CUTTING ROOM -THE- (15 page)

‘Manny,' she protested again, ‘to say it's the same killer or killers based on—'

‘I've found others.'

She stared at him.

After last week's conversation with Nassau County PD, he and Dickerson had pored over ViCAP reports and online cold case files from multiple departments, searching for any and all homicides that had mutilation and/or disfigurement and, more particularly, burns or branding. They'd also searched for similar unsolved homicides with the same victim typology as Gabriella Vechio and Holly Skole: blonde, slim, attractive, aged 15–30, flagging disappearances from, or around, nightclubs or bars. Then Manny, who was no fan of the feds, swallowed his pride and called the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI at Quantico to see if they were working something similar. No one was. And from the lackluster reaction of the Special Agent in Charge, it didn't sound like they wanted to.

It was a laborious process. He wished profiling and investigating crimes were as easy in real life as it looked on a
Criminal Minds
episode — one click and ditzy super-analyst Penelope had all the information her FBI agents ever needed, down to the name of Joe Bad Guy's second-grade school teacher and the nutritional content of the cereal he ate that morning. Shows like that gave police work a bad name, raising the already clueless public's expectations on crime-solving to completely unattainable heights. The general
CSI
/
NCIS
-watching public now assumed that, in addition to leaving their fingerprints plastered all over a scene, every bad guy also left his DNA behind, and damning test results from said DNA would be delivered to the police lab within a matter of hours, if not minutes, floating magically in front of some gorgeous crime-scene investigator on some invisible, hand-manipulated computer screen, created by, and found only in, a CGI room in Hollywood.

In the end, it had been old-fashioned, sand-pounding police work that'd led to the phone call Manny received yesterday from the St Petersburg PD, confirming the same grim news Dickerson had already gotten from two other police departments. There were more victims.

‘I have two other homicides in Florida, both unsolved. One is over on the west coast in St Pete, one's down south in Homestead. Both are women, both have traumatic brandings, one on her neck in the shape of a zigzag enclosed in a circle. That was Cyndi DeGregorio, a twenty-one-year-old pole-dancer from Miami, who was found in a dumpster last July. The other one had it on her buttocks, but we don't have an ID on her. She was never claimed. She may be a prostitute. Jane Doe was discovered behind the baseball stadium at Progress Energy Park on opening day of the Devil Rays spring training in April of 2009. Much more troubling is that I also found a
male
in New Jersey who had the symbol carved into his right pec. He'd been gutted like a fish and disemboweled. Found him in a dumpster, too, in Hoboken. Name was Kevin Flaunters. He was a twenty-two-year-old body builder and male escort; he was found in November of 2008. Three homicides in the past three years. That's only what I could find through ViCAP. There may be others who were never placed in the system. Maybe nobody recognized they had a branding. Maybe the bodies decomped before they were found and the brandings were not readily identifiable. Maybe they haven't been found yet. The point is, there are more, Counselor. There are more. And now we can't say we don't see it anymore.'

She sat there, dumbfounded. ‘I'm not sure I get what you're saying, Manny …'

‘I think we're dealing with a serial. Or serials.'

The word ‘serial' always struck a note of fear in a detective's or prosecutor's mind. The enormity of who, or rather,
what
, you were dealing with in real life was overwhelming. It was the difference between reading about an earthquake and living through one — until you experienced the terror and devastation wrought by a living, breathing, human monster who randomly preyed on his fellow humans, you had no idea how wrong the books and movies got it, or how trivial they made serial murder sound. Fortunately, serial killings were actually pretty rare, accounting for less than one percent of all murders nationwide. Unfortunately, the identification and capture of a serial killer was very difficult, as Manny knew all too well.

‘Several years ago I worked a case,' he began. ‘Cops were being murdered here in Miami. It was back in '04.'

Daria had been in law school then, but she remembered the killings that had captured headlines all over Florida. ‘That was the Black Jacket case, right?'

‘Yes. In the course of that investigation, I had to interview a serial killer who claimed to have information about the case. His name was Bill Bantling.'

