Mercy (46 page)

“Okay, you’ve got my criminal profile and crime assessment there,” he said, nodding at the stapled pages everyone was holding. “Let’s get to the questions.”

Palma had read the pages quickly, much of it being what she and Grant had discussed over the telephone during the past several days and last night. Grant must have written most of the profile and assessment on the plane coming down, working in last-minute observations based on what he saw confirmed or contradicted by the Mello case. The paper was lengthy, fifteen pages.

“A general question.” Gordy Haws was reared back in his chair, his stomach protruding. “Lew and I have the Ackley-Montalvo hits. Since these aren’t addressed here in your assessment, I was wondering how you see them in relation to the three women.”

Grant was nodding before Haws finished his question.

“First of all, it’s obvious that Ackley and Montalvo weren’t killed for the same reasons that the women were killed,” he said. “But we can’t ignore the probability of a relationship because of who Louise Ackley was and the timing of her death. But I’d lay bets it wasn’t done by the same man. I’m not saying the deaths aren’t related, just that the same man didn’t commit all five killings. The Ackley-Montalvo hits seem to me to have all the earmarks of a business transaction. They were a housekeeping matter. No emotion involved. The guy behind the gun wasn’t thinking with his dick. He walked in, popped them, and walked out. He was doing business.”

He shifted his position on the desk. “Now whether that business had anything to do with Moser, Samenov, and Mello is something this investigative technique isn’t going to tell us. On the other hand what you find out investigating those deaths could very well play back to us. We’ve been told Louise Ackley bottomed for Gil Reynolds…you can read the possibilities there. But that could have been false information. It could have been half false. Or, her death could have been a chance element, another story altogether, one of those loose ends that are inevitable in every case.”

Palma noted Grant’s crude reference. It was almost as if he had read Haws’s own personality and knew that he would have used the phrase himself. It was a reference Gordy Haws would recognize and understand immediately. He also would have understood the term “psychosexually motivated aggression,” but he wouldn’t have thought much of Grant for having used it. By acquiring Haws’s own manner of expression—but not mimicking him—Grant picked up points, became a non-threatening cooperative, a fellow hunter, instead of a big boy from Quantico.

Manny Childs waggled his pages, frowning at the floor. “Uh, I can see where you get some of your conclusions,” he was nodding. “But you’re gonna have to explain why you think the guy’s a married man with children.”

Again Grant was nodding before the question was complete.

“Okay. After working through hundreds and hundreds of these kinds of cases we’ve learned that most organized murderers—and we think this guy falls in that category—live with a partner and are sexually competent,” Grant said.

Still sitting on the edge of the desk, he raised one fist.

“Let’s hold on to those two probabilities for a second, keep them over here.” Then he raised the other fist. “Now over here we have the time elements involved in all three murders. All three deaths occurred on Thursday evenings. The forensic data indicate that in each case the time of death was ‘probably’ around ten o’clock at night. If I remember correctly, Moser was last seen at seven-forty, Samenov at six-twenty, and Mello at six-thirty. In each case the victim was last seen within two or three hours prior to their deaths. This is a very precise—and very consistent—time frame, both as regards the day of the week and the hours.

“If you accept the statistical probability that the man lives with a partner,” he said, holding out the first fist, “then you have to ask yourself whether these precise time frames would more likely accommodate the living situations of a married man with children, or a man living with a girlfriend or another male…not a homosexual.”

He held out the second fist. “A man without a family could probably be absent at those hours any number of nights a week; life’s a little looser for him. You’d have a hard time convincing me that those are the only hours he’d have available each week. A man with a family, on the other hand, has obligations that an unmarried man without children couldn’t even imagine: dinner at a certain hour to accommodate the rhythm of the family’s routine, household chores that inevitably crop up and can’t wait until the weekend, helping the kids with lessons, all those things that have to be done with and for the kids before bedtime—around ten o’clock.

