"What do you think it means?"
"I'm not certain, but it looks to me like he was grafting her."
"Grafting?"
"Trying to turn her into something else, something she could never be."
Their earlier conflict had been pushed to the background. They were two officers trying to make sense of possible clues.
"Graft her into what? A plant?" Gillian sounded unconvinced. "A rosebush?"
"Have you read Symbolic Death by Ivy Dunlap?" Mary had worked with Ivy on a Chicago serial killer case. Since then, the two of them had become good friends. "In it, she theorizes that oftentimes killings are symbolic, that the manner and style in which the killing takes place has a deep, personal meaning for the killer."
"And what do roses symbolize?"
"Love. Beauty. Loyalty. Perfection. Femininity. Any number of things depending upon one's viewpoint. It's too early for speculation—I haven't seen any information on the other two victims—but in this instance the simplified message is telling us that the woman didn't live up to his expectations."
"It seems like a twisted fairy tale."
"Or twisted romance."
Chapter 4
It took twenty minutes to get from Lynwood Park to the FBI office in downtown Minneapolis. Mary circled the block in her rental car—a green Ford Taurus— and ended up in a lot between Marquette and Nicollet.
Years ago, the local division of the FBI had moved across the street and up the block to an ultramodern facility they shared with other businesses. Mary walked through the revolving doors of the skyscraper and took the escalator to the second floor. At the security desk, she flipped open her FBI photo ID. That garnered her access to a silent elevator that carried her to the eleventh floor, where she was directed down a carpeted hallway to Agent Senatra's office.
He shook her hand this time. The earring, which wasn't approved FBI dress, was gone. He'd traded his expensive suit for a more conservative gray.
The office was military tidy, with filing cabinets, a TV, and a VCR in the corner and maps of Minnesota and the Twin Cities on the wall. On a shelf was a framed photo of Agent Senatra and a laughing little girl.
"My daughter," he said, sitting down at his desk and motioning for Mary to take the seat across from him.
"She's beautiful." Fortunately, Mary could be honest in her response—something that wasn't always possible.
"She just turned eight and is a handful." He adjusted his burgundy tie. "Got any kids?"
"No," she said in a way that always sounded like an apology. It was good to make small talk before getting down to business, but the subject of parenting was something Mary knew very little about.
"We work closely with the Minneapolis Police Department's Homicide Unit. I hope you don't mind, but I've taken the liberty of arranging for you to meet privately with Detective Wakefield after your briefing here."
Wakefield. The detective Gillian had spoken to the night before. "That's fine."
They were lucky. In some cities, the police didn't work closely with the FBI. In some cities, if a crime occurred, the FBI might not know about it until after the media chewed it up and spit it out.
"Here's what we've got."
Senatra put an eight-by-ten color photo of a dead, eyeless girl on the desk. "Four weeks ago seventeen- year-old April Ellison was kidnapped from the Mall of America. No leads. Nobody saw anything. A lot of people speculated that she'd run away. One week ago, her body showed up. Where? In one of the mall elevators. At that point, we treated it as a single, isolated incident. Five days before that, a body was found in a Minneapolis nature park." He put down another photo, this of an unrecognizable decayed body. "Turned out to be an eighteen-year-old named Bambi Scott."
"Bambi?"
"I know. You can imagine how that played out with the investigative team. Finding a dead Bambi in the woods."
"No doubt," she said dryly.
"Because of the decomposition of the body, we have even fewer leads with this victim than with the previous one."
"Any similarities other than age?"
"Here are high school photos of both victims."
He pulled out eight-by-tens of two smiling girls, both blond. "If the perpetrator is the same in both cases, then I'm guessing he likes 'em young and he likes 'em blond."
"Had the Scott girl been reported missing?"
"No. Her parents were divorced, and her mother had custody. As soon as she turned eighteen she left home. The mother said she hadn't seen or heard from her in two months, but didn't think it was strange."
"Where was she living?"
"In a house where transients hang out. Nobody there seemed to know much about her. A couple of druggies remembered her, but said she basically stuck to herself and didn't stay there all the time. Said they never saw her with anybody strange, but everybody there seemed a little strange to me."
"We need to try to determine whether she was abducted from the park where her body was found."
"We've been trying to piece together a timeline, but keep running into dead ends."
"I see three possibilities: She visited the park and was killed on the spot—which would signify that her murder was unrelated to the other earlier case. She was abducted somewhere else, killed, and dumped at the park. Again, probably unrelated to the other. Or, she visited the park, was abducted by our Romeo, then killed and returned to the same place."
"I asked her mother if she liked the outdoors," Elliot said. "The woman didn't know." He pursed his lips in disgust. "That's what I call parental involvement."
"What about the father?"
"Hadn't seen Bambi since she was seven."
He handed her two folders, one labeled APRIL ELLISON, the other BAMBI SCOTT. "When the governor got after us about getting a profiler in here, I really didn't think there was a connection between these two cases. But now, with this new body showing up last night—"
"Was an autopsy performed?"
"Yeah, but we won't have any lab results back yet."
She shuffled through the Ellison paperwork, searching for the medical examiner's report. "Any drugs show up in the lab tests?"
"She tested positive for morphine and Phenobarbital."
"Pharmaceuticals."
"Here's the only videotape we have of the guy." He popped a tape in the VCR and pushed the PLAY button.
It took a moment for Mary to realize the camera was located in an elevator. The door opened. A man in a ski mask dragged a bundle inside, then punched a number on the control panel before exiting the elevator.
