Perfect Victim (2 page)

Raw Material

Barbara Lynn Allison noticed things. Little things. Seemingly trivial things. It was partly her nature, and partly the curse of twenty-first-century motherhood. Before giving her children packaged cookies, for example, she would notice in the small print below the Nutrition Facts legend whether the product contained trace elements of peanuts. Last year, when she and her husband, David, upgraded to the split-level in Eden Prairie, she noticed all the sharp corners in the kitchen, the questionable second-floor banister, and the lack of a sturdy fence around the pool. “Kid Hazard Radar” is how her pal and fellow mah-jongg player Cyndee Kaiser characterized the talent. More than likely it was this preternatural mommy-vision that caused Barbie Allison to first notice the gray panel van that afternoon, parked way off in the corner of the mall parking lot.

As she pulled her Dodge Caravan into the south lot of the Mall of America, temple of consumerism and eighth wonder of the retail world, she never really got a good look at the van—or at the dark figure huddled behind its steering wheel—as the vehicle was nearly a football field away, sitting out there all alone. Plus Barbie was too busy scanning the jammed parking lanes near the entrance. She needed to find a spot close to the doors so that she wouldn't have to lug her sample case full of cosmetics farther than necessary. Distracted, craning her neck to see an opening, she only caught a fleeting glimpse of the van out of the corner of her eye before losing it in sunspots flaring off the high-gloss hoods of parked cars.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she made a mental note. It was probably nothing. Lots of vans park in the far reaches of parking lots. Still…just for an instant, something about it strummed a nerve.

Shrugging it off, Barbie parked her minivan, killed the engine, and gathered her things. She had a full itinerary of sales calls ahead of her—her cruelty-free cosmetics, developed as an independent project during her days at the University of Minnesota, had been catching fire as of late—and she wanted to take advantage of this rare eight-hour workday afforded her by the playdates she had arranged for Carrie and Casey that afternoon.

She got out, her keyless alarm chirping as she thumbed the control and started across the traffic lane, her glamorous yet sensible wares in tow. The sun was high and wan in the pale spring sky that day, the air redolent with the scents of Cinnabon and coffee wafting out of the massive brick façade of Macy's. The endless ant farm of glass boutiques rose up before Barbie like a Mayan rampart, four levels high, housing hundreds of upscale stores, creating an audible thrum—the whirring of a great particle accelerator bubbling with voices, fountains, and perfumed air.

The sound of commerce.

Barbie paused near the entrance, digging her PDA out of her purse to double-check her first appointment. An elfin woman with a spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, she looked a decade younger than her thirty-three years. Rigorous postpartum jogging and Pilates had staved off the requisite midriff bulge, and a burgeoning small business had done similar wonders for her self-image. Now, clad in her smart, formfitting, navy DKNY dress, she put her iPhone away and strode through the mall entrance with the high-chinned confidence of a color guard leading a victorious regiment. She was ready to rock.

Thoughts of errant vans parked in unlikely places had already faded from her radar screen.

 

She got a lot done that day.

After Macy's she bopped over to Bath and Body Works, then on to Perfumania, then Sephora, then Nail Trix. All told, Barbie took eleven orders. The gal at Nail Trix bought an entire carton of organic yucca moisturizer and Teddy Furniere at Regis Salon ordered the entire line of avocado body lotion.

It was a good day, and by the time Barbie, her sample case empty, made her way down to the food court, exhausted and famished, it was nearly five o'clock. Mrs. Kamin would be dropping off Casey and Carrie soon. Dinner would have to be made, homework supervised. There was just enough time to fill out the sales log and have a quick frozen yogurt, and then back home for mommy-work.

But first things first. Barbie's bladder was screaming. That venti mocha that she had snuck between Bare Escentuals and Your Body Repair Shop was threatening to pop.

She made her way down a side corridor toward the restrooms. The mall had cleared significantly since her arrival that morning, and now the narrow corridor leading to the ladies' john was deserted. Barbie reached the last door on the right and stopped.

The
CLOSED FOR REPAIRS
sign taped over the knob sent of zing of frustration down her spine.

