The 7th Victim - Alan Jacobson [7]
Vail poked her head in the bathroom and forged ahead. Bledsoe straightened up, borrowed a plastic bag from the criminalist, and sealed off his sour stomach contents. He wiped his lips with a folded paper towel he pilfered from the technician’s utility case, then popped a Certs in his mouth. He maneuvered the breath mint toward his cheek, then nodded at the wall above the mirror. “What do you make of that?”
Scrawled in large red strokes were the words, “It’s in the.”
“Could mean a lot of things.”
“Such as?”
Vail shrugged. “I’ll need to think on it. I’m not sure we know enough yet to even formulate an opinion.”
“You said it could mean a lot of things. You’ve gotta have some idea about it.”
“First off, it’s not necessarily what he wrote as much as why he felt the need to write it.”
Bledsoe chewed on that a moment, then shook his head. “You guys are gonna have a field day with that one.”
“No doubt.” Vail stepped out of the bathroom. “Okay, what’ve we got?”
“No signs of forced entry,” Bledsoe said. “Vic could’ve known her attacker.”
Vail looked away, her gaze coming to rest on Melanie’s blood-soaked bed. “Could’ve met the guy yesterday evening and brought him home. Or, he could’ve used a ruse to lower her defenses. Enough to get her to open the door for him. Either way, your assumption that she knew him wouldn’t do us much good.”
Bledsoe grunted, then stepped out of the bathroom.
Profilers often found it difficult to have a relationship with someone, let alone have a family. They constantly thought about crime scene photos, wondering what they’d missed—or even what they had seen and misinterpreted. Or what they expected to see but didn’t. It was a perpetual state of unease, like when you keep thinking you’ve forgotten something but can’t figure out what it is.
But, it was Vail’s job and she did it the best she could. At present, she hoped she did it well enough to help catch Dead Eyes. After three murders spread out over five months, the killer had gone silent. For several months, there was nothing. When such a pattern developed, the police figured—or rather, hoped—the offender had either died, or was sitting in a maximum security jail cell, arrested on some unrelated charge.
When doubt intensified that the third victim was the work of Dead Eyes, it left the offender with only two murders to his credit. He suddenly didn’t appear to be as prolific, and thus the threat he posed was not as potent. With escalating police department budgets always a concern, the task force was mothballed.
For Vail, it was good timing: nine months of working in close proximity with Bledsoe was enough. Vail liked him, but anytime you were around someone so much, you tended to make that person’s problems your own. And with a failed marriage—and serial killers bouncing around inside her head—she had enough stress without Bledsoe’s issues invading her thoughts as well.
Vail knelt beside Melanie Hoffman’s bloody, mutilated corpse and sighed. “Why did this happen to you?”
four
Vail stood at the foot of Melanie Hoffman’s bed. After the criminalist briefed her on his findings, Vail asked Bledsoe to leave her for a few moments so she could be alone with her thoughts. Alone with the corpse. Some would think this was a morbid request, but for a profiler it was a priceless advantage.
As a new agent going through training, Vail had read all the papers written by the original FBI profilers, Hazelwood, Ressler, Douglas, and Underwood. For a profiler, getting inside the offender’s head was exciting, almost sexy. The way they figured