At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)(23)

“Well, that’s very perceptive of you, Professor.”

He could tell from Maclean’s faint smile that she wasn’t genuinely angry, but neither would she ever back down without a fight.

“You’re right about men being more visual,” said Verraday, “I hadn’t considered that. I’ll have to rethink that study.”

Maclean smiled. “Thank you.”

“All I was trying to say about our killer,” continued Verraday, “is that he plays on his victims’ needs. Even if he doesn’t know their backstories, he can sense their wants, their insecurities. And he would play to those needs. And the more it worked for him, the more excited he would become. He would have gotten more and more aroused as he duped his victims into putting themselves in a vulnerable situation where he could then totally dominate them. That sense of fooling them would have continued even as he began to flail them with the belt. The early stages wouldn’t have alarmed the victims. They likely even moaned with pleasure, or pretended to, when he was hitting them relatively lightly. That would have aroused him even more, knowing they had no idea what was coming next. Then when it got to be too rough, they would have begun to protest. That’s the part that would really get him off. That they’d tell him to stop, but he could ignore them. He would have savored beating them and humiliating them, showing his power over them.”

He saw a muscle in Maclean’s jaw contract with anger.

“This guy’s thing is all about power, domination, and control. The beatings were severe, but they were just preamble. He could have beaten the women to death if he’d wanted to, but that’s not what gets him off. Strangulation is what turns his crank. The reports suggest that he started by choking them with his hands, then switched to the garrote. That’s when his victims would have finally known what his true intention was. They would have realized they weren’t getting out of there alive. They would have begged him to stop. He would have taken special pleasure from their desperation as they realized they’d fallen into his trap. That’s the moment that excited him most of all: when he wound that cable around their necks and started tightening it. If deception was his foreplay, this was his climax.”

Verraday could see the knuckles of Maclean’s right hand turning white as she unconsciously balled it into a fist. He saw that her face had turned white too, not from fear but from fury. It was more unconscious semiotics of the human mind. At the most extreme stage of anger, the blood flows away from the body’s extremities and into its core, as preparation for physical combat. Verraday knew from Maclean’s unconscious display that if the killer had suddenly materialized in the café at this moment, she would have gone after him with her bare hands. He knew what he was about to tell her wouldn’t do anything to soothe that instinct.

“If strangulation is the climax, then the disposal—the act of getting away with the crime itself—is the cigarette in bed afterwards. It gives him a feeling of superiority to get attention in the headlines, that the authorities are apparently powerless to stop him. He feels like he’s tricked everyone. He feels smart as hell.”

“I want to get this son of a bitch,” said Maclean. “I want to nail his ass to the wall and put him away forever.”

“So do I,” said Verraday. “So do I. But this guy’s cunning. He’s highly organized and, typical for those profiles, his abductions, crimes, and disposals are played out in multiple locations as part of his system.”

“So what is his system?”

“He lures them. Because of the BDSM context, we know that sex was used openly as the pretext for their association. And since both victims were engaged in the sex trade, using the cover of a transaction to draw them to the kill room would have been easy. He would have done it in a way that left virtually no evidence trail. He probably contacted them in what appeared to be a spontaneous, last-minute way, so there would be less chance that they’d tell friends, coworkers, whatever, where they were going.”

“What about the location?”

“The kill room would have to be a place that he had absolute control over, at least during the time that he committed the murders. It would be somewhere that he either built especially for the job, or that just happened to suit it perfectly. Few if any other people would have had access to it. This guy’s so concerned with not alarming his victims until it’s too late, with how everything looks to his victims, that the kill room is probably stylish and luxurious. The girls would feel like they were somewhere exclusive, pampered even. Then, once he killed them, he would move them to a different location to clean them and remove any traces of himself.”

“Not the same location?”

“No. I mean, he’s got to persuade a total stranger to strip off her clothes, prostrate herself, and allow herself to be bound by her wrists and ankles. Nobody in their right mind is going to do that in a tiled room with drains in the floors. That would come later.”

“Where? Like in a bathroom?”

“Maybe. But this guy kills when all the conditions are right and he feels sure that he can get away with it. So I think he would use a location that allows for a highly efficient cleanup and that would be unlikely to have his DNA in it.”

“What are we talking about?”

“Someplace that he’d never use for any of his own personal hygiene. An industrial cleaning basin, for example. He would place the bodies in the basin. Use soap and water to remove all traces of semen or other sources of DNA, except for the ones he wanted us to see to throw us off. He enjoys washing the bodies of his victims almost as much as he enjoys killing them. Psychopathic killers always prolong contact with the bodies as long as they can. So he would take his time and be thorough, not just to destroy evidence, but to savor the experience.”