Chapter Twenty-One
En Route
Day Two Interviews
The Funeral Home
After getting caught off guard by Callen’s information he found on Jeffrey Von Gunter’s mother, Elizabeth had to take a minute to figure out her game plan. Did she run there immediately, or should she keep going with her current schedule?
It was a risk either way, since she knew that she was not the puppet master in this game, but the marionette being jerked around on strings.
Her concern was that by skipping the steps in her head, it would just trip her up.
So, Jeffrey and his dead mother were going to have to wait until after she crossed one more thing off her list.
The funeral home.
It was the other logical place where the killer could be harvesting eyeballs, and it was also tied to the fingerprints inside of Steph’s casket.
Maybe she’d get lucky.
After all, the men who buried the victims would know how to dig them up, and access the bodies.
She was going to keep doing what she did best.
Eliminating suspects.
It was time to weed through all the bullshit that the killer, and this nut, had left her.
Which meant she likely was.
“I feel like I’m being jerked around on a string,” she admitted to Ethan, who was right beside her. In the front seat, Ivan was driving, and Raphael was running shotgun.
Ethan was holding her hand.
“That’s the point. Just do what you normally do, and we’ll get through it. Part of his process is leaving fake bullshit along with good information. We just have to determine which is which. A profile is never going to lie.”
Yeah, well, about that.
“Why is he doing this?” she asked.
He laughed.
“I knew that was coming,” he admitted. “I almost called in sick today,” he joked.
She elbowed him.
“He’s got to be doing this for a reason,” she admitted. “Men don’t just wake up one morning and decide to fabricate deaths so that they can hump a dead body.”
Ethan was amused.
“I mean, that’s a pretty picture.”
She knew what he meant.
“Seriously. Men like women, but almost ninety-nine percent of the time, they like them alive. That he doesn’t…what is his fixation on women who are dead?”
Ethan was trying to pinpoint this for her, and it wasn’t easy. Something clearly broke this person.
“Well, there’s only a few possibilities. He was born this way, and death fascinates him to the point where he can’t distinguish between a dead body and a non-dead body.”
She stared at him.
“Uh, one is cold and just lies there.”
He was aware.
“And he might prefer that since women don’t want him, or he can’t perform with women who are alive.
Maybe he’s been damaged psychologically by a woman or women who keep telling him no.
It’s a slippery slope, Elizabeth. I can’t diagnose him, but I can tell you that he’s doing the dirty deeds because he feels he can’t get what he needs from a relationship.
He’ll hide his true nature and never let anyone see his depravity. ”
She was thinking about what he said.
“So he wants control.”
He nodded.
“He’s using them like they’re nothing, because to him, they are nothing. He doesn’t want to love them. He wants to collect them. It’s his way of having power when he feels out of control.”
Ethan pulled out his tablet, and pulled up the driver’s license photos for all of the women they had confirmed dead. Each and everyone was smiling and pretty.
“He admires their beauty, but he hates it at the same time. He takes their head because what he admires most is his ability to collect them.”
Elizabeth didn’t like this.
“He has a type,” she said. “They’re all brunettes.”
He nodded.
“He’ll want to play this with you to end your life, but he likely is intrigued because you found his cache of bodies. You are the first one, in a very long time who has.”
This posed a whole bunch of different questions.
Gene went there.
“I want to go on record and say I don’t like any of this,” he admitted. He’d been silently listening, and it was making him twitchy for so many reasons.
Yeah, her too.
“EJ, we don’t have anyone who is incredibly old,” she admitted. “If Chrissy found DNA from YEARS ago, that gives this person an advanced age. Like our age,” she admitted, not going there with the ‘there might be two killers’ part yet. She didn’t want to taint her profiler’s opinion.
Not yet.
Elizabeth wanted to see what he came up with on his own first. When she glanced over at Gene, they shared a look, but thankfully, he didn’t go there. Never let it be said that she and Gene didn’t think alike.
It was clear they did.
Ethan was contemplating what she said.
“Who do we have that fits that?” he asked.
On the tablet, she opened her drive, and pulled up her suspect list.
‘Devon Slater
Larry Springer
Jeffrey Von Gunter
Trenton Balkin
Bill Farmington
Ernie Kotile
Hector Del Rio
Travis Del Rio
Alexi Redmond’
She went down the list, and used her tablet to pull up their driver’s licenses to confirm.
