Chapter Thirty-Five
Thirty-Five
“What’s wrong? You look terrible.” Sam handed her a cup with two sugars stacked on top.
“Hey, it’s my turn to pay,” Leanne said.
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s sit on the patio. I’m not the only agent who stops in here, and people are nosy as hell.”
Sam was right. Glancing around the coffee shop, Leanne saw that it was laughably easy to spot the FBI agents amid all the college students in ripped jeans and hoodies. She led Sam outside to a table on the patio’s edge, away from eavesdroppers.
“Thanks for letting me hijack your morning,” Leanne said.
“No problem.” Sam scooted in her chair. Today she wore a very agenty-looking black pantsuit and white blouse. “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”
“I got about two hours of sleep last night.” Leanne peeled the lid off her coffee and dumped in the sugar. “And as of an hour ago, I’ve probably been pulled off my case. But, hey, other than that, I’m great.”
Sam’s brow furrowed. “ ‘Probably’ pulled off?”
“My chief threatened to yank my case if I didn’t come up with a suspect by this morning. Right now, your profile is my Hail Mary. No pressure or anything.”
“I work best under pressure,” Sam said, pulling a file folder from her tote bag.
“Well, thanks again for squeezing me in. I owe you.” Leanne sipped her coffee. It was scalding hot, but she was too sleep-deprived to care. “First, some key updates. The most recent victim has been identified through fingerprints. Her name is Elena Saldivar.”
“The Gold Springs Trail victim?”
“Yeah, the one the papers were calling a ‘hiker.’ ”
“Let me guess,” Sam said. “She’s not a hiker.”
“Not at all. And we knew that from the beginning, even though the media didn’t,” Leanne said. “She’s in the system. Two arrests last year, both in El Paso.”
“Prostitution?”
“And drugs.”
“That tracks, too.” Sam opened her file and jotted some notes. “Okay, let’s dive in. Based on everything you gave me—which was a lot, by the way. It took me hours to wade through.”
“I may have overloaded you, but I wanted you to see everything I had.”
“No, it was fascinating. The more facts I have to look at, the better. Anyway, based on what you gave me, I put together a basic analysis. That’s what, why, and who. Let’s start with what. The question is, What do these crimes have in common? And the answer is: a lot.”
Leanne felt a surge of relief. “So, I’m not crazy, then. You think these murders could all be connected?”
“I’d bet money on it.”
She stared at Sam, one of the smartest investigators she knew and someone she’d admired for years, as both a cop and a friend.
“To hear you say that…” Leanne shook her head. “There have been so many moments when I’ve thought I was crazy. Or paranoid. Or that it was all a bizarre hunch, with no basis in reality.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy at all. I believe at least six of these crimes were committed by the same UNSUB, or unidentified subject.” Sam flipped a few pages and skimmed her notes. “Let’s start with Hannah Rawls.” She looked up. “And, yes, I believe she’s part of the series.”
Leanne closed her eyes as a fresh wave of emotions swamped her. Vindication. Disbelief. Disgust.
But underneath all that was sadness, not just for Sean Moriarty but for her entire community. This was going to come as a shock to so many people. More than that—a betrayal. How would their town ever recover from it? And how would they trust the police again?
“You okay?” Sam asked.
“Yeah.” She shuddered. “I’m just thinking. This is going to be a nightmare.”
“Focus on the investigation. That’s where your head needs to be right now.”
“I know.”
Sam took a deep breath. “So, including Hannah Rawls, we’ve got eight known victims whose remains were recovered within a quarter mile of Highway 67 between Fort Stockton and Marfa.
In two cases, the remains consist of a single bone—a femur and a jawbone.
Let’s put those two cases aside for now, since we don’t have much info to go on.
Besides those, we’ve got six victims who were brutally bludgeoned.
In several cases, the pathologist believes the weapon was a smooth, blunt object.
So not, for example, a rock, but more likely the butt of a pistol or something similar. ”
Leanne’s stomach knotted as she pictured the disfigured face of Valeria Reyes.
“And something interesting about all those victims? Based on the pattern of their injuries”—Sam paused—“I can tell you know where I’m going with this.”
“He’s left-handed.”
“Exactly.” Sam leaned closer. “Which could be an advantage, from your perspective, if you zero in on a suspect.”
“When, not if. I’m determined to be optimistic.”
