The Ripper Gene (3 page)

My mother, in fact, had been slain in the very same county twenty-plus years before. That sudden realization probably explained why this case was bothering me more than most.

Unfortunately, the interviews with Anna’s family last night hadn’t helped. They’d revealed that she’d been focusing on law school, hadn’t been with anyone for more than a year, and that there had simply been no bad blood in any of her past relationships. We’d already phoned the last three boyfriends, dating all the way back to her senior year of high school, but each of them had provided an airtight alibi. Each of the three boys had been in public most of the night and they all lived with roommates or girlfriends who’d verified their whereabouts last night. The old boyfriends were looking more and more like a dead end.

At least the boyfriends that her family actually knew about. I kept reminding myself that it was still
theoretically
possible that Anna had been in the midst of an affair. And if she had been, then she just might have issued an ill-advised ultimatum that had turned sour in that worst of ways.

Suffice to say I thought it was still entirely possible that it was a boyfriend thing, just a boyfriend about which the family had no knowledge or clue.

In fact, the number of slashes was powerful evidence that still argued for a killer with passionate knowledge of the victim: Monsieur X. Young Anna bore a total of twenty-three slash marks on her body. Because of this overkill, I’d assigned one of Terry’s people to call every female friend in Cross’s e-mail and phone lists. While families were often unaware of their beloved’s illicit relationships, girlfriends usually weren’t.

The remaining details of the crime scene continued to gambol in my mind, and whether I liked it or not, the rest of the evidence added up in favor of a carefully orchestrated modus operandi rather than a crime of passion.

First, the postmortem sexual posing—although atypical—suggested we were dealing with a sexual stalker. The atypical posturing was problematic—clothes were usually only placed back upon victims killed by someone who felt instant remorse and who wanted to restore the victim’s dignity. Nonetheless, after her reclothing, Anna Cross’s legs had been spread-eagled in a sexually evocative way that most body-posturing sex offenders preferred to do with naked corpses. At best, the reclothing of the body followed by the sexually suggestive posturing was an indecipherable motif.

Second, there was the bloody letter
A
smeared on the victim’s forehead. It could have stood for any number of things.
A
for
Anna,
or
A
as the first letter in the alphabet? Or
A
for a grade? Or, my original gut reaction,
A
for
adultery
? Again, if it stood for
adultery,
it pointed to someone with an intimate knowledge of the victim, who felt betrayed. Still a possibility, and maybe those phone calls to girlfriends would give us a lead.

It seemed to me, however, that everything pivoted around the apple, the third and final piece of evidence that argued against a crime of passion. Young Anna Cross had been holding the ultimate symbol of Halloween in her hand when she died. Not just any apple, but an apple with a razor intentionally embedded in it. And that one tiny aspect created the profile of a killer who didn’t just leave behind a victim, but left behind a tableau—a victim posed in a sexually suggestive position, yet strangely reclothed, and forced to hold an apple with a razor in it.

I hated to admit it, but everything suggested we weren’t dealing with a crime of passion, but the work of a serial killer with a message, or a messianic calling, or some other horseshit, that had only just begun.

I caught myself. My mind was already making a mad dash for the finish line long before all the evidence was analyzed. There truly was nothing to do but wait on the interviews and the remaining laboratory analyses.

I finally shook myself from my thoughts and logged into the FBI server to prepare the monthly report for my boss, Jim Raritan, since I’d see him after my lecture in Quantico the next day. After a moment’s hesitation, I decided I wouldn’t include the Anna Cross case in the write-up. Despite my misgivings, there was still a decent—if not overwhelming—chance that we were dealing with a one-off sort of killing here. I hoped so.

The little voice inside my head told me I was being a fool for wishful thinking. I tuned it out.

I had work to do, and a plane to catch.

THREE

The next day I shifted uneasily in my seat as Dr. Bob Canner, a legend around Quantico’s Behavioral Analysis Units, introduced me to the FBI Academy.

