The Killing Lessons (5 page)

‘As you know,’ Captain Deerholt said, when the task force had gathered, ‘Special Agent Myskow is on sick leave. So as of today Special Agent York will be joining us. She’ll be meeting with each of you individually later. I know you’re up to your necks, but please try to make yourselves available within the next twenty-four hours. Right now I want to give her an overview while you’re all here. Detective Hart?’

Valerie stood by the murder map. She didn’t need notes. She didn’t need to refresh her memory. Most of the time there was nothing else
in
her memory. (Apart from Blasko, and the Suzie Fallon case, and the death of love.) Special Agent Carla York was early thirties. A petite but visibly fit woman with hazel eyes and precise, understated make-up. Mousy hair scraped back into a short ponytail. Navy blue pants suit. Low-heeled snug-fitting black boots. No wedding ring. No jewellery at all, in fact, as far as Valerie could see. The thought of dealing with her – someone new – had been draining her all morning. A new person was a restatement of the only fact that mattered: You haven’t caught him yet.

‘OK,’ Valerie said, indicating the ‘before’ photograph of Katrina on the map. ‘First victim, Katrina Mulvaney, thirty-one-year-old white female. Educational outreach officer at the San Francisco zoo. Resident of the Bay Area, body
found
in the Bay Area. Second victim, Sarah Keller, twenty-four-year-old white female, prostitute, resident of St Louis, Missouri, body found near Richfield, Utah. Third victim, Angelica Martinez, twenty-eight-year-old Hispanic female, schoolteacher, resident of Lubbock, Texas, body found near Laramie, Wyoming. Fourth victim, Shyla Lee-Johnson, thirty-four-year-old white female, prostitute, drug addict, resident of Lincoln, Nebraska, body found near Elk City, Oklahoma. Fifth victim, Yun-seo Hahn, twenty-five-year-old Korean-American female, grad student at Berkeley, resident of the Bay Area, body found in the Bay Area. Sixth victim, Leah Halberstam, forty-year-old white female, housewife, resident of Plano, Texas, body found near Salina, Kansas. Latest victim, Lisbeth Cole, thirty-four-year-old white female, prostitute, resident of Omaha, Nebraska, body found near Algona, Iowa. This is not the order in which the bodies were discovered. It’s the best guess order based on approximate date of death.’

Valerie paused. She wished there were windows in here. It would have done a lot for her right then to be able to look out and see the sky, even a mid-December sky in San Francisco. From their long way away the dead women had turned their attention on her. Not with urgency. Not with expectation. Just with dumb sadness. Because they knew she felt nothing for them.

‘All the victims were mutilated, most likely before being killed. Mixture of knives and tools. We know for certain three of them – Katrina, Yun-seo and Lisbeth – were raped. All of them carry fingerprints and DNA from the same individual, and the last three victims – Yun-seo, Leah and Lisbeth – carry fingerprints and DNA from a second individual. We don’t know if it’s been two guys from the start, or if the second guy’s been recruited. Neither, in any case, has a match in the databases.’

The impatience and boredom in the room was palpable. This meeting was tactically redundant: York was going to get all the information anyway, through the eight investigators working the case, and Valerie was going to sit down with her in private later this afternoon. The real reason Deerholt had got them together was because he was worried about the creeping sense of futility. He was worried about
morale
. This was a reminder: Hey, come on, we’re doing this together, we’ll get there, don’t give up. We’re a family.

‘Linkage blindness was inevitable,’ Valerie said. ‘Given the timeline, the geographical spread and the victim demographic, three years isn’t bad. If it weren’t for the signature and DNA we’d probably still be blind, at least beyond the two Bay Area victims.’

The two Bay Area victims were Valerie’s blessing. And her curse. It was the only site for more than one of the murders. It was assumed (desperation, Valerie admitted, privately) that Katrina’s killer was either from or had close connections here. Everything else was scattered around Middle America. The Bay Area (desperation insisted) was special. It was Valerie’s belief that if the killers had known any of their victims before they
became
their victims, that victim was Katrina Mulvaney.
Start with what you know
, was what Valerie’s creative writing tutor had told her in a class she’d taken when she was a teenager. Now applied to the reasoning of murderers. Life never tired of these perverse connections. On the surface Yun-seo Hahn didn’t help, since serial killers, as Jodie Foster had made big screen gospel, tended to hunt within their own racial and social group. But since they had nothing better than geography to go on, the working principle was to set up the task force in the place where it was believed the unknown subjects either currently lived, had formerly lived, or at the very least had forged some sort of connection to the first – and possibly fifth – victim. That was part of the San Francisco rationale. That and the simple fact that they had a bigger budget and better resources than any of the other states involved.

