“It’s a her and I don’t know if she got it because she’s not answering her phone or her e-mail and she didn’t-”
I stopped in my verbal tracks and looked at Rachel.
“What?”
“She didn’t show up for work today. She didn’t call in and nobody could reach her. They even sent somebody to her apartment but they got no answer.”
Rachel abruptly stood up.
“We’ve got to go back to L.A., Jack. The chopper’s waiting.”
“What about my interview? And you said you were going to pull the video from downstairs.”
“What about your partner? The interview and video can wait till later.”
Embarrassed, I nodded and got off the bed. It was time to go.
I had no idea where Angela Cook lived. I told Rachel what I did know about her, including her odd fixation with the Poet case, and that I’d heard she had a blog but had never read it. Rachel transmitted all the information to an agent in L.A. before we boarded the military chopper and headed south toward Nellis Air Force Base.
On the flight there we wore headsets, which cut down on the engine noise but didn’t allow for conversation that wasn’t in sign language. Rachel took my files and spent the hour with them. I watched her making comparisons between the crime scene and autopsy reports of Denise Babbit and Sharon Oglevy. She worked with a look of complete concentration on her face and took notes on a legal pad she’d pulled out of her own bag. She spent a lot of time looking at the horrible photos of the dead women, taken both at the crime scene and on the autopsy table.
For the most part I sat in my straight-back seat and racked my brain, trying to put together an explanation for how all of this could have happened so fast. More specifically, how this killer could have started hunting me when I had barely started hunting him. By the time we landed at Nellis, I thought I had something and was waiting for the opportunity to tell Rachel.
We immediately transferred to a waiting jet on which we were the only passengers. We sat across from each other, and the pilot informed Rachel that there was a call holding for her on the onboard telephone. We strapped in, she picked up the phone and the jet immediately started taxiing out to the runway. On the overhead the pilot told us we would be on the ground in L.A. in an hour. Nothing like the power and might of the federal government, I thought. This was the way to travel-except for one thing. It was a small plane and I didn’t fly small planes.
Rachel mostly listened to her caller, then asked a few questions and finally hung up.
“Angela Cook was not at her home,” she said. “They can’t find her.”
I didn’t respond. A sharp stab of fear and dread for Angela worked its way up under my ribs. This didn’t ease any as the jet took off, rising at a steeper angle than I was used to with commercial airliners. I almost tore the armrest off with my fingernails. After we were safely up I finally spoke.
“Rachel, I think I know how this guy could’ve found us so quickly-Angela, at least.”
“Tell me.”
“No, you first. Tell me what you found in the files.”
“Jack, don’t be so petty. This has become a little bit larger than a newspaper story.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t go first. It’s also larger than the FBI’s penchant for taking information but not giving anything back in return.”
She shook off the barb.
“Fine, I’ll start. But first let me commend you, Jack. From what I have read about these cases, I would say there is absolutely no doubt that they are connected by a single killer. The same man is responsible for both. But he escaped notice because in each case an alternate suspect came to light quickly and the local authorities proceeded with blinders on. In each case, they had their man from the beginning and didn’t look into other possibilities. Except of course in the Babbit case, their man was a boy.”
I leaned forward, beaming with confidence after her compliment.
“And he never confessed like they put out to the press,” I said. “I have the transcript back at my office. Nine-hour interrogation and the kid never confessed. He said he stole her car and her money, but the body was already in the trunk. He never said he killed her.”
Rachel nodded.
“I assumed that. So what I was doing with the material you have here was profiling the two killings. Looking for a signature.”
“The signature’s obvious. He likes strangling women with plastic bags.”
“Technically they weren’t strangled. They were asphyxiated. Suffocated. There’s a difference.”
“Okay.”
“There is something very familiar about the use of the plastic bag and the cord around the neck, but I was actually looking for something a little less obvious than the surface signature. I was also looking for connections or similarities between the women. If we find what connects them we’ll find the killer.”
“They were both strippers.”
“That’s part of it but a little broad. And, technically, one was a stripper and one was an exotic performer. There is a slight difference.”
“Whatever. They both showed their naked bodies off for a living. Is that the only connection you found?”
“Well, as you must have noticed, they were very similar in physical makeup. In fact, the difference in weight was only three pounds and the difference in height was half an inch. Facial structure and hair was also alike. A victim’s body type is a key component in terms of what makes them chosen. An opportunistic killer takes what comes along. But when you see two victims like this with exactly the same body type, it tells us this is a predator who is patient, who chooses.”
It looked like she had more to say but stopped. I waited but she didn’t continue.
“What?” I said. “You know more than you’re saying.”
She dropped the hesitation.
“When I was in Behavioral it was in the early days. The profilers often sat around and talked about the correlation between the predators we hunted and the predators in the wild. You’d be surprised how similar a serial killer can be to a leopard or a jackal. And the same could be said for victims. In fact, when it came to body types we often assigned victims animal types. These two women we would have called giraffes. They were tall and long-legged. Our predator has a taste for giraffes.”
I wanted to write some of this down to use later but I was afraid that any obvious recording of her interpretation of the files would cause her to shut down the exposition. So I tried not to even move.
“There’s something else,” she said. “At this point this is purely conjecture on my part. But both autopsies ascribe marks on each of the victims’ legs to ligature. I think that might be wrong.”
“Why?”
“Let me show you something.”
I finally moved. We were in seats that faced each other. I unbuckled and moved to the seat next to her. She went through the files and pulled several of the copies of photos from the crime scenes and the autopsies.
“Okay, you see the marks left above and below the knees here and here and here?”
“Yeah, like they were tied up.”
“Not quite.”
She used a clear polished fingernail to trace the markings on the victims as she explained.
“The marks are too symmetrical to be from traditional bindings. Plus, if these were ligature marks we would see them around the ankles. If you were going to tie someone up to control them or to prevent escape, you would tie their ankles. Yet we have no ligature marks in these areas. The wrists, yes, but not on the ankles.”
She was right. I just hadn’t seen it until she explained it.
“So what made those marks on the legs?”
“Well, I can’t say for sure, but when I was in Behavioral, we came upon new paraphilias on almost every case. We started categorizing them.”
“You’re talking about sexual perversions?”