“I’m gonna take it over to the lab,” Burden said. “Have them do the usual workup, see what they can tell us. Karen?”
Vail was reading it a second time. They waited for her to finish, at which point she sat back in her chair. “There’s a lot of anger. It looks like his grammar is atrocious, which would indicate a lower level of schooling. But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. There’s a purpose behind it. And he specifically warns us not to underestimate him.”
“What else?”
“The writer appears to have done time in prison. He obviously refers to it and implies he’s had experiences there. I assume being ‘stuck,’ in that context, refers to being raped. And he asks why he should respect authority in prison if his parents taught him not to respect it when he was free. That could merely be bullshit, but he does describe an attitude toward authority that’s common among violent offenders: a lot of them don’t think the laws of society apply to them. So I think there’s a good chance our writer’s been incarcerated.”
“That could help us out big time,” Friedberg said.
Burden leaned toward Vail. “He mentions you twice, as if he’s talking directly to you. What do you make of that?”
“That would be what our UNSUB would do. Same with his opening-he puts himself out as the smart one, us as the dumb ones.”
“You think this really is from the Bay Killer?” Dixon asked.
“That’s a much more difficult question to answer.” Vail sat forward in her chair and carefully slid the paper toward her using the eraser of a pencil. “It could be someone who read Allman’s article. He mentioned me, so this crackpot could be trying to get his fifteen minutes of fame, if tomorrow’s newspaper, or the paper’s website, mentions the letter. Or it could actually be our guy-but he could be deliberately altering things to throw us off.”
“Throw us off, how?” Friedberg asked.
“Reading this, you might think he doesn’t appear to be too bright, with all the grammatical and spelling errors and run-on sentences. But hints of his intelligence come through when he makes his point, however circular and pontificatory he made it sound.”
“Pontificatory?” Burden said.
“Yeah,” Vail said, “pontificatory. You got a problem with that?”
“Go on,” Dixon said.
“There appears to be a cogent message beneath the surface, if we read between the lines. I said before that he’s angry. He’s pissed about something that happened in prison. It might be a rape, but I think it’s more than that. Sounds like he got out of prison and tried to make it work, but he couldn’t survive in society.
“This is also a recurring theme with criminals-they do their time or get paroled, and then get released-and are completely unprepared for how society functions. They can’t get jobs, or they get one and can’t relate to people and they get into trouble, get fired-and then have no money and no way to get another job. So they turn to what they know, or what they learned in the joint, and that’s robbery, or theft, or drugs. And they get caught and tossed back in prison again.” Vail slid closer to the letter, took another look at it, and said, “There’s more here, but that’s a start.”
“So what do we do with this?” Friedberg asked. “He didn’t give us a way of responding.”
“But he did,” Vail said. “He wants the attention. So if we want to reply, and we do, we have to do it publicly.”
“And what reply do we ‘want’ to send?” Burden asked.
“Appeal to his grandiosity. We should make it all about him. He’s the ultimate, super important. All our efforts are focused on him. We’re blown away by his intelligence. But at the same time, we have to challenge him so he doesn’t get bored with us.”
“Bored with us?” Burden asked. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“Psychopaths get bored. It’s a part of who they are, their personalities. We’re finding they’ll even vary their crimes just to keep it interesting and different. That could explain why the new crime scenes are slightly different.”
“But if he gets bored with us,” Friedberg said, “and stops communicating, then what?”
“Nothing good from our perspective. Unless we handle it right, he could quickly lose interest in me. I have to let him think he’s in control. Some detectives who had a dialogue with a serial killer want to talk to them after they’re caught. They think they’ve got some kind of ‘special’ relationship with this killer, but the killer doesn’t give a shit about them. It’s all about how the serial killer thinks he can manipulate and use the detective. And then he spits them out.
“If I go to visit an offender in prison, someone I’ve spoken with a number of times in the past, he won’t have warm, fuzzy memories of talking with me-even if we did have productive chats. These assholes don’t form a bond with me or anyone else. There’s just no loyalty there because they’re not capable of it. Our UNSUB’s contacting us-me-because it’s exciting to contact ‘his’ profiler. But I could lose him really fast if I don’t handle it right.”
“I say we just tell him to fuck off,” Burden said.
“First of all,” Friedberg said, “other than quotes in an article that we plant, we have no way of reaching him.”
Vail said, “He’s set this up as a one-way conversation, which fits-his opinion is all that matters.”
“What about TV? Would that be better than a newspaper or website post?” Dixon asked.
Vail cringed. “TV’s bigger, more grandiose. We definitely don’t want to go there unless he forces us to. So far that hasn’t been an issue.”
“So we build up his ego,” Dixon said. “How would we simultaneously challenge him to keep his interest?”
Vail rose from her chair and walked over to the murder board where the photos were displayed. “We ask him to help us out, because we’re not getting what he’s trying to tell us. We understand he had a tough time in prison, but we sense there’s a bigger picture, that there’s a message here we’re not capable of seeing without his help.”
Burden slapped a hand on the table; the pencil jumped. “So you’re saying we should play dumb and ask this fuckwad, who’s murdered several people, to help us out because we’re incompetent and we can’t catch him?”
Vail tilted her head. “Do you see him behind bars, Burden? Because I sure don’t. So check your ego at the goddamn door so we can do what we need to do to keep this guy contacting us. Sooner or later, if we play it right, he’s gonna tell us something that will give us a direct line to him. Get it?”
Burden tightened his jaw. “Whatever.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’”
“Karen,” Dixon said, then gave her a slight shake of her head.
Cut it out. Vail took a deep breath. You’re letting the offender get to you. She closed her eyes and cleared her mind. When she opened them, she realized her team was looking at her. “All right. I don’t see where we have a choice. This asshole wants to play.” She shrugged. “Let’s play.”