‘As far as the signature goes,’ Valerie continued, ‘it’s probably the one thing that doesn’t need repeating. But for the record, our guys leave objects inside their victims. Random objects or objects with significance, we don’t know yet. No rare moths or butterflies, sadly. Nothing, in fact, that helps us narrow it down. They leave them in the vagina, mouth, or anus, except in the cases of Yun-seo and Leah, when they left them in the opened abdomen. We’re assuming because the objects were simply too large for their first choice orifices.’

Valerie had spent hypnotic hours with the body photographs – the ‘after’ shots in the murder-makeover. Yun-seo’s gaping guts. A heavy duty claw hammer jammed in between the large and small intestines. Surreally worse than this – a hammer was at least a potential instrument of violence, was at least grimly congruent – was the glazed and depressingly cheery pottery goose her murderers left in Leah Halberstam. It wasn’t life-sized but they’d still had to cut out half her internal organs to make room for it. According to the forensics report the evisceration had been done with a serrated fish knife. In the movies the goose would have borne a maker’s mark, would have been an antique, would have reduced the number of people who might own or know where to find one. But this wasn’t the movies. The goose had been mass-produced throughout the seventies. There were tens if not hundreds of thousands of them out there – or rather there had been. If you wanted to buy one now you’d have to trawl garage sales or junk shops or kitsch vintage boutiques that depended on people with more money than sense. It was the sort of object that would feature on an emo-hipster website called something like thingsmypa‌rentsownth‌atfreakmeout.com.

‘Katrina Mulvaney had the remains of a candy apple in her vagina,’ Valerie said. ‘Sarah Keller had a deflated balloon shoved down her throat. Angelica Martinez had a scrunched-up flyer from the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History’s dinosaur exhibit stuffed into her anus. Shyla Lee-Johnson had a fork in her vagina. Lisbeth Cole had a two-inch-long piece of clear crystal – the consensus is it’s meant to be a unicorn’s horn – in her anus. If they’re trying to tell us something’ – Valerie looked at Carla York, not with hope but with reassurance that she didn’t expect
her
to confirm this hypothesis – ‘we don’t know what it is yet.’

She could feel the room’s deadness to the dead women. And her own. The homicide wisdom she’d come to late: in order to figure out who had done these things to a person you had to get the reality of the person out of the way. The person became a victim. A victim was a conundrum in flesh and blood. Catching the perp was earning the right to think of the victim as a person again. Trouble was, by the time you caught the perp (if you did) you were so fucking fried that you didn’t give a shit about the person anyway. You just wanted to get drunk and watch sports. Or go out and fuck a complete stranger. You wanted to do anything, in fact, to postpone the reality, which was that tomorrow there would be another dead body, another conundrum in flesh and blood, another testimony in the case against the world as a place of hope, and light, and love. Especially if you’d already killed love yourself. That, for Valerie, had been the trade-off, the lesson she’d learned, eventually. Before the Suzie Fallon case three years ago her weakness as a cop was that she
couldn’t
stop thinking of the victims as people. Because she’d had love in her life she’d been unable to stop thinking of the love the victims had had in theirs. Then, with the help of the Suzie Fallon case, she’d killed love. Now the victims were just ugly puzzles to be solved. She knew it had made her better at her job. But she saw the way people looked at her sometimes, the question their eyes asked: How come you’re so cold, so clinical, so fucking
dead
?

‘We’re also aware of the possible irrelevance of the objects,’ she continued, for Carla York’s benefit. ‘There are really only two ways to look at them. Either they have meaning – useful meaning, meaning that will help us figure out who these guys are – or they’re just them fucking with us, giving us Serial Killer Standard Practice because they’ve seen the movies too.’

