The Bride Collector (6 page)

“I’ll have your eggs right out. Over easy with two pieces of whole-grain toast, half an orange, peeled. Like clockwork.”

He offered her a smile and thanked her. She strode away, wearing an amused grin. This was home. Although he’d only been in
Denver one year, his living habits had returned him to the same restaurants, stores, and gas stations so often that he’d become
a fixture in their worlds.

If the Bride Collector was psychotic, truly mentally ill, he would have a harder time fitting into normal social contexts.
Unless his intelligence compensated for the instability of his mind.

Brad left Maci’s Café at seven forty-four, headed north on the Denver-Boulder Turnpike, and arrived at the scene off 96th
at eight twenty-nine. He parked his BMW next to a patrol car, gathered his briefcase, and approached the officer on duty beside
a yellow-tape perimeter.

“Morning, Officer.” He flashed his identification. “Brad Raines, FBI.”

“Morning, sir.”

“All quiet?”

“Since I took over at six. We’re a ways out.”

“I want some time. No one comes in but Nikki, okay?”

“You got it.”

He stepped over the yellow tape and walked up to the shed, thinking the sound of his feet on the gravel would have been similar
to the sound the killer had heard on his approach. But he’d had Caroline with him. Had she walked willingly? Had he carried
her? There were no fibers on her person to indicate she’d been wrapped. No bruises on her wrists to suggest she’d struggled
against restraints. Drugged, but enough for such complete compliance?

What do you tell them? How do you win their submission?

The room was as he’d last seen it, minus the body, the rough shape of which was now outlined in chalk.

He scooted the single chair to the table, withdrew several books on mental illness, his laptop, a drill. On the wall next
to the outline, he posted eight-by-ten photographs of each victim, placing the image of Caroline where her body had been.
Surrounding each photograph, he pinned a dozen more, detailing their angelic forms and drilled feet.

The drill went on the table.

He wrote the Bride Collector’s confession on the adjacent wall using a fresh piece of chalk.

The Beauty Eden id Lost

Where intelligence does centered

I came do her and she smashed da Serpent head

I searched and find the seventh and beautiful

She will rest in my Serpent’s hole

And I will live again

Brad set the chalk on the table, stepped back, gently pressed his palms together in front of his chin, and stared at his approximation
of the Bride Collector’s work. The shed, the women, the drill. The confession.

What had crossed through his mind, taking the drill for the first time, pressing the bit against flesh, feeling it hit bone?
Like a dentist drilling for his goal.

In this case, blood. He took a deep breath and settled. The roof creaked as it expanded under the sun’s heat. He let himself
sink into the scene, in no rush to coax truth from what could not yet be seen.

From his own mind.

For a few moments, Brad felt himself become, however faintly, the Bride Collector. Or at the very least, he felt himself stepping
first one foot, then another foot into the Bride Collector’s shoes.

“I’m psychotic,” he whispered aloud. “No one knows I’m psychotic—why?”

“Because you appear normal,” Nikki’s voice said softly behind him.

She was early.

He spoke without turning. “Good morning, Nikki.”

“Morning. Sleep well?”

“Not really, no.”

“Me neither.”

He’d wanted to be alone, but he felt comforted by her response.

“I choose beautiful women,” Brad said, staying in the killer’s role. “Tell me why without thinking too much.”

She stepped up beside him. “Because you’re jealous.”

“I kill out of jealousy, why?”

“Because you were made to feel ugly.”

“If killing beautiful women makes me feel better about myself, why don’t I abuse the bodies?”

Nikki hesitated. She had been the first to employ this form of rapid response, plumbing the mind for thoughts that sometimes
only surfaced in a form of pressured speech.

“You let them have their beauty but take their soul.”

“Why do I take their soul?”

“You need it to make you beautiful on the inside.”

“Why do I drain their blood?”

“Because the blood is their life force. Their soul.”

“No, I take their blood to make them beautiful,” he said.

