Spectrum (The Karen Vail Series) (18 page)

27

>263-37 147th AVENUE

Rosedale, Queens

Wednesday, December 24, 1997

Vail pulled into her driveway at 11:00 PM. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to lose the stress and death in her work world, outside the safe zone that was her husband and her child.

She had wanted to stop at a pay phone and tell Deacon she was on her way but did not have any change and figured it would be better to head directly home rather than spend additional time trying to find an open store on Christmas Eve that could break a dollar.

A chill shuddered through her body. Even though she had only been sitting there a few seconds, the warmth inside her Honda dissipated nearly immediately.

She got out and ran up the front porch steps, then jammed her key into the lock and quickly closed the door behind her.

She found Deacon sitting on the couch in the living room, beside the tree, a spreadsheet on his lap.

“Hi,” she said, heading straight to him. “Sorry I’m so late. I was ready to leave at six, as soon as I finished the arrest report, but then Russo—”

“So Russo’s the one to blame for ruining Christmas Eve?”

Vail pulled her chin back. “Uh, well, there was another murder, that case I was working on when—”

“Yeah, I don’t really care, Karen. I mean, who works on Christmas Eve?”

“The world doesn’t stop because the date on the calendar reads December 24, Deacon. This is a big case, a serial killer. This is his third victim.”

Deacon tossed the spreadsheet aside. “That’s why they have detectives, right? I mean, you’re a patrol officer on a gang assignment I wish you weren’t doing to begin with, working undercover buying guns and drugs from all kinds of dangerous criminals. You’ve got a baby, for Christ’s sake, Karen.”

“This is the job, Deacon. You knew I was a cop, and that I wanted to make detective, when you asked me to marry you. I’m doing what I need to do to get that shield.”

“No matter what it means to our family. How long are you going to be putting your life on the line with drug dealers?”

Vail removed her jacket and tossed it over a nearby chair. “Funny you should ask. Because tonight, I got my shield. I’m a detective.”

Deacon sat forward. “You—what?”

“Where’s Jonathan?”

“In his crib. Asleep. It’s eleven o’clock. Where’d you think he’d be?”

Vail shook her head, then ran upstairs and gave her baby a kiss on the cheek. She wanted to pick him up and hold him, but she knew better. Instead, she stood there a moment, stroking his face, then headed back downstairs.

Deacon met her at the bottom of the landing. “Have you eaten?”

“Never had time.”

“I got you some Chinese, just in case. It’s in the fridge.”

“Thanks.” Vail walked into the kitchen and pulled the pink Frigidaire door open. “Believe me, I would’ve rather been here with you and Jonathan on Christmas Eve than staring at another murdered woman.” She went about dishing out the food.

“Why don’t we open presents first?”

Vail stopped, her finger hovering over the microwave’s start button, then said, “Sure.” She was starving, but she knew Deacon had been waiting hours for her to come home.

They sat down beside one another in front of the tree, exchanged boxes, and tore open the wrapping.

Vail was staring at a diamond drop necklace. Her mouth slipped open. “Deacon, this is—it’s gorgeous.”
And expensive.
“I love it. Thank-you.”

He stopped, about to open the Bloomingdale’s box. “I knew you’d like it. Try it on.” Then he pulled the lid off, exposing a striped dress shirt. “I love these colors. Oh,” he said, lifting the shirt up. “And a tie.” He glanced over, must’ve seen that Vail was hesitating. “What’s the matter? Go on. Take it out, put it on.”

“Deacon, I … I can’t. We can’t afford this.”

“Of course we can. I charged it. We’ll just pay it off over time.”

“At 20 percent interest? Look, I love it. And I love that you wanted to buy it for me.”
Impulsive, actually. And irresponsible. But damn, it’s beautiful. Must’ve cost a thousand dollars, if not more. What was he thinking? He’s never done anything like this.

“Just try it on.”

She closed the box. “If I try it on, you won’t be able to get it off me. And we can’t afford it. I don’t want to run up a credit card bill. You’re in finance, you know this.”

“Like that movie—
Risky Business
? Sometimes you just gotta say, ‘What the fuck.’”

“Yeah. But this isn’t one of those times.” She snapped the box closed, got up, and went into the kitchen to eat.

28

>230 EAST 21st STREET

Manhattan

Monday, January 12, 1998

Vail stepped into the police academy auditorium and stopped. She had not expected to see so many cops here—well over a hundred, she estimated. From the looks of it, just based on the ones she recognized, there were detectives, sergeants, lieutenants, and captains, all taking the course alongside her.

She took a seat and glanced around. The more she thought about it, however, it was not surprising to see the upper ranks here because it was technically possible for a patrol officer to keep testing up to higher grades relatively quickly, before he truly developed and honed the investigative skills possessed by those he would be overseeing. It seemed to her to be an odd and screwy setup, but the NYPD was considered the finest police force in the country, so what did she know? The system obviously worked fine the way it was.

