The 7th Victim - Alan Jacobson [25]
Vail sat up, chest heaving, her throat dryer than dust, her heart bruising itself against her ribcage. Holy shit. That was all she could think: Holy shit, that was intense.
She lay in bed another hour or so, trying to fall back asleep, all the while hoping she wouldn’t, fearing a return to the dream that just about took her breath away. By the time dawn began creeping around the edges of her window shades, she was finally tired enough to drift off. Her alarm clock blared an hour later, and had she not just bought the damn thing she would have thrown it through the window. But then she’d have a window to repair, and in the past year the divorce had caused enough self-inflicted hell in her life. She was enjoying the calm and hoped there wasn’t a storm lurking around the bend.
When Vail got to the office, she remembered she was first up on the card to present. Twenty-five years ago, the founders of the profiling unit chose Wednesday mornings for a free-thinking roundtable discussion of current cases the agents were working. The unit still met on Wednesday mornings, and the brainstorming sessions remained a useful tool that ensured the lead profiler had not overlooked something because he had gotten too close to his case. Sometimes having someone look over your shoulder enabled you to pull back from the needle to see the haystack.
The meetings were held in a large rectangular conference room, with the new budget-conscious Bureau crafting a fiscally intelligent setup. Instead of a long, traditional oval table that had but one purpose, the new look was six rectangular cherry wood tables neatly abutting each other, forming one large table around which sixteen people could sit. If needed, the tables could be separated into six-seaters for impromptu workshop sessions.
Tan wallpaper with textured vertical stripes added to the room’s utilitarian feel. An LCD projector and wall-mounted screen, overhead projector, large pivoting white board, and television/VCR/ DVD setup were silently placed off to the side in an alcove, like a coroner ready to pull back the sheet to expose the horrors of psychotic minds.
Seated around the segmented conference table were Vail’s profiling colleagues: senior members Art Rooney, Dietrich Hutchings, Tom van Owen, Frank Del Monaco, and nine other men who’d been with the unit fewer than five years.
Vail hadn’t had much time to prepare this morning’s presentation. She had been handed a CD with the remaining photos from Melanie Hoffman’s crime scene fifteen minutes ago, and she had rushed to view them on her laptop to throw them into some semblance of order. But she knew the case well, at least up to the point of the latest victim, and felt confident she could wing the rest of it.
Because she was the first and only woman in the profiling unit, looking good in front of her peers was important. She always felt she was held to different standards, higher levels of scrutiny. During her first few weeks in the new position, every time she was shown a crime scene photo of a dismembered body, a female so grotesquely beaten that she no longer had a face, the others in the unit expected her to grab for the garbage pail and puke her guts out. Not that they didn’t do that their first time around—they simply expected her to be weak because she was a woman. She was not superhuman—of course the pictures affected her—but she only wanted to be treated the same way they had treated each other.
But Vail felt that people learned who they were by placing themselves into situations and seeing how they reacted. While staring at grotesque photos of women who had been abused, she gained a tremendous amount of insight into herself. Insight that told her when it was time to leave her husband.
Vail stood at the head of the room with her expandable Dead Eyes case folder lying on the conference table in front of her. She opened the PowerPoint file and started the slide show mode.
She brushed back her hair, then took a sip