Another hesitation. Brad felt a trickle of sweat break from his hairline. It was all conjecture at this point. Nikki stepped
into the role of interrogator.

“Why do you drill their heels?”

“Because it’s the lowest point in the body, largely unseen, so it doesn’t spoil their beauty.”

“Why do you need to kill seven beautiful women?”

“Because seven is the number of perfection. The number for God.”

“Do you fear God?”

“Yes.”

“Are you religious?”

“Deeply.”

“Are you a Christian?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you Catholic?”

“No.”

“Protestant?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They’re all liars. Unable to live the life they suggest others live.”

“But you, on the other hand, live the truth?”

“All of it. That’s what makes me special. That’s why I kill, to be true to myself.”

“Why seven women?”

“I told you, because seven is a perfect number.”

Cycling back provided a thread of intellectual honesty that mirrored normal interrogation techniques. A simple aid to both
of them.

“Okay, let’s talk about how you choose your victims. Why—”

“They’re not victims.”

“What are they?”

“I’m not hurting them.”

She paused, probably because he hadn’t answered her questions.

“Why is Eden lost?” she asked.

“The
beauty
of Eden is lost. Innocence was corrupted.”

“Where is intelligence centered?”

“In the mind. Innocence was lost in the mind.”

“Are you the serpent?”

“No.”

“Who smashed the serpent’s head?”

“She did.” Brad nodded at the wall of crime scene photographs.

“She hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not the serpent. Are you the serpent?”

“No. Not always.”

“Why do you kill her?”

“So that I can kill again.”

Only that’s not what Brad meant to say. He lifted his hand, considering the response.

“
Kill
again, or
live
again?” Nikki asked. “‘She will rest in my Serpent’s hole. And I will live again.’ His poem seems to indicate that he’s doing
this so that he can live again.”

“I meant to say
live again.
”

They both stared at the confession posted on the wall.

“But if he’s playing the role of the serpent in this self-fulfilling tale of his, it does stand to reason that he kills so
that he can live
as the serpent
and kill again,” Nikki said.

“It does.”

She looked at him. “So then, Temple could be right. We’re looking for a delusional schizophrenic who’s suffered a psychotic
break.” She swept a long strand of dark hair from her cheek and absently touched her neck where it met her jaw. Long, delicate
fingers, French manicure.

He had always found Nikki’s attention to seemingly insignificant detail appealing. She lived her life with passion; truth
be told, with far more energy than he could usually muster. Running an hour every day to bring stability, she said. Putting
in long, twelve-hour days. She seemed to have energy left over to keep up an active nightlife, if all the stories were true,
and he had no reason to think they weren’t.

Their relationship had always remained purely platonic. There were times when Brad regretted his avoidance.

“Maybe,” Brad said. “We established last night that he was probably psychotic.”

“You might have, but I’m not convinced. A mentally ill serial killer is atypical, short of mental illness caused by severe
trauma to the frontal lobe through a head injury. Otherwise, nearly all pattern killers are middle- to high-income earners,
are good looking in general, and usually articulate. Nearly all kill out of either a sexual compulsion or a need for revenge.
In both cases, most have been severely abused by their mothers and are reacting to that abuse through some ritualistic act,
which relieves their compulsion for gratification or revenge. Environment, not psychosis, forms most serial killers. This
is not the profile of the mentally ill.”

He knew all of this, naturally, but investigative work was an exercise in rehearsing details, coaxing new truth from them.

“And yet the note indicates delusions of grandeur, which is a form of psychosis.”

“Yes,” she said.

He looked at the drill, pacing. “His killing doesn’t appear to be sexually motivated. It’s ritualistic. He’s courting delusions
of grandeur. He’s intelligent. He’s killing so that he can kill again, because in his mind, unless he carries out his role,
he can no longer play that role and live.”

“Right,” she said. “And whatever that role is, it’s not the role of executioner or punisher. He thinks he’s serving his victims
well. He’s loving them.”

They stood in silence for a full minute.

