“Or he could find another field and dig another matrix of graves,” Jen said flatly.
“That, too,” Thomas acknowledged. “What he does next may depend on why he’s doing this at all. Why he kills. What got him started? And why a year between sprees?”
“We were kind of hoping you could help us with that,” Vito said dryly.
Thomas’s smile was equally dry. “I’ll do my best. One of the things we need to establish is how he chooses his victims. The last two came from the modeling website.”
“Maybe the last three,” Tim Riker said. “I ran a search on all the male models at UCanModel that have the same height and weight as Flail Guy.”
“Stop calling him that,” Katherine snapped, then pursed her lips hard. “Please.”
There was a raw desperation in her voice that made everyone turn to look at her.
“I’m sorry, Katherine,” Tim said. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”
She nodded unsteadily. “It’s okay. Let’s just call him three-one, for his grave. I just finished that man’s autopsy. Brittany Bellamy and Warren Keyes suffered horribly, but there’s every indication their ordeal was no longer than a few hours. Three-one was tortured over a period of days. His fingers and thumbs were broken. His legs and arms were broken, his back flayed open.” She swallowed. “And his feet were burned.”
“The soles of his feet?” Liz asked gently.
“No, his whole foot. The scarring is total and has a clear delineation. Like a sock.”
“Or a boot,” Nick said grimly, coming in the door. He squeezed Katherine’s shoulder reassuringly before taking the seat next to Scarborough. “It was one of the torture devices on the websites I found. The inquisitors would pour hot oil down into a boot, usually one foot at a time. It was a very effective method of getting people to say anything they wanted them to say.”
“But what could our killer have possibly wanted these people to say?” Beverly asked, frustration in her voice. “They were models, actors.”
“Maybe he didn’t want them to say anything. Maybe he just wanted to see them suffer,” Tim said quietly.
“Well, they suffered,” Katherine said bitterly.
Vito closed his eyes and forced himself to visualize the scene, horrible as it was. “But Katherine, something doesn’t make sense. The way his head had sheared off, he had to have been sitting up. If he’d been lying down, I would think the skull would crush, not shear. If this guy was in such horrible shape before he was hit with a flail-or whatever-how did he even sit up to receive the blow?”
Katherine’s lips thinned. “I found rope fibers in the skin of his torso. I think he was tied so that he was vertical. The pattern of circular bruising was on top of the fibers.”
There was a moment of silence as everyone digested this latest horror. Vito cleared his throat. “What did you find when you searched the UCanModel database, Tim?”
“A hundred names, roughly, but knowing about his feet being burned helps. Brittany Bellamy had been a hand model and the killer posed her hands. Warren had the tattoo of Oscar holding the sword and his hands were posed the same way.” Tim pulled a sheaf of papers from his folder and began scanning the list. “There are three that were foot models.” He looked up at Katherine. “What size were the victim’s feet?”
“Ten and a half.”
Rapidly Tim thumbed through the pages, then stopped and focused. “Yes.” He looked up again, triumphant. “But only one has size-ten-and-a-half feet. William Melville. Goes by Bill. He did a shoot for a foot spray ad last year.”
Vito’s pulse picked up some speed. “Good work, Tim. Really good work.”
Tim nodded soberly, then looked at Katherine. “Now he has a name.”
“Thank you,” she murmured. “That means a lot.”
“When we break, we’ll need to confirm it,” Vito said briskly. “Nick and I will take finding an address for Bill Melville and checking him out. Tim, I’d like you and Beverly to keep working that database. I still want to know who our killer attempted to hire and couldn’t. I also want to know who he’s contacted lately. We need to find him and stop him before he finishes out that row.”
“We’re meeting Brent Yelton from IT when we’re done here,” Beverly said. “He said he’d try working through the user side but that he’ll probably need help from the website hosts themselves.” She grimaced. “And for that we’ll need a warrant.”
“You get me the details,” Liz said, “and I’ll get a warrant.”
“So each of the last three victims was chosen based on a physical attribute,” Thomas said, musingly. “Using the modeling database, he could search for the attributes he wanted. There’s also a certain drama about posing hands, et cetera. Models are accustomed to playing roles in front of a camera.”
Nick frowned. “Could this guy be filming all this?”
“It’s a thought.” Vito jotted it on the whiteboard. “Let’s leave it as a thought for now and go on. Computers. Warren’s hard drive was fried. The Bellamy family’s was also fried. But Claire didn’t have a computer.”
“So he didn’t meet her through the website.” Tim said. “Unless she used a public computer. She did work at a library.”
Vito sighed. “An Internet session on a public computer fifteen months ago will be hard to trace. That could be a dead end.”
“What did you find out about where he could have gotten his tools?” Nick asked. “Were Sophie’s contacts any help?”
“Not much.” Vito sat back down. “The chain mail was high quality. A mail shirt with links that small runs over a thousand bucks.”
“Whoa,” Nick said. “So our boy has some funds.”
“But the mail is available through a number of Web stores.” Vito shrugged. “As were the sword or the flail. It’ll be hard to trace a single purchase, but that’s what we’ll need to do. Sophie did tell me that one of her professors heard that a collection of torture artifacts had gone missing. I’ll follow up on that tomorrow. It was in Europe, so I’ll have to involve Interpol.”
“Which will add time,” Liz grumbled. “Can’t your archeologist dig some more?”
Jen winced. “No pun intended.”
“I’ll ask her,” Vito said. If she meets me tonight. If she didn’t… He supposed he’d have to walk away, but he wasn’t sure he could. She drew him in a way no woman had in a very long time. Maybe ever. Please, Sophie. Please come. “Jen, what more have you found at the crime scene?”
“Nothing.” She lifted a brow. “But that’s something, in a way. We’re still sifting fill dirt and will be for days, but something is missing from the site.”
“The dirt he took from the graves initially,” Beverly said and Jen touched her nose.
“We’ve combed those woods and haven’t found any evidence of dirt he removed.”
“He could have spread it out,” Tim said doubtfully.
“Could have, and he might have, but that would have required a lot of work. Sixteen graves is a lot of dirt. It would have been easier for him to just pile it off to one side.”
“Or remove it. He has to have a truck,” Vito said.
“Or access to one. We might be able to tell what kind. We got a tire print from the access road leading to the field. It’s at the lab.” Jen bent her lips down as she thought. “That resignation letter Claire’s parents gave Bev and Tim was just a copy. We need to get the original. Who has it?”
A cell phone rang and everyone instantly checked their own phones. Katherine held hers up. “Mine,” she said. “Excuse me.” She got up and moved to the window.
“The library where Claire worked had the letter,” Tim said. “We requested it today, but they said they had to ‘go through channels.’ They hoped to have it tomorrow.”