Sociopath (3 page)

7

I stood in the little
storeroom at the back of the Wasatch County Sheriff’s Office and stared at the photographs on the wall. They lined the room in a circle and hung above two desks that were cluttered with papers. I saw the autopsy reports for both victims and David, and several supplemental narrative reports that I hadn’t received. They were laid out on desks the way I used to lay out flashcards to study in college.

The sheriff left the door open behind me and I closed it. I pulled out a chair and sat in the middle of the room and stared at the photos.
Glossy and large, full of vivid color with black blood and choppy, red organs.

The girl would have been pretty, extraordinarily so, except for the thick black ooze
stuck to her chin, seepage from the wound in her mouth where her tongue had been cut out. She was nude, her legs were spread, and a branch, about three feet in length with sharp edges and leaves, was thrust into her vagina. It had gone in so far it ruptured her birth canal. It was sticking out like some macabre ornament and the ground underneath it was caked in blood.

I saw him standing there, raping her with it. The more she screamed the harder he
thrusted. That’s what it was about. That’s why he didn’t kill her quickly, why he used a branch. The screams. They made him laugh several times but he couldn’t tell if the laughs were from joy or pain or pleasure. He was sexually excited, but he didn’t rape her. No semen was found anywhere in the scene. Pubic hair and latex burns were found, but not from rape. That was purposeful. He wanted me to think he could rape her. That he was able to perform.

This was
n’t for sex: it was for the screams. So why cut out her tongue?

I saw him
as he watched her blood in the moonlight. Blood appears as black as oil under the moon. This fascinated him. It explained many things to him. That something wasn’t what it always appeared and all you had to do was change the context and it was something else.

He wouldn’t be able to resist taking a part of her with him.
The fingers were cut off according to the autopsy report. Would he keep them as trophies? Strip the flesh and make a necklace of the bones? Maybe. But no … that’s not what it was. That was too public. He didn’t want public. This death occurred in the woods away from the public. He wanted something private, something permanent that was just between the two of them, something that would mean she was always a part of him.

H
e ate them.

“You must be Jon.”

I snapped out and for a moment, forgot where I was. I saw a young woman, maybe thirty, standing at the doorway. She wore a suit and had an FBI badge dangling from a blue lanyard. Her hair was dirty blonde and she was smiling at me.

“Yeah,” I said, swallowing, “yes. I’m Jon Stanton.”

She walked toward me and held out her hand. I shook it and it was smooth with lotion. “Melissa Harding.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“You too. Kyle talked you up quite a bit.”

A man came in behind her, also wearing a suit and an FBI badge. His hands were in his pockets and he stood behind her and looked at me. He didn’t say hello and didn’t stick out his hand.

“This the guy?” he said.

“This is Adam. Don’t mind him,” Melissa said, “he just lost a hundred bucks on a Lakers game.”

“So you’re the guy who’s going to solve this mess, huh?”

“No,” I said calmly. “No I’m not here for that. I’m just here to look at evidence and see if I can help.
David was my friend.”

“He was my friend too. One of the best agents I ever worked with. And you know what? When I asked for agents to swarm this little town so we can find who killed him, you know what Kyle told me? He said they didn’t have the funds for it. So instead they flew out a rent-a-cop.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said. I didn’t have the stomach for confrontation right now. I felt queasy and weak and wanted to take out the package of Tums in my pocket, but I resisted and instead stood up and placed the chair back under the desk.

“Adam, why don’t you grab us some coffee?”

“They don’t have any here.”

“I know, just run up the street. It’s not far.”

He looked to me and to her and rolled his eyes as he walked out.

“Sorry,” she said. “He’s taking this
kinda hard.”

“You have nothing to apologize for. I’m the outsider. I wouldn’t have come except I felt I owed it to
David. He helped me on something when no one else would.”

“He helped a lot of people.
Even me.”

I looked up to the photographs on the wall. “
He had his problems, but he was a good man.”

“So,” she said, glancing up to the photos, “you ready to dig in?
David was close.”