‘Cupid,' Daria said slowly. Her heartbeat quickened. Certain names conjured up instant emotional responses in people. Bill Bantling was right up there with Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson. The emotional response elicited was fear. The same unfamiliar, icy sensation she'd experienced at Talbot Lunders's Arthur Hearing raced down her spine and she shifted in her seat.

‘Yes, Cupid. I worked that case too.'

‘How many women did he kill?' Daria asked softly. She had been a hard-partying college student in Miami when Cupid was busy trolling nightclubs on South Beach. In fact, she was at Club Liquid the night one of Cupid's victims had disappeared without a trace from the very bar Daria was doing too many Kamikaze shots at. The eerie, potential close encounter had never left her. You never knew when your number might be up, when you might perhaps catch the eye of a serial killer.

‘Eleven,' Manny replied with a drawn-out sigh. Eleven young women. All blonde, all strikingly beautiful. Their faces had covered the walls of the FDLE task force command center where he'd worked for two years. So had the pictures of their butchered bodies, posed in sexually provocative positions, their hearts cut from their chests while they were still alive. Manny saw those sweet, young faces sometimes in his nightmares, covered in dried blood, still begging him for help.

‘Wasn't Bantling already in prison when the Black Jacket killings took place?' Daria asked.

Manny nodded. ‘He was on death row. He'd been transferred to Miami for a hearing on his appeal and was about to be shipped back to Florida State Prison when his attorney tells me he wants to talk. Says Bantling's got information on Black Jacket and wants to cut a deal. So I go see him. And he starts telling me about this …' Manny paused for a long moment. ‘This
club
.'

‘Club?'

‘Yeah. An underground club made up of crazies who like to watch people die. According to Bantling, this wasn't some bunch of obviously unstable sickos, but prominent citizens — Wall Street traders, politicians, doctors, corporate bigwigs, actors, even …' he paused before he said the next word, as if it tasted bitter: ‘… cops. And thanks to the Internet, we're talking worldwide, not just Miami. It cost a lot of money to get into the club — you gotta pay for the privilege of watching people die. And I don't mean of natural causes.'

‘So they liked to watch snuff films?' Daria asked.

‘They liked to
make
snuff films, Counselor. Now, none of this was ever substantiated — Bantling wouldn't give names and we wouldn't give him a deal, since we'd cracked Black Jacket by then.' Manny rubbed his smooth head and took a deep breath. ‘FDLE was supposed to investigate the snuff allegations with Customs and Postal, but … Bantling's comments were dismissed as the ramblings of a man desperate to save his own ass. He was shipped back to death row and the rest of us just wanted to move on.'

He looked past her, towards the jail. ‘But now … well, I keep going over that interview,' he said pensively. ‘And I keep thinking about that video of Gabby Vechio's death and the faces on those TV monitors, watching. About the horrific scenes we didn't see, the torture and cruelty that were cut from that clip. And I can't help but hear what Bantling told me and wonder if that might be what we got here now, ya know? That maybe this is a snuff club we're dealing with, Counselor. And maybe we stopped looking, but it never stopped operating.'

‘That's a mighty big leap, Detective.' Daria hoped she still looked reserved, but her heart had started to pound and her hands were sweating.
A snuff club. That was a dark twist she'd never heard before.
‘You're thinking snuff club because you have a snippet of a videotaped murder and a lying, locked-up serial killer from years gone by that once told you this secret club exists? And so this must be evidence of it?'

‘Stop doing that,' Manny shot back.

‘Doing what?'

‘Making something sound stupid that made a lot of sense in my head. You twist shit with your lawyer thinking and your lawyer words. Stop and just hear me. Don't cross-examine, because I'm on
your
side here. And I'm not gonna make the same mistake I might've made seven years ago and walk away.'

He rubbed his head again. ‘I have a gut feeling, Counselor. I knew when I first saw that Lunders video that there was something more to it than soft porn. I knew what I was looking at was bad. That's why I had to find the girl. I had to know. These killings, these girls, are like a page torn out of Cupid's book — pretty blondes disappearing from nightclubs, held for several days, or longer, tortured and then murdered.'

