Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [45]
“But that’s even more nebulous, isn’t it? I mean, so we have a criminal who likes to leave his victims in water—what good does that do us if we have no forensic evidence?”
“It’s an insight into his psychology, his personality,” said Lee.
“So maybe he had a traumatic episode with water as a child,” she scoffed. “I don’t see how that helps us. And now you say that signatures can ‘evolve’ and change—which makes it even more useless, it seems to me.”
“Not useless,” Lee said, “just more complex.”
“And what about all this terminology—psychopath, borderline personality disorder, and so on. I don’t see what good that does us. So what if this man is a psychopath—how does that help us catch him?”
“Actually, the clinical term is sociopath,” Lee corrected her.
Krieger rolled her eyes and opened her mouth to reply, but Butts beat her to it.
“Okay, we done here?” he said irritably. “Can we get on with this?”
Krieger stiffened, her spine even more rigid than usual. “I was just trying to save time by establishing what our working methods are going to be.”
“Well, do us all a favor and don’t, okay?” Butts snapped.
“All right, settle down, both of you!” Chuck said. He turned to Krieger. Lee could see from the tension in his shoulders he was making an effort to control himself. “Whether or not psychological analysis of a criminal is a flawless method—and I think we can admit that no method of crime analysis is perfect—it’s all we have right now. So can we just agree to carry on until we have something more ‘scientific'?”
Krieger smoothed her flawlessly coiffed hair. “I have no intention of hindering the investigation. I just thought it was appropriate to raise a few questions before getting too far into it.”
“Look, lady,” Butts interjected, “like it or not, we’re already way further into it than any of us wants to be. The question is, how do we get out of it?”
“Okay, so what stands out about these killings so far?” Chuck asked Lee.
“Well, as I said, water plays an important part in the killer’s fantasy. Although the one victim was electrocuted, it was still a death involving water, since he was in his bathtub.”
“It’s weird, though, isn’t it?” Butts remarked. “How often do you see these guys killing men and women?”
“That’s an important part of the profile,” Lee agreed. “But I don’t know what it means yet. He’s also going after relatively low-risk victims—”
“ ‘Low-risk’ victims?” Krieger interrupted.
“Yeah,” Butts said. “In other words, he’s not goin’ after prostitutes and drug addicts—lowlifes who take risks.”
“So that means he’s bold—confident,” Chuck added.
“Right,” said Lee. “He’s taking more chances by going after these kinds of victims.”
Krieger frowned and crossed her long arms over her ample chest. “How can you automatically assume the killer is a man?”
Butts rolled his eyes, but Chuck glared at him.
“Actually, that’s a good question,” Lee said, trying to maintain the delicate truce they had struck with Krieger. “Though there are female serial killers, they’re very rare. Statistically the odds are against it being a woman.”
Krieger made a little puffing sound with her lips and plopped down in the nearest chair with an air of dissatisfaction.
“Right,” Butts said. “I’d say the odds of this being a woman are about as great as the odds that I’ll develop an interest in playing bridge.”
Lee had to smile at the irony of Butts defending the art of criminal profiling, considering his initial disdain when they first started working together. He suspected Butts was more interested in putting Elena Krieger in her place than he was in supporting Lee.
“I think Detective Krieger has an excellent point,” he said. “At this point I think one of the worst mistakes we could make would be to close off possible options, just because they seem unlikely. I think keeping an open mind is really important in a case like this. There are already enough unusual factors to indicate to me that this is not a textbook example of any particular type of offender.”
“Agreed,