“But—one night a week he has an excuse to be gone: racquetball at the club, bowling with the guys, poker with the boys, Rotary Club meetings, whatever. He has to do it on that one night, and he can’t be out too late. He’s not out drinking with the guys; he’s a respectable family man. He’s got to be home at a respectable hour. Odds are a single man has other opportunities, is more flexible, and that flexibility alone would almost certainly mean that out of three murders one would have deviated from the pattern. Otherwise we’d have to believe that this is all a coincidence and the odds, once again, are stacked against that conclusion. And at this point in the investigation, gentlemen, we’re playing the odds.” And he brought his fists together and interlocked his fingers in a tight grip.

“But what about a guy with a night job?” Childs followed up. “Doesn’t have to be at work until eleven, twelve.”

“And why on Thursday nights?” Grant anticipated.

Childs looked at Grant and then shrugged.

“That’s the way I was thinking, too,” Grant admitted. “But the whole scenario has to work, not just part of it. I couldn’t come up with a good reason why he would do it on that one specific night. That night is a bottleneck, we’re going to have to go through it, make it a logical part of whatever scenario we create. No way around it.”

Grant stood up from the edge of the desk and crossed his arms, the crooked finger of one hand stroking his mustache.

“Now it may turn out that you’ll be proved right on this because there’s something here we can’t foresee right now. But using what we do know, my scenario simply plays out better at this point. And there’s another element. Our experience tells us organized offenders often have good or above-average intelligence and prefer skilled employment. Disorganized offenders are of average or below-average intelligence and tend to have poor work histories. In general—with the exception of police work—” Grant grinned. “Night work is often the domain of the unskilled labor force. Therefore, if we accept the judgment that we’re dealing with an organized murderer, we’re going to have to provide him with a reason—other than employment—for being out of the house every Thursday night. Or, at least, on these Thursday nights.”

Grant stopped and stared at the floor, thinking. “One other thing,” he said, looking up at them from under his eyebrows. “Look at the charts I’ve included with the report about the profile characteristics of the organized and disorganized murderers. Organized offenders are usually socially competent—Ted Bundys, smoothies, nonthreatening types. Remember, these victims—all upper-middle-class from the ‘social’ section of the city—all apparently
agreed
to meet this man. They feel comfortable with him.” His voice softened, imitating a reasonableness of attitude. “He’s their kind of people. Hell, they let him tie them up! This is not likely to have happened with a socially immature person who’d probably come across to these women like a misfit, someone who doesn’t travel in their circles.”

Grant paused. “Our man is not going to be a loser, a member of the subculture. He’s going to be so ‘normal’ that I guarantee you you’ll never look at your next-door neighbor the same again.”

“Sexually competent?” Joe Garro asked.

“Right,” Grant snapped, pausing to turn to the desk, pick up his cup, and swallow a mouthful of coffee. “Sexual
in
competence is most often associated with the kind of frustrations we see in spontaneous sexual homicide. A disorganized killer, a disorganized crime scene. But our man has taken control to the extreme. Everything about the crime scenes exhibits control. His motivations for the killings are most likely sexual, that’s true, but they’re deep-seated drives, not the sorts of things that can be satisfied by merely abducting a woman, killing her, and having sexual intercourse with her body. That’s a pretty primitive impulse. This man’s more complicated than that. What he does to her, he does before she’s dead. The sadism is important to him…he wants her to feel the pain, and he wants her to know that he knows she feels it and that it pleases him.”

Nobody said anything for a moment, and Grant went for his coffee again. He was looking around, wanting more questions. Obviously he enjoyed explaining his reasoning, peeling back the layers of the subject he so far only had imagined, but whom he knew well enough to know how the layers were constructed.

“Yeah, I’ve got a question.” It was Cushing. Palma had wondered how long he could hold out before trying his hand against Grant.

“Under ‘Postoffense Behavior,’” he said, frowning at Grant’s report in his lap. You say that it’s likely that the murderer returned to some or all of these crime scenes and probably kept ‘souvenirs.’ I just don’t see this. I mean, the guy’s so careful, so methodical. It doesn’t seem logical to me that a guy who cleans up the crime scene the way this guy does would do something like that. You know, jeopardize his distance from the case. It’d be damn risky to come back to the scene, or to keep something in your possession associated with the victim.”