In the middle of the second week, the morning sessions featured two FBI agents from the Bureau’s Profiling and Behavioral Analysis Unit, Art Rooney and Mark Safarik.

As Vail settled into her seat, the detective to her left—an older, seasoned investigator, groaned. “If I’d known we were gonna get this hocus-pocus bullshit I woulda brought my pillow. Now I gotta sleep with my head on the desk.” He laughed.

The one to her right said, “I woulda brought my Ouija board if
I’d
known.” More laughing.

Maybe I could’ve taken the morning off, tried to get some work done on my case.

But before she could plot a surreptitious route to the exit, Rooney began speaking and Vail leaned back in her seat, resigned to stay put until she had a clear path out.

Rooney spoke about his expertise in arson and bombing, and new and different ways of looking at the criminals who carried out these crimes. While there was a dearth of information on bombers, the profiling unit was beginning to build a general behavioral assessment of who these people were. It was still a ways off from being put into practice with confidence, he explained, but Vail was intrigued by the methods Rooney used to look at the individual psychologically and turn that information into a forensic that could almost be measured, like fingerprints, hair, and fibers.

More broadly, he gave an overview of the personality types of the offenders who commit the types of violent crimes that the unit commonly encounters. “There are several disorders we see. I’ll go into each one in detail, but suffice it to say that our personality development is key to determining who we’ll become as an adult. If it’s disrupted at any point along the way as a child, depending on the age when it happens and the severity with which it occurs, it’ll cause various types of perceptual distortions—and psychological disorders.

“These may impact their interpersonal relations or their self-concept development. Interruption of either can have catastrophic effects because these are how we establish our sense of self, how a healthy person learns to identify what he or she likes in others, and how to mimic them. But if they go awry, we end up with an adult who exhibits one or more personality disorders. When there’s more than one, I think you can imagine the problems that can arise. In short, we get a really screwed up individual, and if he’s inclined toward violence, this is the offender we’re tasked with trying to find.

“Now, for our purposes, there are five major personality disorders—inadequate, paranoid, borderline, narcissistic, and psychopathic—and each has its own telltale symptoms and traits. This is important for a number of reasons, for when you do catch the offender, you’ll need to interrogate him. If you use the wrong approach for that type of individual, he’ll shut down and you won’t get squat. Use the correct strategy, however, and he’ll open up to you.”

Rooney spent a disproportionate amount of time going through the characteristics of psychopathy, primarily because “it’s the most virulent personality disorder known to man. To give you an example, 90 percent of serial killers and 65 percent of molesters and rapists are psychopathic.”

Vail had filled several pages of notes by this point and was looking forward to giving her hand a rest when Supervisory Special Agent Mark Safarik took the podium.

Safarik started by recounting his personal story of how he came to his position with the vaunted unit. “I was a detective with the Davis, California, PD, sitting in a training class just like this one, and two profilers came to speak. And what they said opened my eyes to new and different ways of looking at not only an investigation but the offender, as well. Let me give you an example.

“As detectives, when you walk into a crime scene, you’re interested in finding the objective evidence that’ll identify a specific individual, the perpetrator who committed the violent crime you’re investigating. A latent print, some saliva, a handwriting sample. Or even better, a video clip on a surveillance tape. These are all known, proven methods of identifying the criminal you’re looking for. But what if you don’t have any of that? It can stall your investigation. And even if you find someone you like for the crime, you may have a tough time helping the prosecutor make the case against him.

“When I enter a crime scene, I’m looking for behaviors that the offender left behind. If I can understand who this guy is, it’ll help me figure out why the offender chose this victim at this point in time. It’ll explain why he lifted her dress up over her face after he killed her, why he defecated at the scene, or cut off a body part.

“I also approach this from the victim’s point of view by learning who she was and what led her to cross paths with this offender.

“In essence, I’m looking to identify the
type
of person who committed the crime—by attempting to understand who this person is by evaluating the crime scene behaviorally. You heard the disorders Agent Rooney discussed. This scene will contain clues to the particular disorder the offender suffers from. Why is that? Anyone?”

He looked around the auditorium, but no one offered a guess.

“Reason is because the killer is unknowingly telling us a story. We just have to be receptive to understanding his language, to learn his language, so we can recognize what he’s telling us.”

Holy shit. That’s what I’ve been thinking.
Vail sat up in her seat and realized that she had been so riveted by what Safarik was saying that she had stopped taking notes.

At the lunch break, Vail rushed the podium. Rooney was talking with two detectives and a captain, but Safarik was alone, shutting down his PowerPoint presentation.

“Agent Safarik,” Vail said, bending around the lid of the laptop to make eye contact.

