“I’m thinking the same thing you are.”
I ask him who and what Daniel Mersa is today and where he is and Benton says he started gathering information when Granby told the BAU that DNA had identified the Capital Murderer as Martin Lagos. Benton talked to Daniel’s mother and told her it was crucial to know if anyone had heard from his childhood friend Martin, who might be in danger or he might be dangerous to others.
She claimed she wouldn’t know because she hadn’t heard from her son Daniel since he dropped out of a college summer program in Lacoste, France, when he was twenty-one. He’d been in and out of trouble, she admitted, and in and out of different schools and sent abroad, and he never graduated and had nothing to do with her anymore.
“Do you believe she was telling you the truth?” I ask.
“About that, yes.” Benton moves the projected image of a file closer. “I honestly think she’s worried now.”
“Because of the Capital Murderer cases.”
“I didn’t mention them.”
He slides documents out of the virtual file and begins turning virtual pages and they make a papery sound.
“But I had a feeling she knew what I was talking about when I brought up Martin and that we need to find him,” he says. “Something about her demeanor caused me to suspect she knew damn well we weren’t going to find him because he’s dead. But that doesn’t mean Daniel isn’t out there somewhere killing people and she knows it.”
He lines up pages of a student disciplinary record with the Savannah College of Art and Design in the headers.
“One of many places Daniel was in and out of and his academic records are telling.” Benton taps the glass with his index finger and a page gets small and he enlarges it again. “Breaking into another student’s locker, sneaking into a girl’s dorm and stealing lingerie from the laundry room, setting fire to a guidance counselor’s garbage cans, drowning a dog and bragging about it, disruptive in class, vandalism. It’s a long list that includes his high school years.”
“Were the police ever involved?”
“They were never called. The matters were handled privately, typical of schools, and maybe there’s another reason.”
“What else did his mother say?”
“She did everything she could for him, sparing no expense on counseling and therapy. As a child, Daniel was diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder, and I gathered from what she said that in his case SPD manifests not in his overresponding to sensation but not being able to get enough of it. Originally it was confused with ADHD because of his sensory-seeking behavior, his inability to sit still and obsession with touching things, his thrill seeking and high-risk activities, walking on stilts, climbing up telephone poles and water towers and out windows and down drainpipes, showing off to other kids, who would try to imitate him and hurt themselves. She said she couldn’t control him no matter what she tried.”
“Sounds like she was making excuses for him because she suspects the worst,” I comment.
“She wanted me to know she was a good mother, availing him of the typical home therapies for SPD. Backyard swings, obstacle courses, monkey bars, trampolines, gymnastic balls, sensory body socks, personally supervising tactile art like finger painting and working with clay.”
“Clay,” I repeat. “What Ernie’s found.”
“It’s entered my mind.”
“A mineral fingerprint that might be from an art supply like paint or sculpting clay,” I think out loud to Benton.
Lycra fibers from a stretchy material like a body sock, and I move the photograph of Martin so I can look at it closely again. I study what Daniel drew on the white plaster cast, a bright blue Gumby-like cartoon that could depict a boy zipped up head to toe in what looks like a body bag sewn of a colorful thin but sturdy fabric that can be stretched into different creative shapes in the mirror or in shadows on the wall. A therapeutic body sock is see-through, impossible to tear, and if the zipper were locked, one couldn’t escape. It’s breathable but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t suffocate someone with it if you wrapped it tightly around that person’s face.
It would be a good way to restrain someone, the soft, silky fabric causing very little injury, and I imagine Gail Shipton paralyzed by a stun gun and zipped up inside such a thing. It would explain the blue Lycra fibers all over her body and under her nails and in her teeth. And then I see her struggling inside this stretchy bag-like prison while she’s in the killer’s car, clawing, maybe biting at the material as she panics, her damaged heart hammering against her chest.
I hope she died quickly before he could do the rest of it and I suspect I know what the rest of it was, as if I’m watching what the bastard did, perhaps spreading open what’s no different from a body bag on the car seat and the minute he’s got her inside he’s zipping her in, assuring her that he won’t hurt her as long as she behaves, and she doesn’t want to be shocked again, does she?
I can see him driving her somewhere in the dark, perhaps talking to her while she doesn’t resist, and then he gets her to a place he’s picked in advance and he tightens the stretchy material around her face and suffocates her. It would require about as much time as it takes to drown someone unless he was cruel enough to do it slowly and he could have, tightening and relaxing, letting her come to and doing it again, as long as he wanted, as long as her body could sustain such torture before it quit.
Then he poses his victim, adorning her as it gratifies his sick fantasies, tightly securing a plastic bag around her neck with designer duct tape that left a faint furrow and mark postmortem and adding a decorative duct tape bow under her chin and then another victim’s panties. All symbolic. All part of his incredibly twisted mind and soul, the choreography of his evil imagination, his evil art, a deviant inspiration that goes back to the beginning of his blighted time on this earth and possibly fueled by deviant home movies of Gabriela Lagos bathing and seducing her son.
I envision Daniel Mersa dragging the body on some type of sled or litter, displaying it by a lake near a golf course. An arm outstretched, the wrist cocked very much the way Gabriela’s left arm was positioned as it floated on the surface of the water in the tub, languidly stretched out, the wrist drooping, her other arm floating across her waist.
Such an image would be indelibly imprinted in Daniel’s violent mind after he drowned her, watching her naked body go completely still, then limp, settling lower in the water, her arms drifting up as if she’s relaxing in her steamy, sharply fragrant bath surrounded by candles and huge plush white bath sheets. He may have recorded her murder and repeatedly watching what he did to her would have fueled what drives him and made him sicker.
“You don’t necessarily outgrow SPD,” Benton is explaining and I look at him and try not to see what I just did. “And the worst thing someone with that disorder could do is to take designer drugs, stimulants like MDPV.”
“And none of what you’re telling me about Daniel Mersa was taken seriously by the BAU.” I feel exhausted and chilled and I try to will my mind to clear.
“No one’s been listening to me because they’re listening to the DNA. It’s not Daniel Mersa’s profile that got a hit in CODIS. In fact, he’s never been in CODIS or arrested and for a good reason.”
The images of women dying are stubborn in my mind. I see their terror and suffering as they were suffocating. “HA! HA! HA!” Daniel Mersa wrote with a flourish on Martin’s cast.
“A lot of people have disturbing backgrounds and they don’t end up becoming serial killers,” Benton is saying. “And Granby’s discredited me with the BAU.” He repeats the depressing story I know so well. “I don’t know exactly how or when it started but it’s not a hard thing to do when people worry about their jobs and are competitive.”