She turned and trundled back out into the main corridor, found the directory kiosk, and saw that the next-nearest public restroom was at the other end of the east corridor, next door to the Sheraton Hotel, between Martini Cove and the Wine Shack. Barbie had no choice. In rush-hour traffic she would be wetting her pants, so she marched eastward, toward the darker, muskier, smokier regions of the mall.

The ladies' room was inside a tile-brick alcove tagged with the international symbol: stick-figure-woman in skirt. Barbie slipped into the silent fluorescent chamber, immediately flinching at the peppery stench of ammonia and human spoor. The restroom was deserted. The muffled drone of a nearby jukebox thrummed behind the walls, the bass lines of some garish hip-hop tune vibrating the tiles. Barbie hurried into the last stall, latching the door behind her. She set her empty case on the floor, then got her dress hiked up in seconds flat.

She was tinkling when she heard someone else enter the ladies' room.

All at once her urine stream halted.

Her heart started racing, a current of amorphous alarm flowing through her brain. The hair on her arms bristled. All because of what she saw underneath the gap at the bottom of that stall, crossing the tiled floor of the restroom: the pointy-toed black shoes of a man.

“Excuse me,” she blurted, her voice cracking with tension.

She could hear a thick, deep breathing out there as those onyx wingtips paused and pivoted toward the stall. Barbie held her breath, her heart thumping in her ears. She could barely muster another word, her saliva all dried up. “You're in a ladies' room, sir.”

No answer.

“Sir?”

Nothing.

“Sir!”

Cold panic sluiced down Barbie's backbone. Her joints felt stiff and cold all of a sudden, her mind swimming with contrary undercurrents. Were these the shoes of a harmless, scatterbrained janitor? Maybe. But
wingtips
? Didn't janitors wear work boots? Perhaps it was a security guard. But why wasn't he responding? Was this a stylish, oblivious,
hearing-impaired
janitor?

“There is someone in here!” she barked at the pointy shoes, taking a different tack. Perhaps if she got angry he would leave. “Hello? Sir?”

Then she heard something coming from the man with the black shoes that chilled her to the bone.

A low, breathy
shushing
noise.

Barbie instinctively rose off the toilet seat, yanking her panties up over her privates with a dry wheezy sound. The back of her dress accidentally slipped into the toilet water. She gasped, whirling around, pulling the expensive silk-rayon blend out of the muck. Her hands trembled as she wrung the fabric dry.

She glanced back at the floor under the stall door.

The shoes were gone.

Barbie took a couple of girding breaths. She told herself to calm down, take it easy, it was probably just a maintenance man who didn't understand English. She smoothed down her dress. Another deep breath and she opened the stall door.

The ladies' room was empty.

Inadvertently leaving her sample case in the stall, Barbie went over to the sink and ran water over her shaking hands. This was so silly. What was wrong with her? She let out a pained sigh as she dispensed a dollop of cleansing foam on her hands. She washed and shook her head and let out another sigh, glancing absently up at her reflection in the mirror.

The man behind her smiled.

“OH!”

Barbie hardly had a chance to turn around before the man lunged at her, grabbing her from behind, pressing a big rancid-smelling hand over her mouth.

So many impressions flooded Barbie's brain and body at that moment that she could only writhe in the man's iron grip as he tugged her toward the southeast corner of the bathroom. She could smell smoke on him, not just cigarette smoke but brimstone and wood smoke, like the smell of burned buildings.

White-hot terror knifed through Barbie's midsection as she dug her heels into the floor and bucked wildly in his arms.
She would not be raped.
That notion crackled through her brain with the cold abruptness of a lightning bolt.
She would rather die than be raped.
If she had to perish at the hands of this freak she would go down fighting. And that's when she thought of something she had learned in a self-defense class she had taken with Cyndee Kaiser many years ago.

She lifted her right foot suddenly and slammed her stiletto heel down as hard as she could on the man's instep.

It was as though a switch had been thrown, the man yelping suddenly like a stuck pig, his arms instantly loosening, his body seizing up. Barbie slipped out of his grasp, lumbering toward the door but stumbling over her own feet. Those four-inch heels proved to be a blessing
and
a curse. She tripped and landed on her face.