Everyone, Valerie knew, was sick of the objects. Each of the victims’ before and after photos on the murder map had a label naming the object found inside her. It was soul-destroying to have to keep seeing the word ‘balloon’ or ‘goose’ attached to the image of a mutilated female body. It was exactly the sort of thing some twisted fuck would get a kick out of.

‘Nutshelling it: our guys abduct the women in one state, do what they do, then dump their bodies in another. Which obviously requires either a travelling job or no job at all. They could be independently solvent, but BSU is telling us that doesn’t fit the profile.’ Valerie felt Carla York not interjecting. Not yet, at any rate. Myskow would no doubt have told York that there was, to put it mildly,
doubt
among the team about the usefulness of profiling. Let me guess, Ed Perez –
uber
-FBI-sceptic – had said before Myskow had even got started, we’re looking for a white male between the ages of twenty-five and forty, with delusions of grandeur and a history of abuse. Low affect. Maybe a harelip or a speech impediment. Am I missing anything? It wasn’t fair, Valerie knew. Behavioural science had long since ditched the cookie-cutter psycho. The Bureau’s 2005 San Antonio Symposium on Serial Murder had devoted a lot of time and energy to exposing ‘Myths About Serial Killers’, many of which, they admitted, had been bred by early behavioural science’s own reductive optimism. The problem was, obviously, the more they conceded it wasn’t an exact science, the less useful it looked to investigating officers.

‘Either way, the high mobility is self-evident,’ Valerie said. ‘The good news is Leah Halberstam and Lisbeth Cole were found less than seventy-two hours after their deaths. We have dry casts of tyres that put a Class B RV within a mile of each burial site. The pool of compatible makes and models is big, and since more than eight million Americans own RVs, you can do the math. Plus we can’t rule out the possibility they’re using multiple vehicles. We’re working through traffic enforcement footage but if they kept off the major routes we’re blind.’

She glanced at Deerholt. That’s enough – right? We’re wasting time. Deerholt’s eyes flicked agreement. Wrap it up. Everyone’s still fucking depressed anyway. ‘With all the usual probability caveats,’ Valerie said, ‘we’re looking for two white males. One dark-haired and dark-eyed, the other almost certainly a redhead. One at least with ties to the Bay Area. Shoe sizes ten and eight, respectively. Footwear prints lead us straight to Kmart shitkickers, so no help there. We’ve got everything we could possibly hope to get from Serology, and as I said, they’re not shy with their DNA. But all of that’s evidence dressed up with nowhere to go if we don’t have suspects. We’ve been working on this for seven months. To date we’ve conducted more than two hundred and fifty interviews and questioned six suspects, all of whom have been ruled out. We’ve got good liaison with law enforcement in eight states, not to mention the Bureau – and yet here we still are. It feels like we know nothing. But one thing we do know is that they’re speeding up. There were approximately eight months between victims one and two. Since then the intervals have been getting shorter. The last two victims are separated by only seven weeks. Acceleration breeds mistakes. They’re going to make one. Let’s not forget that.’

This was for Deerholt, and he knew it. Lead investigator rallying the troops.

The troops didn’t believe it.

Neither did Valerie.

‘You feeling OK?’ Carla York said to Valerie. They were in Valerie’s Taurus, en route to Katrina’s parents’ place out in Union City. It was snowing, the pointless sort that wouldn’t stick, tiny flakes whisked by skirls of wind. Will Fraser was on a lead. What
he
called a lead. He’d been scouring vehicular refrigeration suppliers in the Bay Area (and beyond, though only Valerie knew this), convinced that if the killers were transporting corpses hundreds of miles, they’d want to keep them on ice. RV freezers aren’t big enough for a body, Will had said. Not unless you cut it up, which our guys aren’t doing. What if they broke down? What if they got pulled for a busted tail-light? If it were me I’d have a dummy shelf stocked with frozen steaks and waffles.

Valerie missed him. More acutely in the presence of Carla York, who knew nothing about her. Who’d spent the last hour of Valerie’s time giving her what felt like a recap exam. Why don’t you just go away and read the fucking reports? Valerie had several times been on the verge of saying. Savvy or paranoia had stopped her: there was a calm to Carla’s hazel eyes she didn’t trust. She imagined the FBI briefing: We’re a little concerned about the lead on this. She’s showing signs of stress. Word is there’s a no-joke drink problem. Go up there and take a look at her.

