A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery #1)(59)

The envelope was addressed to a woman. To his surprise, the woman was not Monique Silva. But he recognized the name.

Harry had sharp instincts when it came to good stories, and as he held the envelope in his hand, he began to suspect this story was about to turn out much better than he had thought it would.





CHAPTER 44

In retrospect, Zoe was sorry she hadn’t gone to the autopsy. Sure, she’d get the report later, and she believed Tatum would tell her if anything interesting came up, but this was the best link they had to the killer. Did she really have anything more important to do? She looked morosely at the sketch of the crime scene that Martinez had forwarded to her. What could she really deduce from this sketch? The killer had needed to get rid of the body before driving through the roadblocks, so he had dumped her in the alley. No elaborate posing, nothing that matched his signature. For a moment, she almost wondered if it really was the same killer. There was no shortage of men who killed prostitutes, after all.

But the postmortem cut to the carotid artery was unusual. The theory that it was a hurried, unsuccessful attempt at embalming rang true.

Fine. She looked around at her desk. Wherever she worked, she always managed to accumulate mounds of paperwork, and here was no different. Copies of the case files, reports of taxidermied animals, and printed-out transcripts of the interviews with the victims’ families and friends were all jumbled together, limiting the actual space she could work in.

She decided to clear her workspace and start fresh. She piled up all the case files, put the transcripts on top of them, and shoved them into a drawer in the desk. The animal reports she would throw away. There was nothing more to be gained from them; there were copies of them in the case file, and they were very sparse in detail anyway. She grabbed them and crossed the room to the paper shredder. She fed the papers two by two into the slot, enjoying the view of the papers turned into narrow white ribbons. Shredding was great. She should do it more often.

As she shredded the last three pages, her mind focused on a new question that hadn’t occurred to her before.

What had caused the killer to start practicing on animals?

It made demented sense, if he was interested in preserving his victims, but what prompted him to do that? A book he had read? A film he had watched?

The embalming process itself was not crucial to the killer. The fact that at first he had tried taxidermy proved it. He was only looking for a way to preserve the victims. The purpose was preservation.

Why?

Because he needed time with his victims without the effects of decay.

Why?

She couldn’t answer this question yet. She tried to shift the question in her mind a bit. Suppose he began to obsess about killing a woman and keeping her body. Would he really make the leap in his mind and decide he had to embalm it? Embalming was a complicated process. He had to have decided there was no other way.

She thought of the cycle again. The learning curve of the killer. He kept adapting so the act would better match the fantasy in his head. In this case, there was an obvious learning curve, as she had already noted. The killer had gotten better at embalming. But what had prompted him to start embalming in the first place?

Had there been another murder? Had he killed someone before Susan Warner?

“Hey, Scott,” Zoe said. “Can you help me with one more thing?”

“Sure,” he said from his seat, swiveling his chair halfway to look at her. “What is it?”

“I want to check out some murder reports from a couple of years ago.”

“Okay.” Scott nodded. “I’ll do it on my computer. I have CLEAR access there.”

“Clear access? What do you mean?” She got up and walked over to him, looking over his shoulder. His desk had several pictures of two young children. She studied them for a second, noticing their resemblance to Scott.

“It’s a database thing we use,” Scott said. “CLEAR is an acronym for, uh . . . something . . . Law Enforcement . . . something and Reporting.”

“Current Law Enforcement Access and Reporting?” Zoe suggested.

“No. That sounds dumb. No, the first word is Crime . . . no . . .”

“Custard?”

“Citizen. It’s Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting,” he breathed in relief.

“Okay. Is it any good?”

“Yeah. It’s the bee’s knees. What years are we talking about?”

The first animal taxidermy report was on July 2014. “Try . . . 2013 up to July 2014.”

He fiddled with the digital form. After a moment, a list of names showed up onscreen. Over six hundred names.

“Just female victims,” Zoe said. “And, uh . . . I think you can remove shootings.”

She wasn’t certain; it was definitely possible that the killer had moved from firearms to strangulation. But all his killings seemed up close and personal. Even if strangulation were a new MO for him, she was willing to bet he had previously used a knife or some other sort of weapon that would require physical contact with the victim.

“Okay,” Scott said. “Fifty-three cases. The majority of Chicago killings are shootings, so that makes sense.”

“Thanks, Scott,” Zoe said. “I can take it from here.”

“Glad I could help,” he said and got up from his chair. “Tomorrow I’ll try and get you CLEAR access from your own computer.”