Out of the corner of her eye, in the row of mirrors, she glimpsed the reflection of her assailant. He was doubled over now, ass against the back wall, cringing with pain. Face obscured by shadow, he wore an anachronistic old stovepipe hat—a midnight-black topper, as Barbie's grandfather might have called it once upon a time—along with the black suit of a mortician. In fact, even amid her debilitating terror, Barbie Allison latched onto an odd stray thought:
He looks like a mad chimney sweep
.

He was also digging something out of his pocket. A gun? A knife? Barbie crawled toward the door in a panic.

She never made it.

A viselike grip closed around her ankles, and she screamed then, a primal cry for help, a last-ditch shriek for deliverance that bounced off the tile walls and reverberated out into the corridors, reaching countless ears. “
Help! Somebody help!”

The man in black calmly and relentlessly dragged her back into the shadows, a slipstream of charred BO trailing after him, Barbie kicking and clawing at the floor. She would not give up. She would not give this monster the opportunity to rape her. She would chew his testicles off before she would allow him to rape her.

The odor of menthol filled Barbie's nostrils as a cloth was pressed down over her mouth. Outside the bathroom door, frantic footsteps were approaching. The jangle of keys. The sound of the locked door rattling.

The light was fading, Barbie's flesh cold and tingling, her mouth so cottony now she could hardly open it. She felt herself sliding back along the tiles, and it felt as though she were slipping into a warm bath of darkness. There was a second door in the ladies' room, a service door in the corner, and Barbie saw it through the gauze of her dwindling vision. The man in black was prying it open in slow, blurry motion—a time traveler from some Dickensian nightmare.

Barbie was dragged into darkness, her last conscious thought a prayer to some vague supreme being that she wouldn't be raped.

She needn't have worried.

The man in the hat had something completely different in mind for her.

“This morning we're going to build the perfect serial killer.”

The man at the front of the room made his pronouncement in a measured voice, unaware of the tremendous portents in his words. He was a trim, light-skinned African American in a smartly tailored houndstooth sport coat, black V-neck, and jeans. His deep-set eyes and sculpted features revealed very little, and about the only thing that differentiated him from a stylish hip-hop A&R man was the laminated FBI faculty ID clipped to his outer pocket.

He turned and scratched a phrase in large letters across the blackboard—

THE ARCHETYPE

—as the hushed, scuttling sound of note-taking filled the oblong classroom.

“Webster's defines
archetype
as the model or the original version of something.” He clapped chalk dust from his hands, raising tiny puffs of yellow smoke as he casually surveyed the room. “That's not exactly what I'm talking about here. And I'm definitely not talking about some B-movie version of the serial murderer. You can forget all that bogus mythology. What I'm talking about here is the mathematical average. The standard. The
monolithic
murderer.”

Fourteen eager recruits sat in orderly rows before Ulysses Grove, twelve men and two women, bathed in stark fluorescent light. Each bore the telltale formality of the junior field agent on the come, from the Brooks Brothers jackets draped neatly over chair backs down to the meticulously buffed Florsheims. They all listened intently to the dapper instructor's words—all of them, that is, except one.

Edith Drinkwater sat next to the windows, near the reeking coffee service, chewing her pencil eraser. She was a short, stout, copper-skinned Haitian girl in an ill-fitting black dress, with tight cornrows of inky black braids curving down the back of her skull like ribs of armor. She had the plush curves of her mother—the matronly hips and bosom—which for years had been concealed behind the starched breastplates of boardroom dress codes. But when your cleavage starts a few centimeters south of your chin, there's not much you can do in the way of disguise.

The youngest field agent in the room, Drinkwater had difficulty focusing on the dapper instructor at the blackboard due to an undercurrent of emotions ebbing and flowing through her. She felt a vague distrust for the mostly male faculty here at the Academy—the old patriarchy was alive and well at Quantico—and yet at the same time she wanted so badly to rise through its ranks, to get to the
good part
—the actual casework.

Back in the mid-nineties, fresh out of junior college with a BS in Law Enforcement, Drinkwater got a job as a radio dispatcher for the Cicero, Illinois PD's Violent Crimes Division, a position for which she was woefully overqualified. After burning out on the edgy ennui of the gig, she spent a few years in the private sector—first as an investigator for American Family Insurance, and later as a skip tracer for Maksym Bail Bonds in West Chicago. All of it conspired to make Drinkwater want more. She was too smart, too tough, and too talented to be the token black in an understaffed suburban bond shop.

