John Verdon - Let the Devil Sleep

After giving them time to absorb the information and its implications, Bullard underscored some key points, after which she asked if there were any questions.

Trout held up the CJIS report. “What significance are you attributing to this confusion over where the killer parked his car?”

“I think ‘attempted deception’ would be more accurate than ‘confusion.’ ”

“Call it whatever you like. My question is, what significance does it have?”

“By itself not much, beyond indicating a certain level of caution. But combined with the Facebook message, I’d say it indicates an attempt to create a false narrative. Like the body being moved from the upstairs room where the attack took place to the entry hall where it was found.”

Trout raised an eyebrow.

“Microscopic scrape marks from the heels of her shoes on the stair carpets, consistent with dragging,” explained Bullard. “So we were being set up to buy into a version of the crime very different from what actually occurred.”

Holdenfield spoke for the first time. “Why?”

Bullard smiled like a teacher with a student who finally asked the right question. “Well, had we swallowed the deception-the scenario of the killer pulling into the driveway, knocking on the front door, stabbing the victim when she opened it, and driving off into the night-we’d have ended up believing that the Facebook message was the victim’s and that everything in it was true, including the description of the killer’s vehicle. Plus that the killer was probably someone she didn’t know.”

Holdenfield looked honestly curious. “Why someone she didn’t know?”

“Two reasons. First, the Facebook message indicates that it wasn’t a vehicle she recognized. Second, the misleading position of the body conveys the false message that she never let him into the house-when in fact we know that she did.”

“Pretty thin evidence for any of that,” said Trout.

“We have evidence that he was in the house and that he made an effort to mislead us on that point. There are several reasons he might want to do that, but a big one could be to conceal the fact that the victim knew him and invited him in.”

That seemed to take Trout by surprise. “You’re claiming that Ruth Blum knew the Good Shepherd personally?”

“I’m claiming that certain elements of the crime scene demand we take that possibility seriously.”

Trout looked at Daker, who shrugged as though he didn’t think it mattered one way or the other. Then he looked at Holdenfield, who appeared to be thinking that it mattered a great deal.

Bullard leaned back in her chair and let the silence build before adding, “The false narrative constructed by the Good Shepherd around the Ruth Blum murder has me wondering about his original murders.”

“Wondering?” Trout was agitated. “Wondering what?”

“Wondering if he had the same appetite for deception back then. What do you think, Agent Trout?”

Bullard, in her way, had dropped a small bombshell. It wasn’t a new bombshell, of course. It was what Gurney had been muttering for a week and Clinter for the past ten years. But now, for the first time, it had been tossed onto the table not by an outsider but by a ranking investigator with an arguable right to pursue the case to its conclusion.

She appeared to be inviting Trout to soften his insistence that the essence of the case was summed up by the manifesto and the offender profile.

Unsurprisingly, he stalled and sniped. “You spoke earlier about the importance of facts. I’d like a lot more of those before offering any opinion. I’m in no rush to rethink the most analyzed case in modern criminology, just because someone tried to fool us about where he parked his car.”

The sarcasm was a mistake. Gurney could see it in the set of Bullard’s jaw and in the extra two seconds she held the man’s gaze before she went on. She picked up her e-mail printout of Gurney’s questions.

“Since you folks at the FBI have been at the center of all that analyzing, I’m hoping you can illuminate a few points for me. This business with the little animals? I’m sure you saw in our CJIS report that a two-inch plastic lion had been placed on the victim’s mouth. What’s your take on that?”

Trout turned toward Holdenfield. “Becca?”

Holdenfield smiled meaninglessly. “That’s a speculative area. The source of the original animals-a Noah’s Ark play set-suggests a religious significance. The Bible describes the flood as God’s judgment on an evil world, just as the Good Shepherd’s actions represent his own judgment on that world. Also, the Good Shepherd used only one of each pair of animals at each attack site. There may be an unconscious significance for him in breaking up the pairs that way. His way of ‘culling the flock.’ From a Freudian perspective, it might reflect a childhood desire to break up his parents’ marriage, perhaps by killing one of them. I would emphasize again that this is speculative.”

Bullard nodded slowly, as if absorbing a profound insight. “And the very big gun? From the Freudian perspective, that would be a very big penis?”

Holdenfield’s expression became wary. “It’s not quite that simple.”

“Ah,” said Bullard, “I was afraid of that. Just when I think I’m catching on…” She turned to Gurney. “What’s your read on the big gun and the little animals?”

“I believe their purpose was to generate this conversation.”

“Say that again?”

“My read on the gun and the animals is that they’re purposeful distractions.”

“Distractions from what?”

“From the essential pragmatism of the whole enterprise. They’re designed to suggest an underlying layer of neurotic motivation, or even derangement.”

“The Good Shepherd wants us to believe that he’s deranged?”

“Under the surface rationale of a typical mission-driven killer, there’s always a layer of neurotic or psychotic motivation. It’s the unconscious source of the homicidal energy that drives the conscious ‘mission.’ Right, Rebecca?”

She ignored the question.

Gurney continued. “I believe that the killer is fully aware of all that. I believe that the gun and the animals were the final touches of a master manipulator. The profilers would expect to find things like that, so he provided them. They helped make the ‘mission’ concept believable. The one hypothesis the killer didn’t want anyone to propose or pursue was that he was perfectly sane and that his crimes might have a purely practical motive. A traditional murder motive. Because that would have led the investigation in a completely different direction and probably would have exposed him fairly quickly.”

Trout sighed impatiently, addressing himself to Bullard. “We’ve been through all this with Mr. Gurney before. And his assertions are still nothing more than assertions. They have no evidentiary basis. Frankly, the repetition is tiresome. The accepted hypothesis represents a totally coherent view of the case-the only rational, coherent view of the case that’s ever been put forward.” He picked up his copy of the new Good Shepherd message, gesturing with it. “Plus-this new communication is one hundred percent consistent with the original manifesto and offers a perfectly credible explanation for his attack on Harold Blum’s widow.”

“What do you think of it, Rebecca?” said Gurney, pointing to the paper in Trout’s hand.

“I’d like some more time to study it, but right now I’d say with a reasonable level of professional certainty that it was composed by the same individual who composed the original document.”

“What else?”

She pursed her lips, seemed to be weighing different ways of answering. “He’s articulating the same obsessive resentment, which has now been aggravated by the TV airing of The Orphans of Murder . His new complaint, the motivating factor that triggered his attack on Ruth Blum, is that Orphans is an intolerable glorification of despicable people.”