The 7th Victim - Alan Jacobson [28]
“So what?” Del Monaco looked around the room, as if to garner support for his consternation. Since most gazes remained on Vail, he turned his attention back to her. “So, Karen, the signature is all wrong. Just about all the behaviors are missing. You’ve got some parallel aspects between the killings but there’s no linkage.”
“We’ve been through all this before,” another profiler said.
“Copycat,” Hutchings said. “That’s all it was, if you could even call it that.”
Vail was shaking her head in disagreement. “You’re all missing the point. True, there are things the offender didn’t do with this victim, but I believe it’s the same guy. I mean, just look at the crime scene.”
“We looked, a year ago,” Rooney said. His voice was even more scratchy now. “There’s no convincing linkage there.”
“Art, there were only a few defensive wounds, and there was a lot of blood.” She stopped, then realized she should review the photos from the scene, in case the offender had left the same murals. If she recalled, there was no blood at all on the walls. If that was correct, it would do nothing to support her linkage theory.
“Were there any Impressionist blood murals?” Del Monaco asked.
“I’ll have to check—”
“And what about food? Did he eat his usual peanut butter and cream cheese ketchup sandwich at the scene, postmortem?”
“No.”
“And the incapacitating blow?” Del Monaco was flipping pages as he spoke.
“Disabling skull wound. Same as vics one and two—”
“You can’t say that, Karen.” This from Rooney, whose eyes were fixed on a particular document. “You can’t say it was the same. Vics one and two were hit from behind, the other one from the side.”
“So she suddenly realized what was happening and turned her head at the last second.”
“When you turn your head to duck, you throw your hands up. It would’ve broken a few fingers. Hell, even a nail or two.” Rooney held up the file. “There were no such defensive wounds.”
There was quiet. Vail felt as if she’d been cross-examined and the defense attorney had just made a case-breaking point. But even as she tried to concentrate on a reply, she felt Gifford’s stare boring into her, disrupting her concentration.
She knew what he was thinking. It wasn’t the same way she knew what Robby Hernandez was thinking. She knew what to expect because she’d already gone toe to toe with Gifford about linkage of this victim to the Dead Eyes killer.
With his arms folded across his wide chest, it was as if Gifford wanted Vail to put her foot in her mouth. And unfortunately, she was about to accommodate him.
“Look at the facts, Karen,” Del Monaco said. It was as if he had suddenly realized Gifford was still in the room, and was now playing to him. “Just about none of the behaviors were present in the third scene that were present in the first two. Think about it logically. It’s a different guy.”
Telling her to think about it logically was like saying she was being irrational. At least, that’s the way she saw it. But she didn’t want to blow it all out of proportion and claim he’d said that because she was a woman. It pissed her off regardless. “I believe the offender was interrupted before he had a chance to finish what he’d started. That’s why the crime scene looked different.” Admitting the crime scene looked different threw water on her fire, killed her entire argument. Such major variations in crime scenes often meant a different killer was involved. This wasn’t lost on Gifford.
“The crime scene did look different, didn’t it, Agent Vail?”
Gifford was leaning back, an attorney asking a hostile witness a damaging question to which he knew the answer.
Vail wondered how much of this was fallout from their prior altercation in the library. “Because the offender was interrupted,” she said. “Otherwise, we’d be seeing the same ritualistic behavior we’ve seen in his other crime scenes.”
“That’s assuming it’s the same offender.”
She clenched her jaw. They were