“Okay, let's start building the killer,” Agent Grove was saying, pacing across the front of the room with his own bad self all decked out in Armani denim.

Drinkwater noticed Grove's mismatched eyes from the back of the room—one eye, the left, looked droopy, unfocused, and dead—and she wondered about the visual acuity in that left eye. Would they let
her
in the Academy with an eye like that? She knew all about the incident that had nearly blinded Grove two years ago. In fact, she knew more about Ulysses Grove, the only African American man ever to reach the status of senior consulting profiler in Bureau history, than most field agents who had spent months on cases with him. She made it her business to know such things.

“First question,” Grove said, looking around the class. “Man or woman? Quick. Anybody.”

Drinkwater heard somebody murmur, “Man…what else?”

Grove was nodding. “That's right, men are dogs, and they also thrill-kill about eighty-nine percent more than women. What about age, race, religion?”

A portly black man with thick glasses in the third row raised his hand. “Middle-aged, white, Christian, red state Republican probably.”

Scattered laughter. Grove acknowledged the joke with a terse nod. “Very good. The archetype is forty-two, to be exact. He's married and has a family. Usually in some middle-management job. Very few serial killers are drifters, as the movies would have you believe. On the other hand very few are geniuses. On the surface, the archetype is a bland, ordinary, run-of-the-mill person with no outward eccentricities. That's too easy, though. Let's go back to the perp's childhood and the old chestnut, the homicidal trinity. The early childhood attributes of tomorrow's serial killer are…what? Anybody. Give me the three traits of the junior sociopath.”

Around the room scattered arms levitated. Edith Drinkwater put her hand up.

Grove gave her a nod. “The nice lady in black over here.”

“Bed-wetting, fire starting, and animal torture.” Drinkwater uttered the words with the plainspoken confidence of a country lawyer resting her case, as Grove proffered a pleasant smile in response.

“Excellent, thank you.” He turned and wrote the three traits on the board, the sound of his chalk rasping and squeaking.

 

BED WETTER

FIRE STARTER

ANIMAL TORTURER

 

“This formula is overused,” Grove went on. He turned and scanned the room as he spewed his rapid-fire lesson. “It's probably a little misleading, maybe even a little apocryphal, but it's still to this day a good starting point. Sixty-two percent of all children between the ages of six and ten wet the bed on a regular basis, and they're not gonna kill anybody. But when you add a fascination with fire you reduce the percentage to eleven percent.”

Throughout the classroom pens madly skritched and scrawled the numbers.

“You know where I'm going with this.” Grove paused for dramatic effect. “If our little problem child also has a propensity to pull the wings off of flies, he's part of a much narrower band of the population. We're talking about maybe point-zero-five percent that will pee the bed, play with matches,
and
kick the dog. Why is this percentage important? Anybody? What's the big deal with point-zero-five percent?”

Fewer hands shot up. A couple in the back. And, of course, Drinkwater.

Grove grinned at Drinkwater. “You're on a roll, go ahead.”

“It's basically the same percentage of the human race that will murder somebody.”

“Very good. Now let's push it further. Let's say a huge percentage of that point-zero-five percent will kill out of passion or opportunity. Cuckolded husbands, drive-by initiates, robberies gone bad. That's not our boy.”

Grove paused again. He played his gaze across the room, and for a brief instant Drinkwater thought he was going to say, “Boo!” Ulysses Grove had that effect on people. Something behind his dark, almond-shaped eyes hinted at volatile chemicals being mixed.

Not surprisingly, many of the students had entire MySpace pages devoted to speculations about Special Agent Grove's mysterious personal history. He had been instrumental in more infamous homicide closures than any other single employee of the Bureau, including Melvin Purvis and J. Edgar Hoover combined, and yet he seemed like a major flake. One rumormonger swore up and down that Grove was the reincarnated spirit of some African witch doctor. Most believed there was something mystical about the man's intuition, but Edith had a feeling the only mystical thing about Ulysses Grove was his ability to manipulate the media, play politics at the Bureau, and maybe even use people to get ahead, to close cases, to build his legend.

