The Ripper Gene (14 page)

I remained seated. “Yes, Tyler. With both her doctor’s and her approval. I didn’t interrogate her, I just asked if she could remember anything from her ordeal.”

Tyler looked at me with an incredulity that distorted his face. “So does she still claim that
you
were the one who kidnapped and raped her?”

“No. She seems to have made good progress with her psychiatrist and seems pretty convinced now that it wasn’t me. But she didn’t remember much of anything else.”

“What else could she remember? The only thing she kept saying over and over was that you did it, Lucas.” Tyler hesitated and looked at Woodson, but then looked back at me. “What did you do to her? What terrible thing did you ever do to her in the past that would make her think that?”

“I didn’t do anything to her, Tyler. And you’re the one being questioned here, not me. I’ll ask the questions.” I waited for a response, but received none. Tyler just stood there seething, so I continued. “She also mentioned something else that we found rather strange. She claimed that the killer talks to her in her dreams. While she sleeps.”

Tyler raised his eyebrows. “So?”

“She said the killer talks to her in her sleep, Tyler.”

“And again, I repeat, so what?”

“I guess I have to spell it out for you. You sleep with Mara. She says the killer talks to her in her sleep. Can you shed any light on this?”

Tyler laughed so loudly that I jumped. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He glanced at Woodson. “You’re both serious?”

Neither of us replied.

He leaned forward and spoke directly to me as if Woodson wasn’t there. “I don’t know anything about that, Lucas. Are you that screwed up over the idea of me and Mara together?”

“Don’t kid yourself.”

He balled his hands into fists, but left them on his desk. “What kind of a hit did your ego take, Lucas? Was it bad enough for you to try to accuse me of being your killer?” He shook his head. “Get the hell out of my office. I’m not saying another word to either of you.” He picked up his telephone, but kept his eyes on us. “Janie? Get security on the phone.”

I stood. “There’s no need for that. We’ll go.” I saw Woodson begin to protest, but spoke over her. “We’re leaving.”

Woodson shot me an angry glare as she passed through the door. Without another word I turned and walked in silence down the hospital hallway behind her.

*   *   *

Woodson didn’t speak to me until we got in the car. As I turned the key, she faced me. “What happened in there?”

“I just needed to avoid an embarrassing situation, for one. For God’s sake, he’s my brother.”

“Then maybe Jimmy’s right. Maybe you
are
too close to this case.”

“That’s for Jimmy to decide. Not you.”

“He could be persuaded. There’s a reason he assigned me to this case.”

“Look, Woodson. I realize he’s placed you in a watchdog role here. It’s painfully evident. But just think about it. How did you think my brother would react? Just because Mara said that she’s dreamed about these women getting killed and she thinks the killer spoke to her, so what? She has a professionally documented mental disorder. And let’s not forget that she believed I was her abductor, not Tyler. She even admitted in her interview today that she never even saw her kidnapper. Based on all of that, do you really think that interrogating my brother was the most important lead we could follow in this case?”

Woodson shifted in her seat and looked away, out the window. “No, I don’t. But you have to trust me. You needed to interview your brother in order to stay on this case.”

“And only time will tell whether it was worth it or not. But for now, I’d rather get back to the crime lab and find out whether Terry’s pulled any trace evidence that can actually help us identify the real killer. Maybe some DNA evidence, I don’t know, or a fingerprint. Something.”

“You get no arguments from me.”

“Great.” I started the car but didn’t put it in reverse. “Woodson. I want to catch this guy as bad as anyone. But if I don’t have to further destroy the remnants of my relationship with my brother in the process, I’d prefer to avoid doing so. Okay?”

“Okay, Madden. I really am looking out for you. We had to interview your brother today, after what Mara said in the interview. Jimmy would have pounced on you otherwise.”

“I get it. So, are we back in business?”

“We’re back in business.”

*   *   *

We didn’t get back to my place until seven o’clock. I confirmed with Woodson that I’d see her at the New Orleans field office the next morning, where she, Terry, and I would organize the debriefing for local law enforcement that afternoon. After a cordial and brief exchange of good-nights, she ducked into her car and left.