“Today it gives me great pleasure to introduce a former student of mine, Dr. Lucas Madden, to you. Many of you have discussed his cases during your course work, but he’s probably best known for his pioneering studies that link violence and genetics. His best-known work is his discovery of the ‘ripper’ gene
,
which turned out to be a gene encoding a key dopamine receptor expressed in the brain.

“More recently he’s proposed that we may be able to predict distinct patterns of violent behavior based on genetic differences in neurological genes, using a method dubbed by the media as his very own ‘Damnation Algorithm.’ He comes today to speak to us on that topic, and how advanced next-generation DNA sequencing tools may one day be used in the behavioral profiling of serial killers. Please join me in welcoming him today.”

I stared across the sea of attentive faces during the applause. I relished my once-yearly lecture for the Advances in Criminal Profiling series but hated the title of this year’s talk. Some horse’s ass at CNN had nicknamed our method the Damnation Algorithm, and it had stuck. I’d given up fighting it several months ago.

I took the podium. “Thank you, Bob. Today I hope to convey how a small bit of genetic information from a killer can be used to predict behavior in most, if not all, cases. A process otherwise known as the so-called Damnation Algorithm. First slide, please.”

The class swiveled its attention to the large drop-down screen on my right, depicting a veritable rogue’s gallery of serial killers. The curly hair, prominent forehead, and elongated eyebrows of David Berkowitz, the charismatic Hollywood smile of a cocksure Ted Bundy, and the half-lidded, drug-baked eyes of a mustached Jeffrey Dahmer were among some of the most recognizable.

“It’s a well-known fact that serial killers come in a bewildering array of combinations and exhibit disparate patterns of behavior depending on whether they are, for instance, experienced or inexperienced, organized or disorganized, whether they’re souvenir takers or not, and myriad other well-defined behavioral observations.”

I clicked to the next slide, in which the photos of the same thirty killers were now rearranged in a branched tree according to the overall similarity of their DNA profiles. “We’ve now shown that newer genetic analysis tools based upon next-generation sequencing can actually cluster these serial killers into groups of similar violent behaviors, based on their DNA patterns alone. Importantly, we don’t just look at single nucleotide polymorphisms, as scientists did in the past. We can now investigate many different aspects of human DNA—its methylation patterns, microRNA binding sites, copy number variants, insertions, and deletions, just to name a few. When we examined the totality of genetic differences that can be observed, we found that key differences between violent offenders mapped to several dozen human genes … all of which are linked in one way or another to neurochemical signaling in the brain.

“Properly used, the new algorithm is designed to take an unknown suspect’s DNA—the kind you might recover from a crime scene—and assign a predicted behavioral pattern to aid in the capture of the offender.”

I flicked to the next slide and noticed a complete silence in the room. The faces in the audience seemed thoroughly receptive.

It was going to be a good lecture. I could feel it.

*   *   *

Afterwards I faced the audience in a standard question-and-answer session.

After a few normal chatty questions broke the ice, a dark-headed kid in the front asked a more targeted question. “So how did you get DNA from Ted Bundy? Or any of the other convicted killers who were executed long before you ever even came to the Bureau?”

“Great question,” I acknowledged, leaning over the podium. “The honest truth is that we had to be inventive. Most of these guys weren’t what you’d call ‘altruistic.’ They didn’t donate their bodies to science, but they did have habits we could exploit.” I paused, scanning around the room. “And even more importantly? We were lucky. We were fortunate to have had incredibly visionary predecessors in the original Behavioral Science Unit who had the foresight to preserve things like cigarette butts and chewed gum from these offenders, in case they might be of use someday. Sure enough, we eventually picked up the DNA for a lot of these offenders from saliva traces on cigarette butts or wads of gum. I never dreamed Juicy Fruit would help us design a genetic algorithm to test serial killer behavior, but it did.”

The audience laughed in unison. I prepared to thank everyone for coming, when another voice sounded in the hall.

“But does all this genetic analysis really add value to a behavioral profile?” A female agent stood and spoke from the upper rows. “Most of these genes are just linked to general violent behavior, not any specific type. Seems far-fetched to believe that genetics in a few genes can accurately predict serial killer behavior. Have you tested it yet?”