Right now, in fact, the legend was turning with a dramatic flourish and pulling down a small projection screen on which a gun-range silhouette was pasted. “Our boy fits into a much smaller shard of that murderous pie chart,” Grove said, jerking a thumb at the silhouette, then shooting a sidelong glance at the class.

Drinkwater stared at the paper effigy. She had seen similar silhouettes many times. The black, featureless cutout was rendered with the simplicity of an international symbol for PERSON. Depicted from the waist up, overlaid against an intricate crosshair bull's-eye, it looked like an inverted cast-iron skillet.

“We're talking about one hundredth of one percent of that point-zero-five percent.” Grove indicated the black oval head and rounded rectangle shoulders.

Drinkwater knew target silhouettes well. She had happily riddled many of them with .44 caliber holes over the years. At the Cicero police academy she had won a trophy in the quick-draw contest, managing to get her Colt Desert Eagle out of her shoulder holster in 1.5 seconds, then squeezing off eight rounds over the course of another 4.2 seconds, five of them head shots. But today, for some reason, the target looked strange to Drinkwater.

At the front of the room Grove posed another question: “What we're talking about here is a person who will kill out of…what?”

Only Drinkwater's hand went up.

Grove gave her a nod. “Go for it.”

“They'll kill out of need.”

“Define need,” Grove said.

She looked at the target silhouette, that big bulbous black head like a dead lightbulb. “Need…in terms of…like addiction.”

Grove nodded. “That's not bad. But it's more than a controlled substance to feed an addiction, it's fuel for the fantasy. The killing is actually secondary. What do I mean by that?”

Drinkwater didn't exactly get what he meant by that.

Neither did anybody else.

“The murder serves a purpose not unlike pornography,” Grove explained. “This guy—our mathematical average, our
every-killer
if you want to call him that—he kills to feed that furnace.”

Pens scribbled notes across the room. But Drinkwater could not tear her gaze from that silhouette. Something about it was profoundly bothersome.

“What is this furnace anyway?” Grove scanned the room, looking for a participant other than Drinkwater. “Anybody, what is it?”

“Sadism?”

Grove nodded at the Pakistani gentleman in the second row, the one with the bow tie and eager-beaver expression. “Interesting but not exactly correct, not for our archetype. Somebody else take a crack.”

“Cruelty,” another voice suggested.

Grove shook his head. “Actually, cruelty is more of a baroque, external modifier. When I say furnace I'm talking about something fundamental, the source of the fantasy—the
source
—somebody else?

Nobody said anything.

Drinkwater stared at that black bulbous outline, that perfectly generic figure. “Ego.”

“Excuse me?” Grove glanced at Drinkwater with a half smile. “Say again?”

“Ego.”

“Give the lady a gold star, that's exactly right. Hubris, ego. It's that Nietzschean superhero comic book in his head.” Grove walked over to the target. He reached up and ran the tip of his index finger around the contours of the silhouette. “When you perfect victim away the fantasy, our typical killer here murders out of the need to dominate. To be superior. That's where the torture component comes in.”

More scribbling.

Grove cocked his head at the silhouette. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, our boy's a torturer. Most are. Even physical positioning echoes the ego. Somebody tell me what I mean by that. The physical positioning echoing the ego component.”

Drinkwater looked up, didn't even raise her hand. “You're talking about the missionary position.”

Uneasy laughter.

Grove stopped smiling. “Go on.”

“Man on top,” Drinkwater said.

“That's right…and what else?”

Drinkwater looked at the silhouette. “He needs to do it to them slowly.”

“Good, what else.”

“He needs to have eye contact.”

The class got quiet then. Grove nodded. He started down the row toward Drinkwater's chair in the back. “Interesting.
Why,
though? Why eye contact?”

Drinkwater took a deep breath. At the age of eleven she had been raped by her stepfather. It happened late one night in a tractor shed out behind the Robert Chambers housing project.

After a long pause she said, “Because he needs to see the desolation in your eyes.”

Now the class was stone silent. Some of them stared at the floor. Most realized Drinkwater had said “
your”
instead of “
their”
as Grove approached her desk. He gave her an encouraging smile. “Ms. Drinkwater, you go to the head of the class.”

“He needs to see it,” she reiterated softly with a level, unblinking gaze.