“No.” Vince cracked a lopsided smile and chuckled. “Where’s Russo? I came to look at her.”
Rosanne Russo was the only woman in the unit and more than used to taking a rash of shit for it.
“She’s at a conference in Seattle.”
“Damn. My luck.”
“What have you got, Vince?”
He rose to his feet slowly, so as not to touch off a bout of vertigo. “I’ve got a possible serial killer in Southern California. The guy abducts women, tortures them, and glues their eyes and mouths shut with superglue.”
“Pre- or postmortem?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“What’s the victim profile?”
“One of the vics had an old record of arrests for prostitution. No ID yet on the latest one.”
“How many vics?”
“Three in two years.”
His friend frowned. “That barely meets criteria.”
“Tell that to the dead woman they found yesterday. She was buried in a public park with her head aboveground.”
Eyebrows went up. Now it was interesting. This was a jaded bunch. There wasn’t much in the way of human depravity they hadn’t seen. It took something pretty out there to impress them.
“Photos?”
“They just found her late yesterday. No photos yet.”
“What about from the other two cases?”
“Were the other bodies buried in the same manner?” another agent asked.
“No and no.”
“You don’t have any paper on this,” his friend said. “I haven’t seen any paper on this.”
“Nope. I was just wondering if anyone had come across this See-No-Evil, Speak-No-Evil thing with the superglue before. Roy?”
Roy was the resident expert on sexual assault and sexual homicide, although they all had dealt with their share of it. Roy shook his head.
“I’ve seen eyes gouged out, acid poured in them. I’ve seen lips cut off, objects wedged in the mouth, mouths taped shut. No superglue.”
“Okay,” Vince said and took his seat again. “I was just wondering.”
His friend at the end of the table wore the my-ass expression. Everyone else got up to go to lunch, exchanging handshakes, concerns, and pleasantries with him as they made their way to the door. With him and the boss still sitting at the table, no one bothered to ask if he was coming to lunch.
When the door had closed and they were alone, his friend let his own concern show on his face. He got up and came to Vince’s end of the table.
“You grew a mustache.”
Vince swiped a hand over the coarse steel gray, not-exactly-regulation hair decorating his upper lip. “You’re very observant. You should be a detective.”
“Makes me think you’re not really back. How are you? Really.”
“The meds make me puke up everything I eat,” he confessed. “But I hear that’s all the rage these days among the beautiful people, so . . .”
“Should you be here?”
“Where should I be? Sitting in a recliner watching the hours of my life tick away? You might as well shoot me in the head. Oh, wait, somebody already did that.”
“What’s with this case?”
“A kid I taught in the National Academy classes a year or so ago, Tony Mendez, called me at the crack of dawn with this. The crack of dawn our time. Had to be in the middle of the friggin’ night where he is. He’s pretty het up about the case. His first serial killer.”
“If that’s what it is.”
“If that’s what it is,” Vince agreed.
“Where does the kid rank on it?”
“He’s the lead detective. He works for the county sheriff.”
“The sheriff gave him the okay to bring this to us?”
Vince made a face. “Not exactly. But the kid’s going to convince him.”
“And I’m going to learn to speak Italian.”
“Bella!” Vince said, laughing.
His friend shook his head. “How you still have a sense of humor is beyond me.”
“Hey, I’m a living punch line. I got shot in the head and lived to tell about it. That’s a big joke on somebody—the perp, God, me.”
“What do you want to do with this, Vince? This case won’t even come close to the standard. And we’ve got legit cases coming in for review every day of the week. If I had twenty profilers, they’d all be up to their asses in work.”
“This UNSUB has used the superglue at least twice, and probably on a third vic in another jurisdiction,” Vince said. “This time he literally plants his handiwork for public display. That’s (a) highly ritual ized behavior, and (b) escalating in terms of the attention he wants. He isn’t going to stop.
“And I like this kid Mendez,” he admitted. “He’s sharp. He’d make a good agent. I’d like to see him come to the Bureau.”
“And let me guess. He’s an ex-marine.”
Vince grinned. “Semper fi, baby. There’s no such thing as an ex-marine.”
“You want to mentor him.”
“He promised he’d take me deep-sea fishing.”
“There’s no way I get this approved through the unit chief. He’ll tell you if you want to teach he’ll get you all the class time you want.”
“So I go on my own time. I’m still on leave anyway. And then there’s the mustache . . .”
“On your own time, on your own dime. No per diem, no hotel room, no nothing.”
“Nancy’ll let me skip an alimony payment. She’s feeling guilty.”
“If she hadn’t divorced you, you wouldn’t have gotten shot in the head?”
“She is all-powerful.”
They were silent for a moment. His friend sighed. Vince sighed.
“Look, John, you know how I feel about going to the scene with these cases. For me, being detached from the setting, working out of this friggin’ tomb, doesn’t give me perspective, it doesn’t make me objective. I’d like to teach a hands-on approach to what we do, because for some of us that works better. If I can go out to California, be of some service nicking this dirtbag before he becomes the next Bundy, and cultivate a new agent, why not?”
Why not? Because the Bureau had a book of rules and regs, and “why not” was not an approved reason for any action to be taken by an agent. “Why not” would have to go through the channels of ASACs and SACs, unit chiefs, and half a dozen committees on its way to the head of the Bureau. It sure as hell wouldn’t happen in his lifetime.
A knock sounded on the door, and a clerk stuck her head in.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s an urgent call on line two for Special Agent Leone.”
Vince went to the phone on the credenza and listened, then put his hand over the receiver and turned to his friend. “They just ID’d the vic from yesterday, and they’ve got another woman missing, both connected to the same women’s center.”
His old friend shrugged and smiled. “Go with God, my friend.”
15
“Miss Thomas, does the name Julie Paulson mean anything to you?” Mendez asked.
They had gone into a private family room in the funeral home. The drapes were heavy and the room reeked of stargazer lilies and gladi olas. Jane Thomas had sunk down into a corner of a velvet couch the color of a good cabernet. She was as pale as death, still shaken by the discovery of Lisa Warwick’s body.
Mendez had gone into overdrive at the realization that they had both a dead woman and a woman missing, and that both women had ties to the Thomas Center for Women. He had a million questions and wanted to fire them off like rounds from a machine gun, but Jane Thomas was fragile, and he had to be patient. Not one of his stronger virtues.
Jane looked at him, confused. “No. Who is she? Is there some reason I should know her?”