The 7th Victim - Alan Jacobson [14]
“I do,” Vail said, “but it’s got nothing to do with this case.”
“Let’s get some shots,” Bledsoe said to the forensic technician. “Wide angles, close-ups of all the walls.” He turned to Vail and said, under his breath, “Just in case. I think the guy’s onto something.”
Vail frowned, but she knew Bledsoe—and Hancock—were right. The blood murals were worth reviewing. In rejecting Hancock’s observation due to her prior history with him, she had broken the cardinal rule on which she had just counseled Robby: go in with an open mind and don’t bring any personal biases to the scene. She would discuss it with Robby later, if he didn’t bring it up himself.
Sinclair was standing at the edge of the bedroom with his forearms folded across his chest. “Anybody find the left hand?”
Everyone glanced around. Blank faces stared at each other. Bledsoe turned to the head forensic technician. “Chuck, you guys locate the severed hand?”
Chuck scanned the clipboarded list of identified and photographed items. “No left hand.”
Vail thought she knew why the hand was missing, but for the moment decided to keep her theory to herself until she could be more certain. “Let us know if there are any other . . . anatomical parts missing,” she said to Chuck.
“Why’d he bother to cut her hair?” Robby asked.
Vail nodded at the victim’s right hand. “Goes with the fingernails. For some reason, he’s trying to make her ugly. Butcher the hair, cut the nails down so short they bleed. It holds some meaning to him. Nothing can be overlooked.”
VAIL REMAINED ANOTHER FIFTEEN MINUTES, then left the forensic crew and task force to finish their work and headed to her office to gather materials for a class she was teaching at the Academy. While on the interstate, she pulled out her PDA and dictated her impressions on the Melanie Hoffman crime scene. She arrived earlier than expected, so she decided to grab a coffee at Gargoyle’s, the café across the road from the BAU, or Behavioral Analysis Unit, housed in the Aquia Commerce Center.
The downtime would allow her to collect her thoughts and transition between the crime scene and her office. She needed to become a person again, even if for only half an hour, before plunging back into the underworld of serial killers. Over the years, she’d found she needed that time, or risk losing herself in the dark abyss of the offenders’ twisted minds. If she entered that world, it would be harder to separate herself from the killer, harder to maintain her touch with reality.
If Thomas Gifford, her boss, ever found out she needed this “downtime,” he’d probably transfer her to a resident agency in a quiet town in the middle of nowhere. Because a profiler sees so much violent death—the worst offenses humanity has to offer—the Bureau has to be careful who it exposes to these atrocities on a daily basis. Gifford, the man who owned the desk where the profiling buck stopped, maintained a hawk-like vigilance over the people in his command. If there was a hint someone in the unit was not handling it well, he was gone. No questions asked and no chances for reinstatement. A suicide in the profiling unit would be a slight . . . kink in the old FBI shield of public opinion. Profilers had been known to tip the glass a bit too much, and suffer from heart disease and other stress-induced maladies, but none had committed suicide. Yet.
The commerce center was a grouping of modern two-story brick buildings in Aquia, Virginia, fifteen minutes south of the FBI Academy. The BAU, colloquially the “Profiling Unit,” having undergone myriad name changes and reorganizations over the years, underwent its most sweeping transformation of all when it moved out of the Academy’s subbasement. The brain trust realized that sitting sixty feet underground in an old bunker while analyzing grotesque photos of mutilated women was too much to ask the human mind to endure.
Divorcing itself from a shared existence