And now, on Deerholt’s instruction, she was riding with Valerie until further notice.

‘I’m fine,’ Valerie said. ‘Can’t shake this damn cold.’ Which she regretted, immediately. All the investigators had at one time or another been forced to attend the department’s stress awareness seminar. ‘Physical Warning Signs and Symptoms of Stress’ was the first component. ‘Frequent Colds’ was one of them. As were inexplicable aches and pains, nausea, dizziness, chest pain and rapid heartbeat. As was, probably, throwing up in the middle of brushing your teeth.

‘Not that it matters much any more,’ Valerie said, ‘but are our guys psychos?’

Take control. Make
her
answer some questions.

‘The alpha killer, maybe,’ Carla said. ‘But my money’s on not both of them. It’s more likely the beta’s in thrall to him in some way, though it’s obvious from the serology that he’s at the very least getting his jollies with the corpses. Like a scavenger. It’s unlikely the alpha would let him interfere while they’re actually alive.’

Valerie sneaked a sidelong glance at her. Carla was staring straight out the windshield. Her hair was pulled back so tight it looked painful. Small face (
squirrelish
, Valerie thought), clean features and a maddeningly neat little mouth. Attractive? Not to men who were looking for surface glamour. But there wasn’t a spare ounce on her, and her skin was flawless. The good thing about getting older as a man, Blasko had said to Valerie once, is that you get better at seeing beauty in women. Well, not beauty, maybe, but sexual wealth, sexual…
character
.

‘If the alpha’s a classic,’ Carla said, ‘then the control has to be all his. Which won’t stop him blaming the beta for everything, including the murders. It’s a good bet that’s the dynamic. But the alpha will probably kill him when he’s done.’

‘Done?’

‘If he ever gets done. Which he won’t, because we’re going to stop the motherfucker.’

The profanity was a jolt. Until now Carla might have been speaking to a class of grad students. Valerie’s cynic stepped in:
She’s just mirroring. She’s heard you swear, so she swears. It’s what no-hopers are coached into doing on dating shows. It’s what psychopaths learn to do.

Ostensibly Valerie was seeing Katrina’s parents because the mother, Adele, had called to say she’d found something that might be significant. In reality, the visit was just to let them know they hadn’t been forgotten. That their daughter hadn’t been forgotten. That the hunt for the man or men who killed her was still live. There were, of course, victims’ liaison officers, who kept all the families updated, but Valerie had spent a lot of time with the Mulvaneys in the early months. Too much, according to Will, who’d warned her about victim surrogacy. It wasn’t Valerie he was worried about – Will was one of the people she caught looking at her with a little sadness these days – it was the parents.

‘We found this in the basement,’ Adele Mulvaney said, handing Valerie a plain black shoebox. ‘It should have been in one of the plastic crates when she moved, I guess, but it was under a pile of Dale’s junk. I thought you’d want to take a look at it.’

Dale was Katrina’s father, and he wasn’t home. The victim liaison officer had told Valerie he’d been drinking a lot. No surprise: one murder took more than one life. Adele was trimly dressed and her greying hair was still cut in its nifty bob, but you could see the wreckage in the light brown eyes, the broken world, the loss from which there would be no recovery. The house was cursorily decked for Christmas (they had grandchildren from Katrina’s older brother, and the family would huddle to get through the holidays) but you could feel it had nearly killed them to do it. Even the tinselled tree had something strained and plaintive about it.

‘It’s just oddments,’ Adele said. ‘Ticket stubs and pens and some jewellery she’d outgrown. But there are some photos, and I thought… I knew how much time you spent going through the photos on her phone and computer. I don’t know. I just…’

‘You did right to call,’ Valerie said. ‘Would it be OK if we looked through this at the station? I’ll get it back to you as soon as I can.’

They stayed for a half-hour. Drank the obligatory coffee. Did their best to sound as if investigative energy was high.

Dale Mulvaney staggered onto the porch as they were leaving. Raw bourbon breath. To her own disgust, it made Valerie want a drink. Again.

‘How many is it now?’ he said.

‘Dale, honey—’

‘How many?’

‘Seven,’ Valerie said. ‘Mr Mulvaney, this is Special Agent York. I know it must seem—’

‘Special Agent? What’s special about her?’

