“No. I just know that I should have called her and I neglected to do so. If I had, at least someone would have known and cared she was missing. She didn't have anyone else.”
“And so she was your responsibility,” he said. “Like Angie.”
“The buck has to stop somewhere.”
“With you. Kathryn the Great,” he said with a hint of bitter sarcasm.
Kate lifted her chin and gave him the imperious glare. “You were quick enough to dump the blame on me last night,” she pointed out. “I don't get you, Rob. You tell me I'm just the person you want for this case, then you turn around and whine about the way I work it. You want to blame me for what's gone wrong, but you don't want me to accept that blame.
“What's your problem?” she asked. “Does my taking responsibility somehow screw up your strategy with Sabin? If I'm willing to take the blame, you can't be contrite and obsequious on my behalf. Is that it?”
The muscles of his wide jaw worked and something nasty flashed in his small eyes. “You'll live to regret the way you treat me, Kate. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But one day—”
“You can't fire me today, Rob,” she said. “Sabin won't let you. And I'm in no mood to play your little posturing games. If you have a point for being here right now, please get to it. I have a job to do—at least for the next few hours.”
His eyes narrowed to slits and he moved his weight from foot to foot. His face grew darker. She'd pushed too hard, crossed a line she might not be able to get back over with a simple apology and a promise to behave, but she wasn't about to back down from him now.
“The police want you to go over Melanie's interview tapes to see if she mentioned something that might be pertinent to this case,” he said stiffly. “I thought it would be too much for you, considering,” he went on with the affected tone of the wounded martyr. “I was going to offer to help.”
“Was? Does that mean the offer has been rescinded because you've decided I'm an ungrateful bitch after all?”
He gave her an unpleasant smile, his eyes disappearing behind the lenses of his glasses. “No. I won't let your attitude interfere with my job. We'll listen to the tapes together. You listen for things that seem out of place to you because you knew her. I'll listen objectively from a linguistics angle. Meet me in my office in five minutes.”
Kate watched him waddle off, thinking that she hated him almost as much as she was going to hate doing this job.
“Why can't I just stick an ice pick in my forehead?” she muttered to herself, and fell in step after him.
“THIS TAPE IS a copy,” the BCA tech explained.
Kovac, Quinn, Liska, and a skinny guy Kovac called Ears—crowded together around a bank of black-faced electronics equipment studded with an amazing array of knobs and levers and lights and gauges.
“The quality of the sound is much better than you'd ever get off a microcassette recorder,” Ears said. “In fact, I'd say the killer actually had a mike clipped to the victim, or stationed very close to her. That would account for the distortion in the screams. It would also explain why the other voices are so indistinct.”
“You're sure there are two voices?” Quinn asked, the ramifications of that possibility filling his brain.
“Yes. Here, listen.”
The tech punched a button and adjusted a knob. A scream filled the small room, all four people tensing against it as if it were a physical assault.
Quinn fought to focus not on the emotions within the scream, but on the individual components of sound, trying to eliminate the human factor and his own human reaction to it. Reliving their crimes was a crucial component of a serial killer's life cycle—fantasy, violent fantasy, facilitators to murder, murder, fantasy, violent fantasy, and on and on, around and around.
Cheap technology made it as easy as the flick of a switch and the focus of a lens for them to play back something more perfect than a memory. Cheap technology combined with the killer's egotistic need had also made for a lot of damning evidence in recent years. The trick for cops and prosecutors was to stomach hearing and seeing it. Bad enough to see the aftermath of crimes like these. Having to watch or listen to them in progress could take a horrible toll.
Quinn had watched or listened to one after another, after another, after another. . . .
Ears turned one knob down and pushed two small levers up. “Coming up here. I've isolated and muted the victim's voice and pulled out the others. Listen close.”
No one so much as took a breath. The screams faded into the background and a man's voice, soft and indistinct, said, “. . . Turn . . . do it . . .” followed by white noise, followed by an even less distinct voice that said, “. . . Want to . . . of me . . .”
“That's as good as it gets,” Ears said, punching buttons, running the tape back. “I can make it louder, but the voices won't be any more distinguishable. They were too far away from the mike. But by the readings I'm seeing, I'd say the first one is a man and the second one is a woman.”
Quinn thought of the stab wounds to each victim's chest, the distinct pattern: long wound, short wound, long wound, short wound . . . Cross my heart, hope to die . . . A pact, a pledge, a covenant. Two knives—the light flashing off one and then the other as they descended in a macabre rhythm.
Those wounds made sense now. He should have thought of it himself: two knives, two killers. It wasn't as if he hadn't seen it happen before. But he sure as hell didn't want to have to see it again, he realized as resistance rose like panic up through his chest.
Murder didn't get any darker or more twisted than when the killers were a couple. The dynamics of that kind of relationship epitomized the sickest extremes of human behavior. The obsessions and compulsions, the fears and sadistic fantasies of two equally disturbed people tangled like a pair of vipers trying to devour each other.
“Will you play with the tape some more, Ears?” Kovac asked. “See if you can't pull out a few more words from one or both of them? I'd like to know what they're talking about.”
The tech shrugged. “I'll try, but I'm not making any promises.”
“Do what you can. The career you save could be mine.”
“Then you'll owe me two cases of beer I'll never see in this lifetime.”
“Crack this for me, I'll send you a lifetime supply of Pig's Eye.”
Quinn led the way back into the hall, already trying to sort through the tangle in his head in order to take his attention away from the tight feeling in his throat. Concentrate on the problem at hand, not the problem inside. Try not to think that just when he was beginning to feel they were making some progress, the number of killers multiplied, like something in a nightmare.
Kovac brought up the rear, shutting the door behind him.
“There's a wrinkle we didn't need,” he complained. “Bad enough looking for one psycho. Now I get to tell the bosses we're looking for two of them.”
“Don't tell them,” Quinn said. “Not right away. I need to think about this.”
He put his back to the wall as if he intended to stand right there until the answer came to him.
“What's it do to the profile if he's got a partner?” Liska asked.
“What's it do to the profile if he's got a partner and his partner is a woman?” Quinn asked back.
“Complicates the hell out of my life,” Kovac said.
The hall was dark with a low ceiling and not much traffic this time of day. Two women in lab coats walked past, engrossed in a conversation about office politics. Quinn waited until they were out of earshot.
“Are they equal partners, or is the woman what we call a ‘willing victim'? Is she participating because she likes it, or because she feels she has to for one reason or another—she's afraid of him, he controls her, whatever.” He turned to Liska. “Does Gil Vanlees have a girlfriend?”