“How so?”

“He had a good profile worked up. White male, mid-twenties, unemployed or underemployed but with an above average intelligence. Either an avid hunter or some law enforcement training because of the accuracy of the shot to the first victim’s face. Her boyfriend was in the car and he shot him with an arrow first before going after Tiffany. The arrow went right through the brain. David thought he did all this to humiliate her. That’s why he used the branch to rape her. I think that’s pretty spot-on actually.”

I shook my head, not taking my eyes off the photo of
Tiffany. “That’s not why he did it.”

“You don’t think he wanted to humiliate her?”

“That wasn’t his primary motivation. He would have been more public if he wanted her humiliated. He chose a quiet spot in the woods twenty miles from the nearest house or store. Especially now, it’s easy for this type of sociopath to attain humiliation for his victims. There’s been a surge of rapists forcing their victims to post photos on their Facebook accounts while they’re raped. It’s ultimate humiliation to force all their friends and family to have to see that. He didn’t want humiliation.”

“Then what did he want?”

“He wanted a substitute. That’s what the branch was. We’re looking for someone incapable of sex, at least that night. Either through injury or some sort of neurosis that won’t allow it. But he thought he would be able to perform. He would have brought something with him if he was certain he wouldn’t be able to do it rather than just grabbing a branch. He thought he’d be able to, but when he actually got there he wasn’t. So he grabbed whatever was nearby.”

She shrugged. “That’s one theory I guess.”

I rose and exhaled as I did so, feeling a tug of pain in my knees. I was old enough now that even getting up caused a slight bit of pain.

“I’d like to meet her parents.”

8

The home was tucked away in what appeared like the back of the city. You had to wind through several neighborhoods to reach it
, and Melissa, who was driving an FBI-issued sedan, only found it by using GPS. I was sitting in the backseat and Adam was in the passenger. He didn’t think I noticed but he would glance back at me in the rearview.

Heber appeared like the type of place you would want to raise a family. It was small and quaint with hometown values
. I could picture the high school football game being the highlight of any weekend followed by burgers and fries at the local burger joint.

But small towns always had dark underbellies. People, particu
larly the young, grew bored easily and would search for ways to entertain themselves. High instances of drug and alcohol abuse were rampant in small Western and Midwestern towns and the new drug of choice was methamphetamine, not marijuana, mostly for the cost and the sustained high.

With the drugs
came burglaries and robberies, and with them came sexual assaults and murders. The FBI was reporting that all crime was down, but the vast majority of crimes occurred behind closed doors without anyone ever finding out. The spouse beaten nightly by an alcoholic husband, the child raped repeatedly by a stepfather, the housewife prostituting herself to keep up a methamphetamine addiction … these were rarely caught and prosecuted. If all crime were tallied and totaled and everyone was made aware, I’m not sure most of this country could sleep at night.

We parked at the curb and I watched the house a moment.

“Remember you’re not law enforcement,” Adam said, “so don’t hold yourself out as an officer.”

I disregarded him and opened the door and stepped outside. The warm air had the scent of pine
and though I was exhausted I felt like I had enough energy to ignore sleep.

A paved driveway led to a walkway over the lawn and to the front door. I followed Melissa and Adam. He knocked and glanced to me to make certain I wasn’t, somehow, acting like law enforcement.

A woman in her forties answered. “Can I help you?”

Adam pulled out his badge. “Federal Bureau of Investigation. Do you mind if we have a minute?”

“Um, yeah. Sure. What’s this about?”

“It’s about your daughter.”

She swallowed. “Come inside,” she said, visibly shaken.

We entered the home and I tagged behind. Melissa and Adam were led to the living room and sat on a couch as Mrs.
Ochoa sat on a recliner. She crossed her legs and didn’t allow herself to speak first. I looked to the mantle over the small fireplace. They were all photos of Tiffany at various stages of life, the last one being her high school graduation.

Adam opened up an iPad. I could see the heading on the document: WITNESS INTAKE SHEET.

“Could you please state your daughter’s birthday, ma’am?”