Grant took another sip of coffee, not because he wanted it, Palma guessed, but because he wanted another few seconds to study Cushing, who had not disguised the challenging tone in his voice, nor the inflection that indicated he thought he had found a loophole in Grant’s analysis.

But Grant knew how to handle him.

“You’re right,” Grant said, putting down his coffee and walking over a few steps to address Cushing directly. “That’s a good point. The fact is, it isn’t logical behavior, which brings us to another important factor that I’ve also mentioned in the paper. But I want to emphasize it—in fact, I can’t emphasize it too much in this particular case. That is, the importance to the murderer of keeping alive the fantasy that gave birth to the crime in the first place. This behavior isn’t logical to you and me because we don’t think like this guy, but it’s logical to him because it serves a purpose.”

Grant paused for emphasis, his eyes canvassing the room of detectives as he hunched his shoulders and punched the air with an index finger.

“And that purpose is to sustain the excitement of the murder itself,” he said, emphasizing each word separately and distinctly. “This need to sustain the excitement is so strong that it overrides self-protective instincts. This fantasy is all-powerful. Returning to the scene, or keeping souvenirs that he can pull out and smell and fondle and taste, provides stimuli that enable him to relive the act, re-create the excitement of the event itself.”

Grant turned and went back to Cushing, looking at him down the uneven bridge of his broken nose, his lips thinner under his mustache because he was tense, putting considerable energy into what he was saying.

“I’ve seen these men return to the body sixteen, eighteen, twenty hours later to cut off the breasts and take them away. One guy came back to the body several weeks after the killing to engage the body in every form of necrophilia imaginable. Sometimes the desire to be once again physically involved with the body overrides any element of common sense. They’ll go back, sometimes simply to see the police discover the body. By doing this, they feel as if they’re still controlling the fantasy. It doesn’t stop for them. It’s the same reason they keep ‘souvenirs,’ panties, bras, jewelry, even pieces of the body—I’ve seen feet, breasts, intestines in cans, jars of blood. One man kept his victim’s feet in his freezer, in high-heeled shoes. In the case of our man, he’s probably kept their nipples. He takes them out of their box, or wherever he keeps them, and handles them, puts them to his tongue, something like that. They’re the catalysts that keep the fantasy alive, and the fantasy drives him and sustains him. The fantasy is all-powerful.”

Grant ended by standing in front of Cushing again, his hands in his pockets, his thick shoulders slightly slumped. He gave the impression of being physically powerful, but unmindful of it, his intensity concentrated in the flesh around his eyes, which sat, warm and placid, in their sockets.

Suddenly he turned and walked back to the desk where he had left his coffee and picked up the Styrofoam cup with his back to the detectives. He took a drink.

“Let me clarify one point,” he said, turning around. “What we call the items these murderers keep is actually defined by what the items mean to the murderer. Most of the time it’s the disorganized murderer, the impulsive killer, who keeps ‘souvenirs.’ The organized killer tends to keep ‘trophies,’ some things that symbolize a successful accomplishment, proof of his skill. However, in this case, even though we have to consider our man an organized murderer, I think the fantasy is so overpowering that we have to consider his collected items as ‘souvenirs,’ something that helps him re-create the murders.”

“Jesus Christ.” Richard Boucher had been motionless. He was the youngest detective in the room and had never investigated a sexual homicide. Grant’s recitation was opening up a whole new world to him. It wasn’t a world for the queasy.

The questions continued for another hour, most of the detectives taking notes, following up on earlier questions, asking for clarifications, elaborations, speculations. There was a break to allow everyone to go to the bathroom and get a fresh cup of coffee, and then they came back and went over the reconstructions of the killings in chronological order, Leeland providing graphic charts while Grant postulated the killer’s movements, pointed out how the severity and frequency of the crimes had accelerated and explained what that was likely to mean in terms of future expectations.