He stood up—all six foot six of him, immaculately dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and intense purple and blood-red tie. “Call me Mark.” He extended a hand and she took it.

“Karen Vail. I, uh, I was blown away by your presentation. I mean, I wasn’t expecting much—I mean, some of the guys around me were down on profiling and I thought …”
Jesus, Karen, get a grip.
“I majored in psychology, so I’ve been exposed to some of this, but you and Agent Rooney took it to a whole other level. A lot of what you said has been rattling around in my head on my case, and I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. What you said about understanding what the killer did and why, that makes so much sense to me.”

“It can be pretty powerful, once you step back and allow yourself to see what’s there at the crime scene, other than the usual stuff you’re taught to look for. It’s a totally different way of evaluating your case.”

“Speaking of my case, can I—can I ask you about it? I’ve got one that’s really baffling us and there aren’t any forensics to speak of. No suspects.”

“How many vics over what time period?”

“Three, over a three-year period.”

“Tell me about the first one.”

Vail gave him a brief rundown of the Carole Manos murder, what she knew of the woman, and an overview of what the scene looked like.

“And you’re sure this was the offender’s first vic?”

“Uh, no. I’m not sure at all. I’m not sure about much of anything. I was—I was a patrol officer at the time and well, let’s just say that I was fortunate to have been at all three fresh crime scenes. I just got my shield and was handed the case.”

Safarik nodded slowly. “You must be pretty damn good if they entrusted you with such an important case.”

Gee, thanks. No pressure.

He started coiling his power cord. “One of our profilers, one of the founding fathers of the unit, developed a database called VICAP, for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Why don’t we plug in your three vics and see if we can come up with something?”

“How does that work?”

“Let’s say the South Dakota PD finds a body in a house with a severed right index finger. Six months later, the Connecticut PD finds one too. They’re both running their own investigations but neither one knows about the other. The offender, or UNSUB—unknown subject—has impunity to kill as he pleases because we’re not able to build a complete picture of who he’s targeting and how he’s finding his victims.

“But what if he made a mistake at the South Dakota crime scene, a crucial error that could help us identify him if we put it together with something he did with the Connecticut victim’s body? If we don’t know these vics are all from the same killer, we have an incomplete book on him.

“That’s why Robert Ressler’s VICAP idea was so important. Whenever a law enforcement agency has a murder that meets certain criteria, they fill out a VICAP form and that info gets entered into the database. All unique characteristics of the case are listed—MO, signature aspects, crime scene photos, victim and suspect details, things like that. And we can set certain search-specific parameters to look through all the data. So—give me something from your case.”

“The UNSUB draws a diagram in black marker on his vics’ necks.”

“Perfect. So you could search VICAP for that kind of diagram. Or you could even go broader and look for those cases where the UNSUB has drawn something on the victim. If it pulls up another case in another jurisdiction, and you think they’re related, you can then compare or combine the things that detective’s discovered with the stuff you’ve discovered on your case, and now you’ve both got a more complete picture of that UNSUB—and it could be just enough to help you solve it.”

“I need to do this. Like ASAP.”

Safarik shoved the laptop into his large leather case. “One caveat. If an investigating agency isn’t aware of VICAP, or doesn’t take the time to fill out the form and send it to us, that murder won’t be in our database. There’ll be nothing to find. But identifying that first victim could be key.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s his first kill. He may not have thought things out as thoroughly the first time around. He’s feeling his way, he’s inexperienced, he’ll probably make a mistake or two, mistakes he learns from as time goes on, as he moves from victim to victim, as he perfects his trade.”

“You make it sound like it’s a business.”

“Not a business per se, but it
is
a career to him. Whether he realizes it or not, he’s learning, getting better at what he does—killing people—and honing his skills. That’s why it can be so tough to catch these guys. They get better at selecting their vics, at entrapping them, at outwitting
us
. But if you can find his first kill, you might just see something that could implicate him or significantly narrow down your suspect pool.”

“Okay.”

“That’s not to say that they don’t make mistakes later. It can happen. They’re human—well, that’s debatable, but let’s just say they’re not perfect. Shit happens.”

Vail flashed on the car accident and Thorne getting killed.
Shit does indeed happen.

“You’ll get this guy, Karen. Have the liaison at the New York field office send the case over to us. We’ll do what we can to help.”

“So when you got turned on to behavioral analysis,” she said, “how did—I mean, you were with Davis PD. How’d you end up at Quantico?”

Safarik gave a quick glance around, apparently realizing that Vail was asking for herself, and how she could make the same thing happen. “I joined the FBI and hoped my career path would lead me to the profiling unit. That’s the only way in.”

Another detective who had come up to the podium asked Safarik if he had a moment to discuss his case.

“Thanks,” Vail said, backing away.

“Find that first vic,” Safarik said.