No, this was all wrong. I could see Mrs.
Ochoa closing down. The blank stare and the body language that told me she had been through this several times and it was now routine. Her mind held more knowledge than she knew but she wouldn’t, or couldn’t access it. Not with people here asking her questions, getting a read on her. It was all so formal.

“Mrs.
Ochoa,” I said, before she could answer, “I just want you to know that I’ve done hundreds of cases just like this and it’s not your fault. I know it feels like it is, but you had nothing to do with this and nothing you ever did led to it. You couldn’t have stopped this.”

Her eyes filled with tears. She put her hand up to her mouth and her lids closed as she wept a moment. Adam looked at me with anger in his eyes.

“Why don’t you go wait in the car, Jon,” he said.

“Actually, I’d like to see her bedroom, if that’s all right.”

Mrs. Ochoa wiped away the tears. She stood up and straightened her blouse. “It’s upstairs.”

I followed her up, leaving the two agents on the couch.
More photos in the hallway and a few on the walls leading up the stairs. I glanced to the right as we climbed. In the kitchen I could see a Bible open on the dining table.

We turned into a room and it was as I had anticipated. Parents of murder victims
who still lived at home never touch the room. They leave it exactly the same as it had been the day they passed. I stepped inside.

“Mrs.
Ochoa, do you think I could have a moment alone?”

She nodded. “And thank you for saying what you said. It’s
… it’s just….”

“I know. Everything that happens to them we take on ourselves.”

She nodded and left the room, shutting the door behind her.

I sat down on her bed and took in the room. It was adult in that it was sparse with almost no decorations
, but also child-like with the few decorations there were of pop stars and stickers of brand names.

I checked under the bed and then the closet and the dresser drawers. There was nothing that would indicate anyone other than a young woman out of high school lived here.
But there was something here. She had been hiding something and this was the likely place she’d hid it. Whatever it was would be a link. This
thing
saw her somewhere, desired her from somewhere. And I needed to know where she had actually spent her time that he could see her, not where her parents or the sheriff thought she’d spent her time.

The air conditioning clicked on and I could hear a
noise that wasn’t there before. Like a bit of paper flapping in wind. I listened for it and it was coming near the bed.

I bent down
over a heating vent, lifted it up, and reached my hand in. Something felt like plastic with putty inside. I pulled it out. Marijuana in a small plastic baggie. I slipped the baggie into my pocket and replaced the vent cover.

N
othing else of note, though I searched through all the drawers for a journal. A small calendar was stuck to her mirror and I flipped through it but it was empty.

Going back down the stairs, I saw Melissa and Adam already standing by the door with Mrs.
Ochoa.

“Thank you,” I said.

She nodded and waited until we were on the driveway before shutting the door.

Adam got in my face as soon as it was closed. “What the hell was that?”

“Forms aren’t going to help you.”

“Those forms were developed by agents a
helluva lot smarter than you and used in thousands of cases just like this. And you know what, we catch the sick fucks.”

“I’m not some reporter, Adam. Your numbers don’t trick me. Most of the
sociopaths caught are caught because they screw up or because someone else turns them in. It has nothing to do with you.”

He grinned. “You think you’re a hotshot? I was with Detroit Homicide for six years before joining the Bureau and I knew guys like you. Academics who thought what we did
was so interesting. Well lemme tell you something, hotshot, the death of the innocent is not interesting. It’s not an experiment for you to run.”

“Leave him alone, Adam.”

He turned away from me and headed back to the car.

“Sorry, Jon.”

I pulled out the baggie of marijuana. “We should have this dusted for prints.”

“Is that pot?”

“She had it hid in her air vent. I don’t think the cops here will send in a request to the crime lab for me. It has to be you.”

“You stole evidence?”

“It’s not evidence. Not yet. And her mother didn’t need to know about this. She has an image in her mind of her daughter and I don’t want to tarnish that in any way.”

Melissa lifted the bag
gie at the opening and looked at it. “Whose prints are we looking for?”

“His.”