“In addition,” Sam continued, “all of those victims were women in their late teens to early twenties, according to the autopsy reports. Four of those were strangled, as evidenced by the broken hyoid bone. In at least three cases, the victims are Latinas. You following so far?”
She nodded.
“In three cases, duct tape was recovered from the crime scenes. And, of course, duct tape is good because it’s sticky.
It might be possible to recover the perp’s DNA if he handled the roll of tape any time before or during the crime, and he might not have been wearing gloves every time he handled it. ”
“Good point.”
“We broke a case wide open based on DNA from duct tape once, so for me, it jumped out,” Sam said. “What else? Oh. Also in two cases, he cut a chunk of hair from the victim.”
“Why?” Leanne asked.
“It’s a souvenir. A trophy. Something he can use to help him relive the event.”
Leanne winced.
“Disturbing, I know, but it’s more common than you might think. Serial killers like souvenirs. It’s a big enough chunk of hair to be noticeable to the examining pathologist, and it looks like he uses scissors.”
“Meaning he comes prepared. These aren’t spur-of-the-moment crimes.”
“Right.” Sam glanced down at her notes. “After going through all this, I believe Hannah was his first victim, which is both good and bad for you. Good, because it was his first kill and he made mistakes. Bad because someone else was convicted of that crime, which enabled this UNSUB to fly under the radar for years.”
The knot in Leanne’s stomach tightened. So many years wasted.
It cut to the heart of what most disturbed her, what had been keeping her awake at night.
Sean Moriarty’s wrongful conviction had set off a terrible domino effect, and so many innocent lives had been affected in the ensuing years.
And—maybe worst of all—people in local leadership positions seemed more worried about lawsuits and bad publicity than figuring out what actually happened.
“So, that’s the what,” Sam said. “Now let’s talk about the why.”
“He hates women.”
“Not to be overly simplistic, but, yes, that’s the crux of it,” Sam said. “These are all cases of overkill. Take Valeria Reyes and several of the others. They were strangled to death and then savagely beaten postmortem. That shows a deep-seated rage that goes beyond a simple homicidal impulse.”
Leanne visualized Valeria in her driver’s license photo, with her sparkling brown eyes and beautiful smile. When Leanne had seen her in that culvert, she’d been beaten beyond recognition and left to be feasted on by animals.
“That level of overkill,” Leanne asked. “What is that about?”
Sam leaned her head to the side. “There are always multiple factors contributing. Almost all of these guys were victims of abuse, at some point. With this sort of female-focused aggression you might have either a mother who was abusive herself or who abandoned the child to an abusive caregiver. The causes vary, but the result is a deeply ingrained contempt toward women, not to mention poor self-esteem and inability to control violent urges.”
“Violence begets violence,” Leanne said softly.
“That’s heartbreakingly true.” Sam paused for a moment, looking down at her notes.
“What about the who?” Leanne asked. “We’re desperate for actionable information, at this point. He’s killed two women that we know about in the past two weeks, and I feel like he’s escalating.”
“He is.” Sam closed the folder and looked her in the eye. “So, for the profile, some things are clear and virtually certain with this UNSUB. Other things are an educated guess given the evidence.”
Leanne held her breath as Sam seemed to be collecting her thoughts.
“I believe he’s midthirties to midforties,” Sam said. “That’s based on the date of Hannah Rawls’s murder, which was sixteen years ago. I believe he’s highly intelligent and capable of learning from mistakes and modifying his behavior. Not all intelligent criminals can do this.”
“That’s based on what?”
“His evolving MO,” Sam told her. “Like I said, I think he started with Hannah Rawls, and he made multiple mistakes. First and foremost, his victim selection. Actually, I don’t think he selected Hannah so much as she was the moment when he first lost control and gave into his overwhelming urge.
He killed her in a fit of rage, probably when she resisted him in some way, such as refusing to have sex with him. ”
“Hannah’s rape kit came back negative,” Leanne said.
“That could make sense, if he went overboard and killed her in reaction to something that happened between them. But, like I said, he learned from his mistakes; he altered his MO. He saw what happened after Hannah died. The response was big and immediate.”
“She disappeared, and there was a search launched within a day,” Leanne said.
“She missed her curfew, and by the following day, we had people from everywhere converging on the town to help look for her. Hannah’s from a prominent family.
At the time, her dad was a big contributor to political campaigns—the sheriff’s, judges’.
He had pull with everyone, and he used it. ”