed, so he tried to stage the scene and make it look like it might be connected to the other murders.” Xavier actually did clarify what Lucas was getting at.
“In other words, the reason everything on the floor doesn’t make sense is because the writer isn’t a pagan practitioner.” Fiona commented.
“Yes,” Lucas agreed.
“Great,” I sighed.
“Why do you look sad about this?” Kimberly asked me.
“Because it means Interpol needs to get involved and someone is going to have to ask some really tough questions of King Gustav.”
“Because King Gustav is the person most likely to have ordered the hit,” Kimberly said.
“Yes.”
“That makes more sense than the FBI’s theory,” the man in the suit said. “She told me the dismemberment and removal of internal organs was a surrogate for sexual tension.”
“Even cannibalism is more likely than that,” Lucas said. “But that’s the problem with profilers. Profiling is still a very Freudian based science, and Freud was obsessed with human sexuality and the repression thereof.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” the man who I assumed was a detective said.
“Today there are multiple schools of thought that can be followed when studying psychology. Profilers go through training after they join Quantico, and that training exposes them to more Freudian theories than they would have been exposed to by getting a doctorate in psychology, so they tend to think everything is about the expression of a persons repressed sexuality.” Lucas said. “So, stabbing a victim becomes surrogate sexual penetration because a knife is a phallic symbol and it pierces the skin, going into the victim, that kind of thing.”
“Because of this, they are very good at catching murderers who kill as a release of sexual repression,” Xavier offered up.
“Are you both psychologists?” The man asked.
“No, I’m a medical doctor, technically,” Xavier smiled. “But I’m only allowed to work on dead people and members of the SCTU. However, some knowledge of psychology would be required even if I had wanted to be a pediatrician.”
Xavier had never explained why his medical license had been revoked and I wasn’t cruel enough or nosy enough to ask him about it. I figured eventually, one day, he’d talk about it, but until then I was okay with not knowing. I couldn’t picture him as a pediatrician, yet that comment indicated he might have been.
“I’ll be,” Kimberly suddenly sighed. She held her phone out to the other detective. I got a glimpse of the screen as it moved, she had found an article about the killings. I’m guessing it had some information that made this killing look like it should have belonged to our acid murderer.
Xavier had wandered over to the body and was helping the coroner and his assistant take the body down off the wall where it had been crucified. I looked at my shoes. The booties I wore were covered in blood. For the most part, I hated these things, but it was better than having blood squelch in my boots.
I walked outside in time to see the sun start to rise. Within minutes of the sun brightening the sky, it was hot. The air felt heavier as I pulled it into my lungs. The police presence hadn’t diminished. One uniformed officer was using his phone to record video of the looky-loos.
I consider looky-loos to be parasitic. I understand human curiosity, especially when it comes to unnatural deaths, but I have been at the center of the looky-loos a few times in my private life, and they don’t respond to a person’s pleas to be left alone, which is nauseating and irritating.
Unfortunately, his killer wasn’t in the crowd. He was probably on an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic. It would take a few days for Interpol to get officers here, hopefully we were wrapped up by then, because if we weren’t it was going to get very crowded in the Tallahassee police department.
Fiona and Kimberly came out of the house and stood next to me. Fiona was staring at the ground. In the time that she had been with the SCTU, she had made huge strides to enjoy her job. She hadn’t wanted to go to crime scenes when she first started, complaining that it wasn’t in her job description. Which may have been true, but she kept on top of crime not related to serial killers and the rest of us really didn’t.
“How did you know all that about Bacon?” Kimberly asked her.
“The CIA asked us to look into it, he falls under the purview of the SCTU because he’s a serial kidnapper. I read the case file and decided they needed a scalpel not a sledgehammer and told them to get the FBI’s behavioral unit involved not the SCTU. They hadn’t yet because they knew who the guy was, they just weren’t able to get evidence on him,” she paused and looked pensive, her face drawing together, creating deep frown lines. “Maybe they had needed a sledgehammer.” She added after a few moments.
“Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” I told her, trying to alleviate her angst over the case evaluation. If it wasn’t a serial killer or mass murderer case, it was at our discretion whether we took it or not. “Besides, can you imagine me trying to gather covert evidence on a serial kidnapper?”
“No,” she admitted.
“Exactly,” I agreed. “And besides, it was the CIA, they could have turned it over to anyone, like the FBI or Secret Service.”
“True,” she said. I had a horrible thought that Fiona might be feeling somewhat responsible for Bacon’s death. Was there a voice inside her head telling her that if the SCTU had taken the case, he’d still be alive?
I wanted to point out that sending the SCTU after a non-violent criminal was not a good idea, I had a temper that was fueled by a bottomless pit of rage. Since the rage was internal and not the direct result of any specific thing, it was easy for me to funnel it into any small annoyance or irritant. I didn’t mostly because there were people around us. And while almost anyone that read a newspaper was aware I was a diagnosed sociopath, it was different to be confronted with that knowledge when I was standing just a few feet away.