“Devon is mid-thirties, Larry Springer is late fifties, Trenton Balkin is sixty, Bill Farmington is fifty, Ernie Kotile is forty-three, Hector Del Rio is fifty, and his brother Travis is two years older. Alexi is not even forty yet. He’s mid-thirties, and the same is true for Jeffrey Von Gunter.”
Ethan looked at the names, and their ages.
“It won’t be on the younger end. Anyone in their forties is going to be cutting it too close. I say that because they would have needed time to ramp up to it.”
Yeah, and that gave her absolutely nothing because that was a lot of her list. Age didn’t eliminate many. It just removed Alexi and Devon.
She needed to figure out a way to eliminate more, or she was going to have to throw Gene’s theory at him.
“What else can you give me?” she asked.
He wished there was more, but he’d given her everything he could up to that point.
“As we start talking to more people, I’ll be able to extract pieces.
Right now, we don’t have a lot. I’m running on a customary profile of someone who has a fascination with the dead, and a sexual attraction to them.
This person had a trigger that made him want to pursue this, and he found he liked the control. ”
She sighed.
Well, then, she needed to get interviewing to give her husband more insight so he could feed her information.
“I feel like we’re about to be fucked over,” Gene said. “Whenever I get that feeling, it generally happens,” he admitted. “Coming from a once Hunter.”
Oh, she knew that feeling.
Only, before she could reassure him, security alerted them.
“We’re here,” Ivan said. “When we go in, stick close. I’ve seen a few horror movies that began with a funeral home, and ended with being buried alive.”
“PASS,” Ethan said. “I’ve done that, and the movies have nothing on it.”
She ran her hand up and down his thigh, and so did Gene to offer him doubt the reassurance.
“If you want to sit…”
He stopped her.
“Not a chance.”
Well, that answered that.
As they got out, they headed toward the big funeral home, and she pointed.
“Ivan and Raph, watch the doors. We can handle the brothers, but I don’t want anyone sneaking in.”
The only reason he was allowing that was because they were down Uriel, and Gene was currently all over Ethan.
Elizabeth could hold her own.
Most of the time.
“Be careful, and radio at the slightest issue.”
She laughed.
“It’s a funeral home. If you smell the crematorium kicking on, come get me.”
He just rolled his eyes.
As they approached the door, she checked the place out. By way of final stops on your life’s journey, it was a nice one. It was big, white, had a ramp to roll the casket down to head to the cemetery, and had a yard full of flowers.
She could see why people chose it.
As they walked in, they were met with a man in a suit. He was standing there, somberly.
“Yes, can I help you?”
Honestly, she wasn’t surprised. At that very moment, this place likely had bodies lying in wait for funerals. It would have been weird had she come in and he was smiling.
“I need to speak to the owners,” she said, showing him her badge, and Ethan doing the same. Gene just crossed his arms over his chest, giving the dude the hairy eyeball.
Apparently, he was playing bodyguard.
That worked for her.
As they introduced themselves, he looked surprised.
Well, yeah, color her surprised too. She wasn’t a funeral home fan, but here she was, standing in artificial light, interviewing to find the mad humper.
“Oh, well, to what do I owe this visit?” the man said. “I’m Hector. I own the place.”
She was aware.
She’d seen his driver’s license photo in the car.
“Is your brother Travis here?” she asked.
He nodded.
“He’s working on a body in the basement. Is there a problem, Director?”
Well, at least he recognized her.
Honestly, she couldn’t believe she was going to say this, but here she was.
“Take us to your brother. We have to have a little talk about the dead.”
He looked…surprised.
Well, yeah, she bet he didn’t get a lot of Feds in here, or people who wanted to be near a dead body.
Call it a hunch.
“Like I said, there’s a deceased person…”
She didn’t care.
“Listen, Hector. I chase serial killers. I’ve seen victims you couldn't even imagine. Grandma who passed at ninety-four, isn’t going to make me puke in a plant. The last time I felt like I was going to puke, it was when someone was feeding people my deceased step-man-mother as chili.”
He looked horrified.
Ethan knew she was being crass for a reason. She was testing the waters, looking for any sign that this person might be involved.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Follow me.”
As they followed him, they got into an elevator, and it smelled like overly sweet flowers. It was the kind of smell that you got when you were surrounded by those huge funeral wreaths.
She hated it.
When she was gone, they needed to just cremate her and skip the hoopla. This was the last thing she wanted.
When the door opened, he walked them to a room, and it was cold in there.
Like.
A.
Morgue.
Well, this was familiar territory.
“Travis, we have visitors.”