I glanced up, perturbed, but only because she was partly right—we hadn’t tested it in the real world yet. “Not yet, but we plan to test it in an investigation soon. I’ll tell you what: we’ll let you know what we find, since you seem to be so skeptical.” I smiled, and a few chuckles from the amphitheater ensued.

But by this point it was clear that the entire audience was expecting a verbal sparring contest. The majority of eyes in the auditorium suddenly tracked back toward my interrogator, as if she were a tennis player about to return serve.

She started to speak again, but I preempted her by addressing the whole crowd in a loud voice. “I’m sorry, but that’s all the time we have for questions today. I do again thank you for your attention.” I cut my eyes toward the rear of the room. “I hope that you all keep an
open
mind when it comes to the genetics, and biology, of behavioral profiling.”

I stepped down from the podium as the audience delivered a final round of applause. At the bottom of the steps Bob Canner waited on me, a tremendous smirk across his lips.

“How’s the hot seat?” he chuckled, glancing toward the back of the amphitheater. I followed his gaze. As the audience dispersed, my challenger now spoke with several other persons gathered around her. She threw her head back with an unflattering expression of disbelief, the kind that would accompany the word
dumbass
with great vigor and conviction.

“I think I had a detractor,” I said. “Perhaps several.”

Bob laughed. “Oh, you certainly got a nice dose of our Agent Woodson. I think she challenged the theory of gravity one day. Until I threatened to throw her out the window to prove my point.” He winked at me.

“I can only imagine.”

Bob waved his hand. “Oh, she’s one of those scientist types, like you. Always questioning, always looking for the best explanation, not just the first one. Right up your alley.”

“Not
my
alley.”

Bob moved in front of me and I had to quell the urge to tilt my head to keep a line of sight on the admittedly attractive agent in the upper rows.

“But Lucas, she’s the one graduate from last year’s class given a permanent position within BAU-2, to help with the overflowing caseload. She’s intuitive; she’s already put together two profiles in missing person cases that led to arrests. I’m telling you, she reminds me of you. She’s as sharp as they come.”

I smiled as insincerely as possible. “Well, that’s
really, really
neat. But we should get moving. What’s next on the schedule?”

“What’s next, you ask?” Bob repeated my question with glee. At that moment he turned his head back in the direction of the upper amphitheater. I stepped around him in order to see up the steps, not terribly eager to find out what sort of slander was probably still taking place in the rear of the auditorium.

Unfortunately, Agent Woodson crashed directly into my path as she descended rapidly down the steps and leaned down to hug Bob. Her forehead met the side of my head at full speed, sending both of us staggering backwards. “Ow!” she exclaimed, placing her palm against her forehead and leaning forward on the bottom step of the amphitheater as Bob steadied her.

“Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry,” I began to say, before a blinding white light flashed in front of my eyes.

It was silent for a moment longer, and then we all laughed. Up close, she had blonde, shoulder-length hair, green eyes, and a thin, prominent nose. Her skin was a light tan, offset by the cream-colored, high-collared blouse she wore beneath a navy blue blazer. She was surprisingly tall as well, only three or four inches shorter than me. No wonder we’d bumped heads when she’d stood on the next to last step.

“My interrogator,” I managed to say. “I’m sorry to make your acquaintance this way.” I extended my hand while continuing to rub my temple with the other.

“I guess it’s a good thing we FBI agents have hard heads,” she said, still smiling. “Your interrogator? Well, I suppose so, in the flesh.” She accepted my hand. “I hope my questions didn’t bother you,” she said, looking nervously between Bob and me. “It only meant I was interested.”

I waved her comment off. “Not at all,” I said. “The questions are always welcome. It was a Q and A session, after all.”

She smiled at that remark, and held on to my hand for a few seconds longer. Then she released it, and along with it seemed to relinquish any interest in pursuing our debate further.

Bob spoke up beside us. “So, Lucas. You had asked what was next?”