Oliver Stark - 88 Killer

Squad Room, Missing Persons

March 7, 4.15 p.m.

Denise spent three hours being spat at, hounded and abused — and what’s more, she paid for the privilege. After the session, she didn’t go home. She walked a while and thought about things. What Mac had done was not nice but it had left her feeling stronger than she had in months.

She grabbed a cab over to Missing Persons. All she was thinking about as Mac was screaming at her was Abby Goldenberg and what she might be going through. Abby Goldenberg who was just sixteen and had her whole life ahead of her.

Denise could help herself now, but if Abby was somewhere out there she wanted to try to help her too. The guy on the desk called upstairs and Detective Sarah Gauge came down, welcomed her and showed her into their offices.

At the squad room at Missing Persons, Abby Goldenberg’s disappearance was cataloged in four large box-files and one chronologically ordered lever-arch file. The two detectives had gone through a lot of leads in the eight days since her disappearance.

Although they’d not voiced the level of their concerns to Dr Goldenberg, it appeared that they’d treated it as a potential abduction since day one. They’d even tried to get the detectives from the Major Case Squad to consider it a kidnapping. The latter had looked at the case-file and sent it back, saying there wasn’t a single shred of evidence. Or, more importantly, the evidence they did have suggested she was a runaway.

Denise saw the problem. If the case stayed with Missing Persons, Abby Goldenberg would become another sad photograph on the NYPD Missing Persons website.

Denise flicked through the case-files. Munroe and Gauge had been working hard to find a break, often on their own time. Not many cops would’ve visited every last person on Dr Goldenberg’s list, but they had done it. Was it something to do with the girl’s beauty or her father’s distress? It was difficult to say what moved cops to go the extra mile, but in the end it came down to a mixture of professionalism and personal integrity.

Denise pulled out the daily report summaries written by Munroe. The pair didn’t seem to have taken a break in eight days. ‘You’ve done well,’ Denise said. ‘You’ve kept the trail warm.’ She flipped another page; pulled out an FBI profile. It was a one-page document, nothing more.

Denise turned to Gauge. ‘You seem pretty convinced that Abby’s not just a runaway.’

‘I know runaways. What can I say? Some strike you that way, some don’t. I can’t see this Abby kid putting her father through this if she could help it. Not a chance.’

‘So, if she didn’t run, what happened?’

‘Rape murder, most probably. The body buried in some shallow grave or cut up and stored in someone’s ice compartment.’ She saw Denise’s face whiten. ‘Sorry, Denise. But it’s the truth. These things we know and it takes some doing to keep her old man from thinking them. I’m not cynical. I hope that she is a damn runaway. I hope she’s on some romantic delusion with some idiot boyfriend — I hope she’s screwing half of New Jersey to impress her mom. I hope she’ll come back tomorrow, but they don’t come back, not often, not after eight days. Not when they’re sixteen and don’t have a drug or home problem.’

‘How much time you got left on the case?’

‘None. We’ve been busting a gut to finish our other caseloads, working our own time, and generally lying and shit to give this case some light, but we’re all done. The Squad Sergeant is going to move it to the back room.’

‘And then what happens to Abby?’

‘We keep in contact with her father every few months, we give the impression that we’re still looking. Officially it’s still an open case, but between you and me, it doesn’t get a second of our time.’

‘He’s a smart man, he probably guesses. I was thinking that’s why he mentioned me. I’m a link — Columbia and NYPD.’

‘Yes, it could be. You want some time with this stuff?’

‘Please.’

‘Well, let us know if you think we’ve missed something.’

‘What’s the bottom line?’

‘Unless you can find some physical evidence to prove to the Squad Sergeant that this is an abduction or murder, then it’s over for Abby. She’s a statistic.’

Denise nodded. She looked down at the FBI profile. ‘They sent this through to you?’

‘We made up some details about the case to get a second opinion.’

Denise read the profile.

‘Any use?’ said Gauge.

‘Inductive profiling. It’s pretty basic. They use the limited information they’ve got about known criminals and match them up with the crime under consideration. All this tells you is that in the last twenty years, the kind of person abducting teenage girls in this type of location tended to be men aged somewhere between thirty-two and forty-five years old who have previous convictions. It’s not going to help you much.’

‘It didn’t.’

Denise took a pen and pulled a clean sheet of paper from the tray on the desk. ‘Deductive profiling works quite differently. The Feds use statistical averages, but that’s a blunt tool. Deductive reasoning is harder but it uses every piece of forensic evidence, every detail of the victim, the location and time of the attack to build an individualized picture of the perpetrator.’

‘There’s nothing for you to work on.’

‘I can piece something together. At least, I can try.’

‘Well, let us know if you need anything else,’ said Sarah Gauge. ‘Right now I’ve got a missing prostitute and an absconded husband to track down.’

Detective Gauge left the room and Denise was alone. A research psychologist by training, she had worked for years on the relationships between behavior and personality types, comparing these to criminal profiles and then analyzing where FBI and police profiles had gone wrong. It had drawn her into contact with killers across America, but always from a safe distance.

She took the job at the NYPD to get closer to the action and in a very short time, she was too close altogether.

Her research had shown her that inductive profiling worked in less than fifty per cent of cases. Human beings were not entirely predictable and Denise was interested in the fifty per cent who were more difficult to profile simply by using statistics. These were difficult because they were not normal. They were the criminals with psychologies so distorted and perverse that basic models and types didn’t help. They needed individual attention.

On the piece of paper in front of her, she started to analyze the victim. It was often the biggest part of the profile, trying to understand why the killer was motivated to take this particular girl and for what particular reason. Denise wrote down everything she could about the kind of girl that Abby was.

The facts were simple. The last thing they knew about Abby was that she left home just before 5.15 p.m. and was last seen leaving the house by her father. A driver spotted her crossing Parkway, but didn’t see anyone following her. There was a report that a truck nearly knocked her over. So presumably Abby was preoccupied. She was going somewhere secretive and she changed her clothes, so it would be something to do with a boy or a band. Denise couldn’t really see another reason for her to deceive her father. And this was to protect him, not harm him.

Denise concluded that Abby was someone who was willing to listen to her own feelings and not be swayed by others. It seemed unlikely then, that she would have been seduced into a car, as some girls were by clever kidnappers who appeared injured, or seemed to need help or offer some inducement. She would also have had a high degree of self-confidence.