Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Flipping through pages in my blue notebook, I look for the note I wrote after one of our meetings last summer:
The note hasn’t officially made it to the black notebook, but I think it’s time I take my own advice.
I pull the whiteboard out of my hall closet and set it up as I wait for my tea to brew.
It’s eight o’clock on a Thursday evening, and while I need something, I don’t want to be up all night because of too much caffeine.
As much as I’d love to be doing something with Ryan tonight, I need to focus on this case.
The team needs me to lead them now, and I can’t do that if I’m distracted by the very handsome man who would command my attention if I were to try and work with him in the room.
Shaking my head to focus, I grab my blue marker and write down the information we know about the cases identified thus far in a table graph with the date of the attack, victim’s name, and the city where it occurred. Trusting my instincts, I first focus on the locations.
Multiple cities in Massachusetts, one in Rhode Island, New York, and New Hampshire.
And two outliers in Nevada and California.
I underline Massachusetts. It appears to be his comfort zone, maybe he lives or works in the state, or possibly grew up in the area.
He likes to stay close to his center, but the data doesn’t tell me where that center is. Not yet, anyway.
My tea kettle whistles and I get up to put my honey in the cup before I steep the teabag. Walking over to my couch, I tuck my legs under me while I cradle my tea in my hands and stare at the whiteboard.
The murders in Las Vegas and Escondido are different. Even though they’re outliers and deviate from his typical modus operandi, they still contain clues and information about his ritual and process.
Does he travel for work?
Does he have any family in those cities he was visiting?
The reality is most serial killers are middle-aged Caucasian men. There have been documented killers that shake an entire community when their identity was revealed.
They never suspected the pastor from their church.
No one looked twice at the local sheriff.
He was the nicest guy and coached his kid’s soccer team.
But none of those were true about those killers—their reputations weren’t reality. They were all masks and distractions to cover up their true selves.
Their manipulation.
Their deceit.
Their control.
Their crimes.
I still think we may be looking at someone who is adjacent to medical or first responders. They could be law enforcement, work at a hospital, or be the friendly neighborhood veterinarian.
Liquid ketamine isn’t something that’s easy to get a hold of outside of very controlled environments.
I take another sip of my tea and exhale deeply.
My eyes scan over the dates, mentally calculating the time between victims. In the beginning, he had longer gaps between the kills we are aware of, but in the last few years, those windows have closed.
Did something change in his life? Was he in a relationship that ended?
Or is his fantasy cracking, and his impulses are driving him more and more?
He’s able to contain himself somehow, whether he is a highly controlled individual or has another source for release of his impulses.
Any theories derived based on timeline need to be considered with a significant caveat that there is a possibility we do not have the full timeline.
There could be other victims out there that, for whatever reason, we are unaware of.
Either their case wasn’t entered into ViCAP, or unfortunately, maybe their bodies weren’t discovered.
I don’t know how likely that last possibility is, though, for this unsub.
He likes the discovery—craves it as part of his ritual.
He wants the victim to be discovered posed exactly how he left them, even adding the carnation in an evidence collection bag when he killed Carmen Martinez.
No, this unsub appears to need the attention.
But whose attention is he after?
Is he craving media recognition for his crimes?
Does he want to be notorious amongst law enforcement?
Something is causing his hubris to crave that acknowledgment and respect for what he has been able to pull off thus far.
But there’s something else … —and I don’t know what it is. It’s like an itch I can’t identify, but I know it’s there.
His control isn’t perfect, but it is entirely based on his emotional state. When his emotional state is episodic rage, violence happens, and victims are killed. But everyone has bad days or goes through hard things in life, and they don’t murder their date because of a rough day at the office.
But this unsub would if it also included whatever causes his rage to escalate to levels where he can no longer control them.
Is he married, and when they fight, he loses control but can’t break the perfect persona he’s crafted in his neighborhood, so he has to hunt elsewhere?
Does the world view him as the nicest guy they know, so he needs to protect the assumption that he would never be who he really is?
Maybe he doesn’t live in Massachusetts now, but maybe he goes there for work, or even grew up there, so that’s why it’s a comfortable center for him.
Whatever is controlling his emotional state is unsteady, and he is losing more control. Jane Doe’s wrinkled sweater could be overlooked by an untrained eye, but when compared to the other crime scenes, it might as well be a neon flashing light: this is bad, very, very bad.
My biggest question is not only what motivates him to levels of uncontrollable rage, but how long do we have until he finds another victim? If it’s not already too late.