“So. We take an exhaustive look at the mental health facilities in the Four Corners state hospitals,” Nikki said. “Residential
care facilities, nursing homes, state prisons, convictions involving the mentally ill… That’s a ton of data.”

“Frank’s got six agents buried in the data already. We’ve put in a request for additional assistance from the field offices
in Cheyenne, Colorado Springs, and Albuquerque. I’ve asked him to cross-reference the confession with all related databases.
He left the note because he wants us to find something.”

“Agreed.”

He put his hands on his hips and studied the walls. “Meanwhile, we have the mysteries hidden here, in his place of work.”

Nikki nodded. “You ever get tired of it?”

“Fieldwork?”

“Trying to see past what a person allows you to see.”

An odd choice of words. “Can’t say that I do.”

“I mean, think about it, we all have our mysteries, right? We live our lives letting people see only what we want them to
see. It takes years, even in a marriage, to know someone. Not that you’d know that, Brad.”

She’d said the last part with a good-natured smirk.

“Even then,” she continued, “how many spouses are eventually blindsided by some deep, dark revelation about the person they
thought they knew?”

“No argument here,” he said, hoping he’d avoided the whole morass. “Everyone hides something.”

She nodded. “Classic existentialism. In the end the human being is alone. We are all confronted by our own complexity, which
we try to unravel, but all the while we’re confronted by our own isolation. This is what we eventually learn. It’s why so
many lean on faith, a relationship that isn’t dependent on another human being.” She crossed her arms and studied him. “So
how about it, Brad? What mysteries are you hiding?”

At first he wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. They’d always been candid with each other, but never probing. He wasn’t quite
sure how he felt about it.

“I don’t mean to pry,” she said. “Not too deep, anyway.”

A smile softened her face, and looking into her soft blue eyes, he suddenly wanted to tell her everything. About how he’d
fallen in love with a young tennis player named Ruby while attending UT in Austin, the wild carefree days when the world was
at both of their fingertips and everyone who saw them together knew it. About the way her eyes twinkled and her laugh echoed
on the tennis court, about how completely he’d given himself to Ruby.

About her suicide.

The thought of it brought a familiar lump to his throat. It had taken Brad three years to uncover the secrets that had led
to Ruby’s decision to take her life.

“Think about it, Brad. The killer’s playing us. Probing us. Tempting us, egging us on, daring us to stop him. My job is to
take his challenge and beat him at his own game. Uncover his true self. So how do you get someone to reveal their secrets?”

She was talking about the killer, but as much about Brad.

He motioned at the wall with a nod. “They do what they do out of pain, and a small part of me can understand that. Not the
way they react to it, of course, but the pain itself. Let’s just say I’ve loved and I’ve felt the pain of a terrible loss.
A woman I once knew. It’s why I can identify.”

He stopped, not knowing where he was heading. Suddenly uncomfortable.

After a pause, Nikki stepped up to him and touched his shoulder in a show of empathy. But she seemed awkward, and he felt
the same. She removed her hand and faced the wall.

“You’ve never mentioned that before. I never knew.”

“I know. We were talking about long-harbored secrets, remember?”

She nodded. A long pause flowed between them, one Brad made no effort to end.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” she finally said.

“It’s okay. We all do at some point.”

But he wasn’t sure about that. The pain he’d felt had left him wishing for death. In a way, he was waging his own personal
campaign against death even now. It was why he’d joined the FBI, now that he thought of it.

“But you’re right,” he said, resuming an earlier thread, “part of understanding someone else comes from exposing yourself.”

She looked at him, then grinned at his choice of words.

“So to speak…”
There,
he thought with a surge of relief. Back on familiar ground—the tinged banter. Their usual territory.

His cell rang and he picked it up, thankful for the interruption.

It was Frank. The staff had registered an interesting hit while cross-referencing the killer’s note with the mental health
facilities database.

“You ever hear of a place called the Center for Wellness and Intelligence?”