‘Dale, stop it.’

‘You told us you’d get him,’ Dale Mulvaney said. ‘Except now it’s two of them. Now it’s
them.
You stood right there where you’re standing now and told us you’d find him. And now seven girls are dead. What are you doing? What the fuck are you
doing
?’

‘You should just go,’ Adele said. ‘It’s better if you just go. Dale, come on inside.’

Dale Mulvaney put his back against one of the porch posts and slid down to his bottom with a bump. ‘It’s a rhetorical question,’ he said. ‘I know what the fuck you’re doing. You’re doing nothing. Absolutely fucking
nothing
.’

In the car on the way back to the station, Carla said, ‘Don’t let it get to you.’

‘What?’

‘The father.’

Valerie bristled. The assumption that it
was
getting to her. For a moment she was so annoyed she couldn’t reply. Then she said, very calmly, ‘I don’t let it get to me.’ She’d almost said: It
doesn’t
get to me. Altered it at the last second. Then wondered which version was the truth.

‘Well,’ Carla said. ‘It’s the brutal part of the job.’

Again, Valerie found herself unsure what the right rejoinder should be. Everything that came out of Carla’s mouth sounded like part of an elaborate mental sting operation, innocent remarks designed to expose the guilt of your responses. It was the woman’s self-containment. She had a way of watching you without looking at you. Plus her plain physical neatness made Valerie feel like a slob. Carla smelled of freshly laundered clothes and slightly citric shampoo.

‘Brutal is having your daughter raped and butchered,’ Valerie said. Which also felt like the wrong thing to say.

But Carla just nodded and said, quietly: ‘Right.’

While Carla went to get a sandwich Valerie sat at her desk and looked through the shoebox. Half a dozen barrettes and scrunchies, a travelling toothbrush, a lunch monitor pin, ticket stubs from concerts – Radiohead, the White Stripes, Nick Cave – a set of ridiculous wind-up chattering teeth, a clean white handkerchief, a half tube of L’Oréal foundation, some My Little Pony fridge magnets and fourteen photos, all but one of them featuring friends or family Valerie was sure they’d already interviewed.

The exception was a Polaroid of Katrina that looked to have been taken when she was around ten or eleven years old. She was wearing cut-off jeans (you could just make out the crescent birthmark on her left leg) and a bright yellow T-shirt that said Hoppercreek Camp and she was standing in front of what Valerie could only think of as a deformed tree – in that it appeared to have two trunks, one upright, the other growing at a thirty-degree angle to join it about five feet from the ground. Katrina had put one hand on her hip, in the mock-sexy way young girls did, and she was smiling, squinting into the sun. The same outlook of cautious optimism, tempered only slightly by juvenile awkwardness.

She put all the items back in the box and made a note to get someone to double-check there was no one in any of the other photos they ought to have spoken to but hadn’t. It wasn’t likely. Adele had given them a boxful of a mother’s desperation.

Valerie’s cell phone rang. It was Will.

‘No joy,’ he said. ‘There’s a guy in Santa Cruz had a big freezer unit installed in his Freelander four years ago. Turns out he’s a sixty-four-year-old taxidermist with severe macular degeneration and a Seeing Eye dog. Had to give up driving
and
stuffing critters two years back.’

‘Sorry,’ Valerie said. ‘Worth a shot.’

‘How’re the traffic cam numbers?’

‘Restricting it to the four days before Leah and Lisbeth were found we’ve still got more than a hundred and fifty Class B RVs on the possible relevant interstates unchecked. They’re doing it, but it’s slow.’

‘And Miss Quantico?’

‘I think we’re being evaluated. Or I am. So don’t come in drunk.’

‘But I just opened a bottle of Cuervo.’

‘Don’t even.’

The thought of a shot of tequila had made Valerie’s salivary glands contract. And it was barely gone noon.

‘All right,’ Will said. ‘I’ll be back in an hour.’

Valerie dropped her phone. When she bent to retrieve it, pain shot from the base of her spine all the way into her shoulder blades. Enough to make her freeze for a few seconds, eyes shut.

When she opened them and sat back up, slowly, Blasko was standing in front of her desk, with his hands in his pockets.

‘Hey, Skirt,’ he said. ‘Long time no see. You look terrible.’