Senatra shut off the tape. "Some computer whiz at the BCA has been working on enhancements, trying to find something, but so far she hasn't had any luck."
The phone rang, and Senatra answered it. The conversation was brief. "She'll be there in ten minutes." He hung up. "Detective Wakefield," he explained. "He's ready to meet with you."
The Minneapolis Police Department was located in the historic City Hall just up Third Avenue. Mary walked the few blocks, taking the Fifth Street entrance where the statue of Hubert H. Humphrey stood. Then it was down a hall of fossil-embedded marble to Homicide Detective John Wakefield's office.
Wakefield was around fifty, stocky, with hair that was as much gray as black. His suit was wrinkled, his eyes puffy—evidence of a sleepless night.
"I understand you're Gillian Cantrell's sister. She was assigned to Homicide a couple of months ago." They both sat down, Wakefield behind his desk. "We do that sometimes," he said, adjusting a jacket that looked uncomfortably snug. "Borrow people from the BCA." He had a rural Minnesota accent she hadn't picked up on the previous evening. "Gillian's a bit impulsive, but I think she might be detective material."
Apparently Wakefield didn't know what a task he'd set for himself, Mary thought. Gillian's gullibility and attraction to strays could prove an insurmountable handicap.
He checked his watch and got down to business. "Okay, here's the deal. You already have all the information on the first two homicides, so what I'm going to tell you is exclusively about the body found last night near the rose garden."
He handed her several photos of the murdered woman, some taken at the scene, some at the morgue. The morgue views were all close-ups of the woman's face and the clawed, grafted hand.
"We've already got a problem. The eyes of the mall victim were removed with almost surgical precision. The latest victim's eyes were gouged or ripped out."
"Did the media know about the victim's eyes?" Mary asked.
"Oh, hell yes," Wakefield said with disgust. "The old couple that found her told everybody. But that's not all that's different about the third body. This one was blond like the other two, but she was older. We don't have a positive ID yet, but the coroner puts her at about twenty-two. So we have three murders, all of blond women, but nothing else about them is the same. One left in the woods, one in the mall where she was kidnapped, one in a park. Two had their eyes removed, but removed differently—which immediately warns of a copycat. Two were left facedown, the third we don't know about. Animals can really make a mess out of a crime scene."
Mary lined up three eight-by-tens of each crime scene, all taken before the bodies had been touched. "The dress April Ellison was wearing. Did it belong to her?" The fabric looked old. Maybe vintage.
"I don't know. Here, let me have my assistant check on that." He picked up the phone and told his assistant to call April Ellison's parents.
When he hung up, Mary continued to follow her thought processes. "What about the body that was found last night? She's partially nude, but she's wearing something. Did you attend the autopsy?"
"Yeah." He rubbed his forehead. "They sent her clothes to the BCA for analysis. It was a dress."
"A sexy dress, like the one in this photo?" Mary pointed to the shot of the girl in the elevator.
"It appeared to be a plain, ordinary dress, but it was hard to tell because it was torn up. We'll have photos of everything by this evening. I'll get copies to you. Now," he said, inching forward, "what do you make of the hands?" He pulled out a photo of the clawed hand, minus the taped branches. "Both hands were mutilated, the nails removed and the branches slipped into the quick."
Mary elaborated on the theory she'd discussed with Gillian. "The woman wasn't what he wanted, so he tried to mold her into something else. When that didn't work, he killed her."
Disgust, but not surprise, registered on his face. "It's one of the weirdest things I've ever seen."
"Any suspects?"
"I had the research department do some cross-referencing, and we came up with over a hundred possibilities." He handed her a stack of papers. Names, mug shots, and offenses that spanned years. Some of the rap sheets took up several pages. She riffled through names, aliases, faces, fingerprints, body art, and distinguishing physical characteristics until she came to Gavin Hitchcock. His life of crime had begun as petty thefts and minor offenses to finally culminate in murder.
"How long will it take you to come up with a profile?" he asked.
"About a week."
"A week?" He gave her a pained look. "I'm not sure we can wait a week."
"It can't be rushed. It takes a few days to study the information, then put a profile together. After that, I send it to Virginia, where it's gone over by a team of behaviorists."
"I was hoping you could come up with something quickly so we can narrow down the list of suspects."
He expected too much. The FBI had spent years building and training profilers, but the Behavioral Science Unit was no longer getting the funding and attention it had received in the past. Time had proved that while profiles could provide a useful adjunct to a case, they were by no means infallible. For a brief period, the FBI had even attempted to phase out the word profiler from the FBI vocabulary, but it was too late. It was already too deeply ingrained in the public mind.
"I'll do what I can, but in the meantime I would suggest you begin interviewing suspects," Mary said.
"Already got people on that. Sent half the list to the BCA, the other half to our department. Officers started the interviews this morning. We're also running everything through VICAP, CJIS, and are in contact with Wisconsin, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Iowa, trying to cross-reference information. Since every department is run independently, that can take a helluva long time."
"I know," she said with sympathy.
Wakefield dug into his pocket, pulled out a roll of antacid tablets, and began popping them into his mouth. He was sweating profusely, and it wasn't even hot in the room. It occurred to Mary that he looked more than just tired. He looked ill.
"Can I get you something?" Mary asked. "A drink of water, maybe?"
"Oh, Christ." He began opening desk drawers. "I've got some around here somewhere." He pulled out a bottle of water. "You know what's really bugging me? I have a daughter. A seventeen-year-old daughter. With blond hair." He suddenly stopped. "Oh, hell. I'm sorry."