Back inside I lay down on the couch, pushing Watson gently aside to make room. Sleep was coming on, but it seemed like such a terrible luxury.

I stared at the picture of Tyler and me waiting on that school bus, my arm protectively around his tiny shoulders. I realized that when I’d stepped into Tyler’s office today I’d crossed a bridge and burned it, probably never to return. I hadn’t realized how much I’d hoped we’d still be able to get back to those days somehow.

Sometimes I had bad ideas in life, and followed through with them anyway. I was fairly certain that interviewing my brother about Mara’s disappearance had been one of those bad ideas. I worried that the price for that mistake might well turn out to be immeasurable.

It was my last thought before I finally succumbed to sleep.

SEVENTEEN

The next morning I walked into the New Orleans field office and ran a gauntlet of agents welcoming me back with nervous greetings and awkward pauses. St. Clair and Harmon, older agents, winked at me in an almost conspiratorial fashion. Faraday and Tucker, the newest agents in the department, shook hands with me gently and patted my back softly. Everyone, veterans and rookies alike, acted slightly out of sorts, not quite themselves. My return from a near-fatal knifing served as a grim reminder of the ever-present potential for disaster in our chosen line of work.

On the way I saw Woodson’s silhouette through the thin curtain of the “hot office” reserved for visiting agents. I thought about dropping by and saying hello as the rest of the agents filtered back to their offices, but there were far too many eavesdropping ears around.

Instead, I walked down the hall to my own office. I sent an e-mail to Terry and Woodson about the upcoming debriefing. I asked Woodson to prepare an overview of the victimology—who was killed and any common links between them—and asked Terry to provide an overview of the forensics.

I set about organizing the entire session, from the geography of the kill sites to possible symbolism in the modus operandi. I called Shelly Vondifer, a linguistics expert in the Jackson field office, to find out if she could offer any insight into the word pattern we’d observed to date—“a tan cat.” If there were any literary references out there, Shelly could find them. But she didn’t sound enthusiastic.

“I haven’t found anything yet, Lucas. This just isn’t enough to go on. You can’t even breach copyright with three words.”

“There’s no mention of a tan cat, not anywhere?”

“Honestly, you name it, we’ve looked. From Egypt to T. S. Eliot to Andrew Lloyd Webber. Nothing sticks out about a tan cat.”

“Sounds like you turned over every stone you could.”

“Lucas, as sick as this sounds, you’re going to need more to go on if we’re going to get anywhere with this message. I hope other leads pan out for you before linguistics is able to help.”

I thanked her and hung up, disappointed. The only way Shelly was going to figure out the message was if we had more bodies. There had to be another way.

At that moment Terry poked his face through my doorway. “Got a minute?”

“For you, always.” I waved him in.

He sat in the chair opposite my desk. “Good news for a change. We looked at the short tandem repeats in the DNA from the blood samples taken from the victims’ foreheads. Those messages on the foreheads aren’t drawn with the victims’ own blood. Just like you thought.”

I whistled. “No shit?”

“No shit,” he confirmed. “But, get this. The DNA in the blood left on each of the victims’ foreheads? It’s not from the victims, but it’s all from the same source. In other words, the blood left on each of the victims is coming from the same person.”

“Then the blood left on the victims’ foreheads probably comes from our killer, right?”

“Hey. Anything’s possible. But if I had to bet on it, I’d say yes.” Terry paused, then added, “Of course, that’s assuming our guy is as screwed up as they usually are.”

I leaned forward with a sudden thought. “Did you search that DNA against CODIS?”

“Yeah, I checked the combined DNA indexing system. But no hits there, either, unfortunately. Whoever owns that DNA hasn’t spent time in our judicial system. Not yet, at least.”

I waved it away. “Not surprising, actually. If I had to bet, I would have guessed our killer’s never been incarcerated anyway.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m getting the sense of a perfectionist here. No trace evidence, no witnesses. And did you see how straight the letters are on the victims’ foreheads? It’s like he uses a ruler. The guy may be sick, but he’s anally retentive, too.”

“I agree with that.”

