Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [119]
“What about this note?” he asked.
Chuck handed him the printout copy, with the familiar block-letter handwriting.
“Okay,” Chuck said to him, “Let’s go over what we know about him already, and if there’s anything you can add, this is the time.”
Lee felt a sense of accusation behind his words, but just nodded.
“You know,” Butts remarked, “the water may be part of his signature, but it sure as hell helps eliminate evidence.”
“Yeah,” Chuck agreed. “That’s what I was thinking.”
Lee summoned his dwindling wits, grabbed a Magic Marker, and wrote on the easel next to the bulletin board.
Butts scratched his ear. “Okay, I get the gender, but how do you figure the age?”
“The crimes are too sophisticated for a teenager, so he’s at least in his twenties. The fantasy is well developed and elaborate, so he thought about this for a long time before his first kill. Therefore, he could be as old as his early thirties.”
Ruggles frowned. “Excuse me, sir, but why couldn’t he be older?”
“It’s not impossible, especially if he was in jail for unrelated crimes for a period of time—but my guess is that’s not the case. He’s clever and he’s careful. I’m not saying he hasn’t broken the law before—I just don’t think he’s been caught yet.”
“Why do you think he’s white?” Butts asked.
“Two reasons. For one thing, most serial offenders are. But more importantly, all of the victims are white. He kills cross-gender, but it’s unlikely that he would also kill cross-racially. If he were black, or even Hispanic, we would expect some of the victims to be as well.”
Chuck grunted and folded his arms. “All right—continue.”
Lee turned back to the board and wrote:
“I think I catch your drift, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so,” Ruggles offered. “Yes, Ruggles?” Chuck said.
“Well, it’s the killings, sir—they’re all spread out, which indicates that he is quite, uh, able to get around, you know. And I expect that his job could give him such mobility, as well as familiarity with the Upper East Side and the Bronx. Is that what you meant, sir?” he asked Lee.
“You have the makings of a first-class profiler, Sergeant,” he replied, and Ruggles’s rather prominent ears turned scarlet.
“Okay, okay,” Butts grumbled irritably. “So he gets around. What else?” Lee turned and wrote:
“We know about the gender issues,” Chuck said, “but just how literate do you think he is?”
“That’s a good question. Krieger said the notes indicated he was trying to make an impression. He might be an over-achiever trying to impress us with how intellectual he is. There was that reference to Hamlet in the note found on Ana, but it was clumsily done.”
Butts shook his head. “Good God. It’s not enough that he’s leadin’ us on by the nose—now he wants us to admire his learning on top of it?”
“We’re his audience,” Lee pointed out. “We’ve probably given him more attention in the past few weeks than he’s had in his whole life.”
“I see, sir—that makes sense to me,” Ruggles said.
Butts glared at him. “So basically he’s enjoying all this?” the detective said with disgust.
“On one level, absolutely. But people who know him will notice his behavior changing—maybe he’s losing weight, or becoming forgetful. He might be short of temper or preoccupied, or acting odd in other ways.”
He turned and wrote on the board in capital letters, underlining the words twice.
“You said that before,” Chuck commented. “That he had some kind of trauma around water early in life. Any ideas what that could be?”
“Someone close to him might have drowned, sir,” Ruggles offered.
“We already thought of that,” Butts said in a bored voice. Lee turned and wrote.
“What about the eyes?” said Butts.
“I think it’s related. I think his trauma with water also involved being observed, maybe by women.”
“The first victim whose eyes