The 7th Victim - Alan Jacobson [8]
As was usually the case, in practice things were a lot different than it seemed they would be. The romantic notions of catching a serial killer were long gone. Vail spent her time in the trenches where psychotic criminals roamed, peering into minds of men who deserved to be gassed. Better yet, to be sliced and diced and tortured like they often did to their victims.
Vail settled into a chair in the corner of Melanie Hoffman’s room and took in the scene, looking at its entirety. The blood all over the walls, the grotesque mutilation of the victim. She slipped a hand into her pocket and removed a container of Mentholatum and rubbed the gel across her top lip, masking the metallic blood odor and reek of expressed bodily fluids.
As she sat there, she tried to get into the mind-set of the killer. Though there were a couple dozen FBI profilers who traveled the world educating law enforcement personnel on what profiling could and could not do, word of mouth was slow. And defunct TV shows, where the FBI agent could “see through the killer’s eyes” only made their job of education more difficult, their credibility more suspect.
Two years ago, a cop asked Vail to touch a piece of the victim’s clothing so she could “see” the killer’s face and describe it to him. He seemed genuinely disappointed when she told him that was not the way it worked.
In reflection, Vail now found herself smiling. In the middle of a brutal crime scene, she was smiling. Smiling at the stupidity of the cop, at the irony and ineptitude of her own skills at times, and how sometimes she could not see even the obvious tangible things right in front of her . . . let alone phantom images through a killer’s eyes. Profilers don’t see what the offender sees. But they do symbolically get inside his head, think like he does, imagine what he felt at the time of the murder—and why.
But that was not to say she did not get something from being in the same room as the killer. She did, though she had never been able to classify these feelings, be they intuition, an intense perception or understanding or identification with the offender and what she thought he’d felt at the time. But whenever possible, she spent a few moments alone with the body. It beat color photos, videotape, and written descriptions.
She shifted her attention back to the victim. To Melanie—Vail always felt it was better to use their names. It kept it personal, reminded her that someone out there did this horrible thing to a real, living, formerly breathing human being. It was too easy to slip into the generic “vic,” or victim reference, and sometimes she wondered if the law enforcement brain did it by necessity, as a self-protection mechanism against emotional overload . . . the mind’s way of forcing them to keep a distance. To stay sane.
Bledsoe’s comment that the killer might have known his victim, if correct, would mean it was a relatively easy murder to have committed. The offender could get close to her without much difficulty. And if he’d gotten to know her so he could increase her comfort levels and decrease her defense mechanisms, that said a lot. It meant this killer was smart, that he had spent considerable time planning his crime. If that was the case, it would indicate an organized offender.
A crime scene was often a mixture of the two—elements of organization blended with elements of disorganization—making the UNSUB’s identification harder. Though Vail had initially thought Dead Eyes was more disorganized than organized, she was beginning to have doubts.
Vail heard a noise in the hallway, followed by a loud voice: “Yo! Where’s the dick that bleeds?”
“In here, Mandisa,” Bledsoe called from the bathroom. He opened the door and stepped out just as Spotsylvania