A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery #1)(30)

She already regretted approaching Tatum instead of Martinez. She didn’t need the agent to listen to her theories and then detail all the ways she could be wrong. It wouldn’t do any good. But it was too late to change her mind.

Martinez said he had half an hour before he had a meeting with his captain. The three of them walked to the task force’s meeting room and sat down. Someone had filled one of the several whiteboards in the room with the crime scene pictures of Krista Barker’s body, and a timeline was drawn underneath. She hoped they wouldn’t find themselves running out of whiteboards. A red circle on the map now marked Ohio Street Beach, and there was a red X in the Brighton Park neighborhood where Krista Barker had worked the street the last night she had been seen. The marks on the map made it very clear that the killer wasn’t focusing on a certain area of Chicago.

“I think we can start narrowing the suspect pool down,” she said, looking at Martinez. The lieutenant and Agent Gray sat next to each other on one side of the table. She sat on the other side.

Martinez nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

“We know the subject is a male. I talked to an embalmer this morning, and he verified what I already assumed. The killer is not someone who works in a funeral home, or if he is, he’s started very recently.”

She bit her lip. Now for the tricky part. Every detail she added to the profile would narrow down the suspect pool, but if she added the wrong detail, the police might completely overlook the killer, searching for someone who fit the profile better.

“The killer is very intelligent,” she said. “He seems to have learned the embalming process very quickly, but he almost certainly did so by himself, by learning from his own mistakes. The first victim shows a lot of amateur mistakes, the second victim a bit less, and the third was embalmed well enough to meet the approval of the embalmer I talked to this morning. That indicates he has high technical skills. He also has unusual self-discipline.”

“Why self-discipline?” Martinez asked.

“Learning such a complex skill alone and persevering requires a level of self-discipline most people don’t have.”

Martinez was leaning forward, jotting in his notebook. Tatum sat back, his face a mask of boredom, arms folded.

“Stating something that’s probably obvious, he has both an apartment or house and a car. He would need the car to pick up the prostitutes and drop off their bodies, and the victims were found in wide-ranging areas. Both Monique and Krista were embalmed outside their homes, which means he did it somewhere he felt safe. This also indicates he’s living alone.”

“Or he has a workshop,” Tatum said.

Zoe nodded. “That’s definitely a possibility as well. The killer was strong enough to drag the embalmed bodies of Krista Barker and Monique Silva to the locations where he posed them,” she continued. “So I’d say we’re looking for a strong man, but his appearance won’t be very intimidating.”

“Why?”

“Because both Monique and Krista agreed to ride with him,” Zoe said. “Crystal told us Krista had refused to go with another man who seemed suspicious. She was more careful than most working girls. If it was someone intimidating, she would have talked to her pimp first and made sure he was watching her back, or she would have told him no. This also leads me to believe that he drives a nice-looking car or at least a well-maintained one.”

“You don’t think it was the guy Crystal described? The one with the tattoos?” Martinez asked.

“I really doubt it. If it was someone that suspicious looking, people would have noticed. I read in the case report that you had several generic descriptions of Monique Silva’s last client. If it was someone like that, you’d get a very detailed description. And again, I doubt she’d enter willingly into his car.”

“Okay, that’s reasonable.”

“Now . . . the first victim was an art student. He attacked her in her home and then stayed there to embalm her. But the second and third victims were prostitutes. He probably paid them to come with him and then killed them in a safe place.”

“Maybe he killed them on the street or in an alley,” Martinez said.

“Then why tie them up?” Tatum asked. “They were still alive when he tied them, and it would be difficult to do that in the street. He could easily get them to come with him.”

Martinez nodded reluctantly.

“The second and third victims are classic targets for serial killers,” Zoe said. “High-risk occupations and vulnerable. But what about Susan Warner, the art student? And if he already targeted her, why stay at her place? Wasn’t he worried that a roommate or a boyfriend would show up?”

“He knew they wouldn’t,” Tatum said. “He knew her.”

Zoe nodded, feeling an inkling of appreciation she was careful not to display.

“Now, the thing that motivates a sexual serial killer to strike is a fantasy. At a certain point, the fantasy becomes too much, and he has to fulfill it. But reality never quite manages to live up to the fantasy, so he wants to try again. Do it better next time. Our killer was acquainted somehow with Susan Warner and probably fantasized about her murder. He knew she lived alone and was vulnerable. And then one night he struck. But things didn’t go as expected. The embalming didn’t work out so well, and he wanted to do it again, to do it better.”