14 - J. T. Ellison [46]
After ten minutes of rehash, they finally got into the meat of the presentation. Charlotte stood up, walked to the front of the room and took the remote from Pietra. “That’s fine, Pietra. Thank you. I’ll take it from here.”
Taylor caught Baldwin’s eye and raised her eyebrows. He rolled his eyes in agreement. Charlotte Douglas was living up to her reputation as a real piece of work.
She clicked the button and a white slide appeared, broken into two screens. Taylor recognized the blue-and-white levels as a DNA profile.
“The DNA of your current perpetrator does not match the DNA profile of the Snow White Killer.”
Well, big shock there, Taylor thought. We knew it was a copycat.
“After extensive testing, there is nothing to indicate that the current killer is even remotely related to the Snow White Killer. Speculations that this might be the work of a son or a brother, can be put to rest.”
Who the hell was speculating that they were related? Taylor wondered. No one on her team had been pursuing that line of thinking.
A new slide came up on the screen. It was a map of the United States, with red dots in four areas—Los Angeles, Denver, Minneapolis and New York City. Taylor leaned in. What the hell?
“As you see here, we have several clusters identified. Within each cluster, there was a series of murders. At each scene, DNA evidence was collected.”
Taylor felt her heart beat just a touch faster. This time, when she caught Baldwin’s eye, she saw only concern.
“The DNA profiles from each of these crime scenes are a positive match. The same man committed the murders in each of these regional areas. The killer has not been caught, the cases remain unsolved.”
As she talked, Charlotte moved the slides forward, each one detailing the murders in each location. There were a total of four in Los Angeles, six in Denver, five in Minneapolis and three in New York City. Eighteen confirmed kills over the past eighteen months. Taylor realized what was coming next and cringed. Holy shit.
A slide with a map of Nashville came up, with four red points glaring at her like eyes from hell.
“These four murders in Nashville have been directly connected to the other eighteen. You don’t just have a copycat on your hands, you have an obscenely prolific serial killer with victims in five states. The CODIS results are definitive. His pattern is undeniable. It is quite likely that he will move on to another state and kill more young women if you don’t stop him here in Nashville.”
A hush had fallen over the room. Charlotte met each eye in turn, stopping with Taylor. I win, her look said. Taylor wondered just how cavalier the woman could be, and why she’d held back the information for so long. There was no reason to hold out over this; they needed to work together. There was another agenda here—Taylor was sure of it.
Marcus Wade was the first to speak. “Are there any indications from the earlier murders that he’s copying previous killers’ MOs?”
The PowerPoint screen went dark.
“Very good, Detective,” Charlotte purred. “Gold star for you.”
Fourteen
Taylor pulled down her ponytail, ran her hands roughly through her hair and pulled it back up, winding the rubber band around the ponytail three times. It was nearly midnight, she was starving, thirsty and tired. She picked up her Diet Coke can and shook it, willing the empty metal to fill of its own accord and save her yet another trip to the soda machine.
Once the power play was over in the conference room, Charlotte Douglas had proved herself a decent profiler. Her bombshell had floored them all. Five cities, five copycat murder scenarios. But only one copycat. An imitator extraordinaire.
In Los Angeles, he’d copied the Santa Ana Killer from the midfifties, an egregious maniac who dismembered the bodies of the women he killed and left them in the desert.