The Darkness of Evil (Karen Vail #7)(27)
“Seriously?” Tarkoff asked.
“Seriously,” Ramos said. “Think about it. It’s a dangerous f*cking job. You know anyone who walks around saying, ‘I wanna be a correctional officer when I grow up? I wanna walk a beat surrounded by violent criminals and not have a decent weapon on my hip?’ No, man. If they want to go into federal law enforcement, they’re looking at FBI, DEA, ATF, Marshals, DHS. Bureau of Prisons? Not likely on that list. But Prisons doesn’t require a college degree. So if you can’t pass the exam to get into one of the sexy alphabet agencies, you take what you can get: Prisons. And at some point you try to get a transfer out. You may think that’s just my opinion, but I’m just tellin’ it like it is.”
“Once the inmates identify who the care bears are,” Hurdle said, “it’s game on.”
“Care bears?” Walters asked.
“Guards they know they can manipulate,” Hurdle said, “who’ll do what you want and get you what you want, because you’ve got something on them. These inmates know how to twist your arm, manipulate you. Once they know your personal shit, now what do you do? They own you. Because you’re a human being and you know their threats have weight behind them. And you know these bastards are the scum of the earth.” He looked again at Walters. “That’s how a good officer, with a good record and admirable intentions, gets dragged into the muck of prison life.”
“And that goes to what I was saying,” Ramos said. “It’s a big reason why I’ve never heard of anyone who aspires to be a correctional officer.”
Hurdle brought them up to speed on Gregory Greeling, the deputy murdered at Jasmine Marcks’s house, then nodded at Curtis. “You two find anything out after I left?”
Curtis brushed back his hair, which was beginning to show gray streaks. “Based on Jasmine Marcks’s account of when she last saw him and when a neighbor discovered the body, he was killed in a window that we can narrow down to between 11:35 AM and 1:00 PM. That fit with what the ME estimated from liver temp.”
“That timeline also fits with what happened at Potter,” Vail said. “If Marcks escaped from the truck around 9:00 AM, he had time to get into Virginia and over to Jasmine’s house by the time the officer was killed.”
“You think Marcks did Greeling?” Tarkoff asked.
Curtis turned to Vail. This was clearly her call.
“There were odd markings on Greeling’s body, the abdomen specifically. Postmortem slices through the skin, adipose, and fascia to the muscle layer. Parallel lines. And his genitals were excised.”
A few of the men winced.
“I’m not trying to be graphic,” she said. “It’s significant because we’ve seen this before. Most of Roscoe Lee Marcks’s victims had this same pattern carved into them. Same with the genitalia. I know you’re all intimately familiar with MO. But it doesn’t really apply here relative to the previous Blood Lines murders because it’s a different scenario, different situation. If we assume that Marcks is responsible for this deputy’s murder, he was not selecting his victim based on the same set of criteria he used for his previous vics. This was an opportunistic kill, one out of necessity. He’s presumably after Jasmine. Greeling was in his way and presented the biggest threat. So he took him out.”
“But the markings,” Walters said. “The ‘blood lines.’ It’s a pattern, so more than likely it’s the same guy. It’s Marcks.”
“In the Behavioral Analysis Unit, we call these ‘patterns’ ritual behavior. Bottom line is that it’s things the offender does with the body, or crime scene, before or after he kills the victim. These are things that have nothing to do with succeeding in his crime. He measures success as murdering the person and doing it without getting discovered. The things he does to successfully kill his victim and get away with it make up his MO.
“These postmortem ‘blood line’ markings have meaning to him. We may not be able to make sense of what they mean, or why he’s doing them—but all that matters for the moment is that he felt the need to make them. It feeds some inner desire. It’s comforting to him in some way. Because of that, the offender does it on all his victims, or almost all, depending on the situation. He enjoys doing it and it becomes like a signature that allows us to link his kills.”
“So,” Walters said, spreading his hands apart, “what you’re saying is that I was right.”
“Do we know what kind of knife or implement he used to make those lines?” Tarkoff asked. “Kitchen knife that he found at the scene or—”
“Great question, Ben,” Vail said. “No, this was something we’re almost certain he brought with him.”
“At one of the earlier crime scenes,” Curtis said, “we found a karambit.”
Tarkoff leaned forward. “A what?”
“One nasty weapon,” Ramos said. “A guy in my unit in Iraq, he had one. He picked it up in Southeast Asia. Indonesia, I think. Curved blade, looks like an animal’s claw. There are a lot of variations but the more modern ones have double-sided edges and are used for slashing and fighting. The original karambits are small and have a finger ring and extend down from the fist, attached to the pinky. When you punch your enemy, he never sees the blade and you do some serious damage. Like I said, if you know how it to use it, it’s deadly in seconds with a minimum of effort.”