“Some people think an offender only gains that sort of expertise by learning from past mistakes, but I think some of them, at least the superintelligent ones, just start out like this when they finally snap. No previous record; they just wake up one morning and start killing, completely in control of their faculties. I think that’s who we’re dealing with here,” I said. “A superintelligent, obsessive-compulsive psychotic who just snapped.”

Terry raised his eyebrows. “Wow. Sounds like someone I work for. Are you the Snow White Killer?”

“Very funny. Everyone seems to be asking that question lately.”

“Hey, at least I’m only kidding.”

“I know. So anyway, if we think the blood left on the foreheads may come from our killer…”

Terry nodded before I finished the thought. “I already know what you’re thinking.”

“Then we should run those samples through the Damnation Algorithm. If SWK really is leaving behind those messages on their foreheads with his own blood, then analyzing that DNA sample might give us a lot of insight into the Snow White Killer.”

“I’m already on it.” Terry stood. “I’ll get the lab moving on it, and I’ll still see you at the debriefing later.”

As the door closed behind him I could barely contain my excitement. The opportunity for a real-life test of the Damnation Algorithm was finally at hand.

Terry stuck his head back in the door. “By the way.”

“Yes?”

“I forgot to mention. Your buddy Agent Woodson has been down on the mass spec all morning. She’s driving the techs crazy.”

“What the hell’s she doing down on the mass spec? Running samples herself?”

“No. She’s using the software to screen toxicology databases. She thinks she might have found something in one of the victim’s blood samples. From the tox reports. Something they might have missed.”

“Really?”

“That’s what she said, but wouldn’t tell me any more. She jumps in with both feet, you know? I like it. I told the techs to calm down and let her do her thing.” Terry shrugged. “Who knows, maybe she’s on to something. Anyway, see you around.”

“Sounds good.”

Terry closed the door, and I returned to the slide presentation on my desktop: “FBI Field Office Debriefing for Local Jurisdictions: Serial Killer Patterns in Three Deaths in the Mississippi Delta.”

We had a lot of ground to cover.

*   *   *

Four hours later I stood in the middle of our main conference room as about a dozen attendees filed inside and took their seats around an oval-shaped mahogany conference table.

Woodson sat on the opposite end of the table, and Terry sat beside her. Several other agents sat in chairs, holding cups of coffee, quietly whispering. I noticed Shelly, our linguistics expert, had shown up in person.

The two young guys, Faraday and Tucker, came in late and took their places, opened their legal pads, and poised their ballpoint pens for notes. I noticed Harmon nudge St. Clair and gesture toward the rookies in a “get a load of this” fashion.

The remaining individuals around the table weren’t from the Bureau, and included my old buddy Sheriff Pratt, the Elvis impersonator from the first crime scene, and several other uniformed state and local law enforcement officers from Mississippi and Louisiana who I didn’t recognize. At the last second, Donny slipped through the door and winked a silent hello before sitting down in a final empty chair on the far end.

Woodson flicked on the videoconference monitor with a remote, and the images of Raritan and Parkman shimmered into view at the end of a nondescript table from some conference room in Quantico.

“Hello, guys.”

They nodded. “Lucas,” Raritan spoke my name simply, as a salutation.

“Okay, folks,” I said, turning back to the gathered group, “everyone’s here, so let’s get started. As you know this is a debriefing regarding the investigation of three murders in the state of Mississippi attributed to the unsub currently referred to in the media as the Snow White Killer.”

I clicked the remote, and the first slide of the presentation appeared, depicting a map of the western Mississippi–eastern Louisiana border. Three yellow stars dotted Mississippi towns in an area delineated by the Mississippi River on the west and by Highway 49 on the east.

“First, the kill sites. To date we have three victims, each with residences within a forty-mile radius spanning the various dump sites.”

“So it’s a local killer?” one of the sheriffs from Louisiana asked.

“Looks like it,” I answered, “but not much else to say about that for now. Geography assessments are just difficult when there are only three sites, but Terry’s nevertheless going to work up a jeopardy surface map as soon as he can. Once he finishes it, we’ll distribute it so you all can see areas with predicted higher probability for future abductions. It may help, it may not. Any questions?”