Even these hardened profilers could only fall into a grim silence, hearing of the madman’s spree.
Reid continued: “At nineteen, Speck went to a tattoo parlor and had the words ‘Born to Raise Hell’ applied to his left forearm. This was one of the things police used to identify him when Speck was arrested on July seventeenth, three days after the crime and his own attempted suicide. In an interesting sidebar, when he was in prison, Speck once found an injured bird. He nursed it back to health, tied a string to its leg and let the bird ride around on his shoulder. When he was told he couldn’t have the bird, because the prison had a policy against pets, Speck threw the bird into a running fan. When a guard said, ‘I thought you liked that bird.’ Speck replied, ‘I did, but if I can’t have it, no one can.’ ”
“Well,” Morgan said, “that’s a little selfish.”
“Speck is generally categorized as a mass murderer,” Reid went on, “but he was a suspect in the deaths or disappearances of eight other women other the years, as well as an individual rape. So other experts classify him a serial.”
Reid looked around for any questions, then lifted his eyebrows and twitched a smile, like a nervous kid who’d just finished a school report. He took a seat at the conference table.
Hotchner asked Rossi, “Do you remember the other names in the mass murderer section of Ryan’s book?”
Rossi’s eyes were tight with thought. “The emphasis was on serial killers, with a relatively small section on mass murderers. I know Howard Unruh, first of the so-called lone gunmen, and Charles Whitman, the University of Texas tower sniper, were written up. I believe there was one other, but I don’t recall who.”
“Byran Uyesugi,” Reid said. “The Xerox murderer.”
Rossi chuckled dryly. “That memory of yours does come in handy. But we could still use a copy of that book. If it’s the UnSub’s bible, having it around could be helpful.”
Hotchner dispatched Reid to a track down a local bookstore with a copy of Serial Killers and Mass Murderers:Profiling Why They Kill. The book was not available for download, and it wasn’t as if they could print a copy from Reid’s memory. No one said so, but they all knew that if they failed to stop the Speck reenactment, they would need every tool available to prevent the next performance on the UnSub’s list.
Morgan felt great respect for Max Ryan, David Rossi, Jason Gideon and the other pioneering profilers; they had built all this up from nothing. The BAU had worked a case with Ryan several years ago, helping the retired agent crack an old unsolved case that had haunted him. With the exception of Rossi, the old guard was gone now. Hotchner led a new generation of behaviorists. Mind hunters, the press called them.
The mind they were hunting this time belonged to an utter sociopath bent on killing as many people as possible in his sick bid for power and recognition. And knowing that the reenactment of individual killings was headed toward re-creations of mass murder was a chilling thought, even to a seasoned veteran like Morgan.
While Jareau dealt with the media, Prentiss stayed in touch with Garcia, who sought to locate groups of nursing students living together who might mirror the configuration of Speck’s original atrocities.
Reid was out getting the Ryan book, and Hotchner was searching for the missing Jake Denson via phone and computer. Rossi, along with detectives Tovar and Lorenzon, was headed for One Hundredth Street, the site of Speck’s invasion.
Meanwhile, Morgan dug into the Herman Kotchman case. Born in California in 1948, Kotchman grew up with an alcoholic mother who turned a blind eye to the abuse of her two sons by her bisexual second husband, perhaps because that lessened his presence in her bed, sparing her to some degree the man’s physical and sexual abuse. One night the abuse turned to murder, when the stepfather killed Herman’s brother, who had dared try to escape his grasp, and the boy was buried in the backyard of their rural home in what was forever referred to as “a terrible accident” and “our family secret.”
In 1966, the same year Speck was making a name for himself, Herman Kotchman, not content to wait for the draft, had joined the army. With the Vietnam War escalating, the army seemed willing to take just about anybody. Kotchman, however, couldn’t make the grade even with lowered standards, and was mustered out on a dishonorable discharge, after savagely beating another soldier in the shower. Seemed the man had been looking “funny” at Kotchman’s penis.
Once back home, Kotchman chose not to return to the house of his mother and stepfather. Instead, he took an apartment in nearby Modesto, California. A year later, the stepfather died of cirrhosis of the liver, and his grief-stricken drunken mother’s first call had been to Herman. To help keep his mother from starving, the dutiful son entered into a plan with her to bury the stepfather in the backyard and continue to cash his social security checks.
The stress of all those years of abuse and secrets finally cascaded over into Herman’s reality once he was living in the house again. His pent-up fury at his late stepfather consumed him and he began trolling gay bars and nightclubs for victims that reminded him of the balding, pudgy man. He would bury them in the backyard, too, but with a gallon of water, a claw hammer, and a vent pipe for air.
Kotchman always told them, “And another of his disciples said unto him, ‘Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father’ ”—a quote from the book of Matthew, possibly somewhat misinterpreted by the killer.
Convicted of four counts of murder and one count each of kidnapping and attempted murder, Kotchman, sixty now, was serving a life sentence in a California prison.
Morgan kept digging into Kotchman’s background (much as the FBI had earlier dug into his backyard), studying the address of Kotchman’s home, the dates of his kills—anything that might give them a leg up on locating a potential victim who had presumably been buried and was possibly still alive. He was still doing that when Reid came in with a copy of Max Ryan’s book.
Morgan asked, “How long will it take you to reread that?”
Reid sat at the conference table, smiled just a little. “I read it on the ride back from the bookstore.”
He’d been driven to and from the bookstore by local agent Kohler, who’d been doing odds and ends for the team.
Morgan asked, “And?”
Reid shrugged. “The book didn’t tell me anything we didn’t already know, per se.”
“Per se?”
“Well, it did get me thinking. What would you need to re-create one of Kotchman’s crimes?”
Morgan shrugged. “Not much—a shovel, some plywood, some PVC pipe for the vent.”
“And where would you get these things?”
“I can think of quite a few places,” Morgan said. “But I know just who can narrow the search for us.” He tapped some keys on his laptop and Garcia’s face appeared on his screen.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“We’re looking for someone who might have gone shopping—he could have gone any number of places, but he’d have a very distinct list. He would’ve bought maybe three ten-foot sheets of plywood, ten feet of PVC, and probably a shovel. Can you do your magic and see how many times that’s happened in the Chicago area in the last say… three weeks?”
“I’m on it.”
“Be sure to include that Fix-it Mate where Bobby Edels worked. In Mundelein.”
“Will do. When I know something, you will.”
And, like any good genie, she was gone, just minus the puff of smoke.
They went back to studying other aspects of the crime and, although waiting was a large part of any law enforcement job, Morgan felt about to jump out of his skin. He was about to say to hell with it, long enough to grab some lunch anyway, when Jareau entered the conference room carrying a large manila envelope.
“Got it,” she said, presenting the envelope to Hotchner.
“Got what?” the team leader asked.
“The forensic artist’s suspect drawing. Minchell says this is the guy that hired him to procure the two gay men.”