A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery #1)(69)

The envelopes had come from Glover; she was convinced of that.

She was less convinced regarding her gut instinct, that he was the killer that the newspapers called the Strangling Undertaker. She tried to force herself to be objective about this. Did Glover really fit the profile of the embalming serial killer?

There was at least one distinct change in his behavior: the fixation upon dead women. Rod Glover’s targets were very much alive. They were alive when he raped them, and once he had killed them, they no longer interested him. Could this have changed? She could feel the gnawing of doubt in her mind.

She set that contradiction aside and examined the rest of the evidence. She could see many links between the murders in Maynard and the current murders in Chicago, but what had he done between then and now?

Years before, when Zoe had begun working with the FBI, she’d gained access to the bureau’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. She’d immediately begun using ViCAP to search for more murders that fit Glover’s MO and signature. She learned that the word tie was very problematic when searching for crimes since it brought up thousands of reports where victims had been tied. Searching for gray tie resulted in nothing relevant, but that meant nothing. The person who submitted the crime report to ViCAP might have simply neglected to mention the tie color. Or maybe Glover had switched colors. It took her months, but she finally concluded that if Glover had murdered anyone, the murder was not in ViCAP. She was disappointed to find that more than 90 percent of murders and rapes in the United States were not submitted to ViCAP at all. People were busy, it was a cumbersome procedure, and using it wasn’t required in most places.

That morning, Scott had helped her get access to the CLEAR system from her own computer. She was now going over all the murders involving rape or strangulation since 2002. She would have preferred to go all the way back to 1998, when Glover had disappeared from Maynard, but the database didn’t go that far back.

She was sleep deprived and rattled to the core, her usual detachment gone. Reading report after report of women being raped and murdered was overwhelming. After about forty reports, she felt a lump in her throat, and her fingers were shaking. She went for a walk in the hallway, breathing deeply, trying to relax. Then she sat down and sighed. She decided to play some music, feeling the need to have a background distraction for this soul-wrenching task. Desperate for cheerfulness, she plugged in her earbuds and played the album One of the Boys, by Katy Perry. The dissonance was too much to bear, and she turned the music off after “I Kissed a Girl.” Murder reports weren’t meant to be accompanied by pop music.

She found what she was searching for when she got to 2008. Two murder cases, seven months apart, of women whose bodies had been found naked and strangled. Shirley Wattenberg had been found in Little Calumet River under the bridge on Woodlawn West Avenue. The item used to strangle her was missing, and Zoe suspected it might have been washed away into the lake. The second victim, Pamela Vance, had been found in Saganashkee Slough. This one had had a tie around her neck. Both cases were still open.

“Hey, want a ride?”

A voice behind her made her jump. She turned around, looking up at Tatum’s smiling face. He stood with briefcase in hand, on his way out. She checked the time: 9:00 p.m. The room was completely deserted. She hadn’t even noticed the people around her leaving.

“No, thanks,” Zoe said. “I’m, uh . . . I’ll take a taxi when I’m done. I really just want to get that report to Mancuso this evening.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

He left, and she turned back to her computer. She kept looking up to 2016 and found no other cases. This didn’t discourage her at all. The claim that serial killers never stopped, that they had to keep on killing, was nothing but a myth. Serial killers often stopped for months and years, fulfilling their needs with self-relief. Sometimes they didn’t stop but hid the bodies well or killed in faraway places. There was nothing strange about the long pause between the two murders in 2008 and the five murders that began in 2014.

She read through the case reports slowly. Though the item used to strangle Shirley Wattenberg had been missing, the marks on her throat indicated a wide, smooth, flexible noose. One of the detectives on the case had theorized that it was a belt, though there were no markings that indicated a belt buckle. This definitely seemed to fit Zoe’s theory that a tie had been used. The crime scene photos showed a naked body of a woman lying on her stomach, partially in the water. This was identical to the way the bodies had been found in Maynard, back in 1997.

Pamela Vance’s photo looked similar. The autopsy report detailed several indications that the victim had struggled violently before dying. There were several overlapping markings of ligature, and the ME concluded that the first attempt to strangle the victim had been unsuccessful due to her struggling. The murderer had had to try again, and the noose had shifted a bit, resulting in the overlapping bruises. There were injuries due to sexual assault both antemortem and postmortem.

The victim had died of strangulation as she was being raped. And he had kept on going.

Zoe leaned back, feeling sick. Was this it? The moment that Glover had changed? It definitely fit.

Was it enough?

She imagined herself presenting the case to Tatum and Martinez. Three murders in 1997 in Maynard, the suspect never convicted because he had killed himself while incarcerated. Two murders in 2008 matching the MO and the signature of the Maynard serial killer. And five murders between 2014 and 2016 with clear links in the MO and the signature to the murders in 2008. And the gray ties. She tried to figure out a way to bring up the gray ties sent to her. How would she explain Glover’s obsession with her?