‘Hold on,' Daria cut in. ‘Holly and these other victims, they all had their hearts, didn't they?'

‘Yeah, they did.'

‘So what are you saying, Manny? That Bantling
wasn't
Cupid? That it was all the work of this snuff club and the real Cupid is actually alive and well and roaming the streets of Miami right now looking for fresh blood? That he changed his MO and is letting all the pretty girls keep their hearts this time around and branding them instead?'

‘There you go, crossing me like some hostile witness.' Manny pounded both fists on the arms of his chair, so hard it sounded as if either the wood or his hands had cracked. He sat back in the chair and stared at the wall, trying hard to rein in his temper.

‘I remember in his last round of appeals Bantling made the argument that he was a poor innocent. I also remember it didn't fly,' Daria finished, ignoring the temper tantrum. ‘He's still on death row, isn't he?'

‘For the moment. The man is like a cat — he's got nine lives, with a few still left to spare. He was supposed to get a new trial. Came real close. Too close.'

‘What happened there?' she asked.

‘His trial lawyer, Lourdes Rubio, had a change of heart some years after Bantling was convicted. Claimed in an affidavit that she'd fucked up Bantling's case on purpose and withheld evidence that would've exonerated him at trial. She was supposed to testify at the hearing for a new trial, only she gets killed in a robbery. The judge kept out her statements and sent Bantling back to Florida State Prison, but then the appellate courts said, nah, the trial judge should've admitted the affidavit. So the state appealed. Case went all the way up to the Florida Supremes. Ultimately, the Supremes tossed it back and said the appellate court was wrong in second-guessing the trial judge and reinstated the original verdict. Last I heard, Bantling was appealing
that
ruling through the federal courts, which'll probably take another five years. Then it'll be on to the next bullshit appeal, and the next.'

She cocked her head. ‘The Cupid case had some other issues, didn't it? With the prosecutor?'

‘Bill Bantling is a psychopath, Counselor,' Manny said dismissively. ‘He creates chaos wherever he goes. It excites him.'

‘Didn't he claim that he'd raped the prosecutor?'

‘Like I said, he creates chaos. If you're old enough to remember the headlines, he conveniently made
that
claim
after
a jury had convicted him of capital murder. It was all he had left in the arsenal — a fucked-up accusation he was being railroaded on to death row by a vindictive prosecutor hell-bent on retribution. C.J. Townsend was her name. An amazing attorney, an even more amazing lady. The sad thing is that Bantling was smart enough to have dug up the fact that C.J. was raped when she was a law student in New York and that her rapist had never been caught. Found out her real name — 'cause she'd changed it, she was so scared the guy who raped her might find her one day — found out where she used to live, the car she used to drive. All this he got from reading old police reports. There's no one more dangerous on this earth than a clever psychopath, I'll tell ya.

‘How she managed to hold her head up after the things he said about her in open court, I don't know. It must have been like being raped all over again. Obviously, the judge saw through Bantling's bullshit theatrical performance and the jury sentenced him to death, but, in my opinion, C.J. was never the same after that. Not as a prosecutor, not as a woman. She was always more guarded, less happy. She was still effective, you know, but definitely anxious and uptight. She worked with the task force on the Black Jacket murders, but when that case closed, she up and left the office.'

‘Where is she now?'

He shifted in his seat. ‘No idea. Haven't seen her since.'

Daria nodded thoughtfully. She'd picked up on a slight, barely perceptible, change in the detective. Obviously, she'd hit a nerve. Perhaps he'd dated the woman. Or he'd wanted to. Or maybe there was more to her story than he wanted to get into. Daria remembered that, after Bantling was sent to death row, C.J. Townsend had been attacked by a Cupid copycat and almost killed. No wonder the woman had bowed out of the game early. If all that shit had happened to her, Daria would be making candles in some small, remote town in Iowa that had a zero percent crime rate — keeping a low profile and living a simple lifestyle.