“Meaning they want me up there yesterday.”
“Exactly.”
He drew a thoughtful breath. “I’ve got another urgent case to wrap up. That should happen tomorrow. I’ll drive up there as soon as I’m done. In the meantime, I can get started down here. If you either e-mail or fax me any case-file data, I’ll review it. Then we won’t lose any time. I’d need a day to familiarize myself with every detail of the case anyway.”
“Consider it done.” Sloane was relieved and grateful. “I really appreciate it.”
“It’s faster than I could get started,” Bill said truthfully. “We’ve got a couple of sensitive cases in the works right now, and I’m pretty much up against a wall. So Larry driving up there to do the investigative work would be ideal. He can check out the crime scenes, work up the victimology with you, and get the ball rolling. In the meantime, now that I have Derek’s official request, you have the full cooperation of the BAU. If I’m tied up, you can speak to my partner, who’s an excellent profiler. I’ll e-mail you her contact information. Then I’ll brief her, and our major-case specialists. You’ll be in good hands. And I’ll make myself available to you as often as possible. Let’s schedule our first video conference for the seventeenth.”
“Fine with me,” Larry agreed. “Does ten o’clock work?”
“It works and it’s now on my calendar.”
“I’ll reserve the video conference room in New York, and we’ll make ourselves available,” Derek said, after receiving Sloane’s nod.
“Before we hang up,” she jumped in quickly. “Is there anything you can suggest that would make us more productive at our end, at least until Larry gets here?”
“Send Larry everything you’ve got ASAP. Do preliminary searches in VICAP and CODIS based on what you know so far. Derek, ask one of the task-force detectives on C-6 to get you access to the NYPD database, and do the same kind of preliminary search in RTCC. When Larry gets to New York, share all the results with him and let him do his investigative work. We’ll review everything on the seventeenth and see if we can derive additional patterns in either the crimes or the offender, which will allow us to further detail the profile.”
Sloane didn’t look heartened, and Derek understood why. All the databases Bill had mentioned were only as useful as the data law enforcement officers provided. If pertinent violent crimes hadn’t been entered, VICAP wouldn’t have them. If their Unsub didn’t have a police record, there’d likely be no record of his DNA in CODIS. As for RTCC—the NYPD’s data warehouse to stop emerging crime by establishing patterns—it might
shed a few insights. Could it benefit them? Maybe. But was it even close to a panacea? No way.
“Was there anything we gave you that would lead you to think in any one particular direction?” Sloane tried.
Bill blew out a breath. “I understand how frustrated you feel. Honestly, I’m not giving you the runaround. But that’s a tough question to answer, since we have very little to go on and every case is different. Based upon the pattern and the targets—all attractive women on college campuses taken at knifepoint—plus the fact that none of them have resurfaced alive, I’d say we have two nobody homicides and an attempted third one, committed by a serial sexual killer.”
“What about the fact that all the victims knew or were connected in some way to Sloane?” Derek asked. “Isn’t that an anomaly in your basic profile?”
“It’s specific to this case, yes,” Larry explained. “But we can’t give you a full analysis on its significance until I’ve done my investigative work. In general, serial killers who commit sexual homicide—including no-body homicides—have no direct connection to the victims. They choose them based upon availability, vulnerability, and/or desirability. If there’s a variation to that profile—namely the victims’ ties to Sloane—we’ll probe it fully. What we do know about this offender is that he’s organized. His attacks have been planned, and his victims were targeted. Thanks to his third victim’s escape, we have a basic physical build and body type, a suspicion that he served in the military, a knowledge that he’s Caucasian yet speaks some Chinese dialects—”
“Fukienese,” Derek interrupted. “All the phrases our C-6 language analyst came back to with were either Mandarin or Fukienese. They’re still working on the first phrase. It’s possible Tina misunderstood it.”
“Good. We know Fukienese is a much rarer dialect than, say, Cantonese. All these things will factor into our analysis. Till then, all we can give you are the generalities you already know. Our Unsub is a white male, uses a combat knife as his weapon, probably has vivid sexual fantasies, some of them violent, and kills for sexual gratification. Offenders that fall into this category have a different assault site, murder site, and disposal site. We know that our Unsub’s assault sites are college campuses, but we don’t know his murder or disposal sites.”
“We also don’t know his motivation,” Sloane murmured.
“Or his trigger,” Bill added. “Something incited him to act at this particular time, something emotionally impacting. But until we know more about him, it’s impossible to guess what that might be. Again, once Larry gets there, we’ll start filling in the blanks.”
“Well, here’s another blank we can fill in,” Derek announced, leaning over his laptop to read an e-mail that had just arrived in his in-box. “It’s no great shocker, but it is an important piece of information. The DNA results from the sweat stains and strands of hair found on that custodial uniform at the hospital just came in. They match the unknown blood splatter found at Tina Carroll’s crime scene. And the drops of blood found on the custodial uniform belong to the murdered nurse. So we can add a few more crimes to our Unsub’s résumé—homicide and drug theft. He ripped off morphine, Nembutal, fentanyl, and OxyContin plus a bunch of syringes.”
“The morphine must be for his pain,” Bill mused. “Nembutal is a pretty strong, fast-acting barbiturate, probably what he’s injecting into the women he grabs to knock them out.”
“Bill…five o’clock meeting.” Somewhere in the background at the BAU, Bill was being summoned.
“Listen, we’ve got more than enough to get started with.” Derek brought the conversation to a close. “We really appreciate both your time and what you’re doing to help us. Larry, I’ll get you everything we’ve got on the case. See you soon.”
“I’ll start reading as soon as I get your case file. I look forward to meeting you, Derek. And, as always, to seeing you, Sloane,” Larry replied.
They hung up, and Sloane turned to Derek. “That went well. I wish we could do more now, but at least I feel as if we’re finally making some headway.”
“We are. And that e-mail I just got confirms it.”
“I never got the chance to ask you—what translations did your language analyst come up with?”
Derek grimaced. “She verified the phrases we already knew. As for the other two, chao ji bei is, shall we say, a degrading Fukienese term used for certain types of women. It translates into ‘stinky bitch.’ But let’s just say that ji bei is a crude reference to a female reproductive organ, and leave it at that.”
“Lovely.” Sloane’s tone was dry. “And nothing on tai kee?”