Jackie frowned and cocked her head. “How do you get that?” she said.
“The first time couldn’t be this, uh … this complete,” I said. “Just killing for the first time would be too distracting, too powerful. He would rush through it, and then panic and run, quickly. But then he doesn’t get caught; he starts thinking about what he should have done.…” I nodded at her, nearly overwhelmed with the idea that she understood. “You know.”
“Yeah,” she said. “And so he thinks, ‘That was too fast; I didn’t get caught—next time I’ll try this.…’ ” Her eyes got far away again as she saw it. It was a real pleasure to watch her—a pleasure that was quickly shattered, of course, by Deborah.
“All right,” my sister said. “Let’s put this out on the wire, see if there’s anything like it out there.”
“What good does that do?” Robert said. “I mean, even if he did it before, nobody caught him.”
“A truly keen grasp of the obvious,” Jackie said.
“It beats the hell out of psychic detective work,” Robert sneered back.
Deborah looked at me and shook her head wearily. “Get him out of here,” she said.
SEVEN
I SPENT THE REST OF THE MORNING SHOWING ROBERT HOW TO find latent blood with Bluestar. It isn’t very hard; you spray it on something and whatever traces of blood there might be glow at you, no matter how much it has been scrubbed. Good stuff, and it didn’t degrade the DNA, which
was becoming more important every day. Robert didn’t seem to mind blood in the minute amounts we were working with, and the hours passed quickly enough with no more than minor irritation when Robert’s questions got too persistent. But at least he wasn’t being aggressively obnoxious. When Jackie wasn’t around, he wasn’t nearly as annoying, and as the clock approached noon it occurred to me that if I could put up with him a little longer, he would probably pay for lunch again.
So I endured him patiently, working with him as he happily used up almost an entire bottle of Bluestar, and I was just about to drop a casual hint to him that lunch might be a good idea when my phone began to chirp at me.
“Morgan,” I said into the phone.
“Get up here,” Deborah said. “We got a hit.”
“What?” I said, very surprised. “You mean you got a reply from the wire?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Two of ’em.”
“That isn’t possible,” I said. And it wasn’t. It was much too soon for anyone to respond to the query she had sent out. It should have taken days, even weeks for some cop somewhere in the country to get around to reading it, checking his files, finding a match, and then responding. Most cops have a life, and a caseload that is already overwhelming, and so although professional cooperation with a brother officer is a great idea, it’s never quite as important as finishing a report before the captain chews your ass, with a little time left over to make it to your kid’s soccer game.
But Deborah was claiming she’d had not one but two replies, and before I could question her any more she said, “Now,” and she hung up.
Deborah was alone when Robert and I got back to her desk. She was frowning at her computer screen, and she looked up and tapped it to show me her e-mail when we walked in. “Look at this,” she said. “Two of ’em, in two different cities, and it’s absolutely our guy, no question.” She flipped her finger at the screen. “Body found in a Dumpster, right nipple missing, same kind of marks on it—”
“What about the eyes?” I said.
She nodded. “The first one, over a year ago in New York, both eyes ripped out; one found near the body, the other never found. The second one, um …” She looked down at the paper, nodded. “Yeah. Vegas. Like, four months ago.” She looked up and smiled triumphantly. “One eye missing, semen traces on the face. It’s him, Dex. It’s gotta be.”
I nodded. It probably was him. But knowing that didn’t catch him, and it left a crucial question, maybe the most important of all. “New York, Vegas, and now Miami,” I said. “Why?”
“He’s harder to catch if he moves around?” Robert offered.
“Most serial killers don’t even think about getting caught,” Deborah said. “They stay in one place, even in one neighborhood.”
Robert looked at me. “Really?” he said.
I nodded. “Yup, pretty much,” I said. “So if this one doesn’t, it’s for an important reason.”
“Okay. So why?” Robert said.
“He could be chasing something—or someone—specific,” I said. “Or …” A very small idea popped into my head. “Those are all cities that have a lot of conventions,” I said.
“Right,” Deborah said. “We can cross-check the lists, see if anything matches.”
“What are you saying?” Robert said. “He could be going to all these conventions, like, he’s a Shriner or something?”