Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [25]
I found him in the corner office with the soft carpeting and real furniture, behind an old-fashioned four-legged desk. A bookcase held his New York City horror show collection of Statues of Liberty, bound Playbills, NYPD mugs, a whip, a miniature guillotine, a human skull, a severed finger, possibly real, a dusty centennial quart of Guinness ale, a black wig and a replica of Poe’s cottage in the Bronx. The walls were taken up with celebrity photos: Galloway (a younger man) with the mayor, senator and Bobby Kennedy; Galloway on the tracks in front of a subway car, inspecting the remains of a jumper; signed cast photos from TV cop shows shot in New York; a plastic box containing yellowed memorabilia from the opening of Mickey Mantle’s restaurant, including a champagne glass with giddy lettering—Spavinaw, Okla!—and a matchbook signed by the legend himself.
“Glad you could make it.” He looked at his watch, a chrome Rolex. “What’d you do, take the bus?”
“Fog. It’s bad. Don’t go anyplace.”
“Where do I have to go?” shrugged Galloway.
Self-pity was now the norm. I learned to ignore it. If you attempted to commiserate about the state of his emotions, he would savage you.
“Got an alert from HQ. It’s come to their attention about the situation in Santa Monica. High visibility, especially if it goes south. They wanted us to be aware that they got three hits on VICAP, which might link Juliana Meyer-Murphy to three other missing juveniles. In each of these cases—Georgetown; South Beach, Florida; and Austin, Texas—you have a teenage girl disappearing from a youth-oriented area like the Third Street Promenade.”
I had become distracted by a young woman I had never seen before who was sitting in the visitor’s chair.
“Ana Grey, meet Kelsey Owen.”
She looked like part of Galloway’s quirky collection. Bureau folks wear suits. Black, brown, navy. Kelsey Owen went for ethnic—long, tiered Mexican skirts and oversized sweaters. Once, even a straw sun hat. She was late twenties, nice skin, long curly dark hair like a folksinger’s and just chunky enough to appear nonthreatening.
We shook hands.
“Kelsey is over at NSD,” Galloway explained. “But she wants to get into the Crimes Against Children Unit.”
“You’re a new agent?”
She nodded. “This is my second year. I just love it.”
“Isn’t that great?” Galloway jabbed the unlit cigar. “Enthusiasm!”
I gave him a sardonic flick of the eyes. Enthusiasm? What the hell did he think was going on over at the command post, twenty-four/seven?
He gave me the printout from headquarters, including photographs of the other victims, aged fourteen to sixteen. They all resembled one another: dark, shoulder-length hair and smooth, hopeful faces. The others were still missing; only the girl from South Beach had been recovered alive.
“Kelsey is a trained psychotherapist. I think we should pay more attention to the psychology of the offender.”
“We do. It’s called criminal investigative analysis.”
It used to be called profiling, but the term sounded too much like racial profiling, so they figured out a way to make it incomprehensible altogether. After completing several hundred hours of advanced instruction at Quantico, I was selected to be a profile coordinator. I learned how to analyze a suspect by age, profession, marital status, sexual history, style of attack, IQ, social adjustment, appearance and grooming habits and a host of other factors in order to come up with a hypothetical portrait. Profiling is not about whether the guy was potty-trained too early. It’s a working description that narrows the field.
As soon as we had a couple of freaking facts, of course I was going to look at the psychology of the offender! I was groping for it now.
“I’m talking the causes of why things go sour,” Galloway went on. “We don’t pay enough attention to what