Stephen Cannell - Final Victim

Lockwood nodded. He had been worried about getting cooperation when they first walked in and felt the intensity in the place. Karen had quickly turned that to their advantage.

The two police officers who drove them to the Atlanta Financial District were both lost in thoughts of their fallen comrade. When they arrived, there was a young man with curly hair and a thick moustache waiting for them at the door of a ten-story building named Hoyt Tower. He was holding a case file and looked about twenty-five. He introduced himself as Detective Bill Stiner and said he was the primary on the Wilcox homicide. The rain had stopped, but thunder and sheet lightning still rumbled on the Atlanta horizon like Sherman's artillery. The security guard let them into the lobby and they went up to the fourth floor to the offices of Cavanaugh and Cunningham. The crime scene had been totally destroyed since the murder. The floors had been scrubbed of Candice's blood, but tomorrow, Lockwood suspected, the people who worked here would come to work and subconsciously walk around the offending spot where her body had been found.

Lockwood and Karen both read the crime scene and lab reports. Then they looked at the victim's desk and watched while Stiner showed them the location where the body had been found. Lockwood opened Stiner's folder and laid out several gruesome crime scene photographs. Malavida flinched, then moved over to the windows and stood there with his back to them, rattling his handcuffs. Lockwood studied the photographs-the clean surgical cuts, the identical incisions on both shoulders. The killer had placed Candice Wilcox's sweater over her face. The scissors from her desk set had been shoved into her vagina. The UnSub had branded her on the left breast. Lockwood studied the brand:

Something started tugging at his thoughts. He passed the pictures to Karen.

"The burglar alarm went off at seven-thirty A. M.," Stiner said. "When we got here, at about seven-forty-five, we found the body. She monitored foreign money exchanges for this firm at night and was alone on the floor. The coroner measured her liver temperature at eight o'clock and it indicated that she had just died. So we figure that the killer set off the silent alarm when he entered by the Center Street door at seven-thirty A. M. We also figure that while the security guard was checking the building, the perp came up here and killed her… did the mutilations. We musta just missed him."

Karen sat down at Candice Wilcox's desk and looked carefully at the crime scene photographs. Then she reached into her purse and took out her yellow pad. She began to add to the list she had started on the plane. The scissors that were stuck into the vagina were a sexual substitute, so she wrote down: "Sexually immature, inadequate individual."

"I think it's possible he may have stood here and masturbated," Karen said. "Did you check her body for semen?"

"I don't think so, not yet," Stiner said. "The autopsy won't be till nine this morning."

"Check. If he's a secretor, we could get a blood type from the semen," Lockwood said.

Karen looked at the pictures again. The sweater was carefully placed across Candice Wilcox's face… She felt this could mean one of two things. The killer could have felt bad about the crime after committing it and covered her face as some show of respect… Karen tried to think like this monster. The scissors connoted anger, sexual frustration. The mutilations had been precise and surgical. The post-mortem behavior had been methodical. The killer had stayed with her for a long time, working to remove the arms… Karen didn't think he had respect for Candice Wilcox. After she was dead he had butchered her, harvesting body parts. She decided the sweater had not been placed there because he felt bad about the crime… On her yellow pad she wrote: "Possibly very ugly, even disfigured." She thought it was possible the UnSub had covered Candice's face so her lifeless eyes would not stare at him. She studied the brand. It looked like an S inside a C… It could mean anything. It looked partially like the Chinese yin-and-yang symbol, but not exactly. She sketched it and copied the symbol along with the "R. 13-15" that appeared underneath. She wondered if it was some kind of computer symbol. She would study it in detail later.

Karen then turned the page and started a file on Candice Wilcox. Under her name, she wrote: "Victimology." She knew that profiling the victim was as important as profiling the UnSub. On this page she wrote: "Blond, thirty, Caucasian." She was almost certain that the UnSub was also white… Ritual or serial killers almost never kill outside of their own racial group. She thought it was probable that Candice had been a victim of choice. She had been selected by the UnSub for murder. There had to be some specific reason why she had been targeted for death. What did she represent to the killer? How had he selected her? What were the things about Candice that had led her to this terrible end? Candice did not seem to have led a life that would make her an easy target. She wasn't a prostitute or a small child who could easily be lured into a stranger's car; she had been working in a secure building, with a guard at the door. It was a high-risk crime committed against a low-risk victim-a difficult crime to pull off. Karen flipped the page back to her criminal profile. Under "UnSub," she added, "Possibly very smart, cautious." Her primary list of profile characteristics was beginning to grow.

She continued to study the photographs of the crime scene. She saw that the head was lower than the torso and that there was a large pool of blood around the body. Then she noticed the books propped under Candice.

"I wonder why he had these books under her like this?" she said.

"We don't know," Stiner replied.

"Sometimes a psychopathic killer will arrange a body in a special way," she said.

"You mean posing the corpse?" Stiner asked.

"Well, I'm not sure," Karen said, chewing on the tip of her pen.

"There's a difference between posing and staging. I'm not sure yet which this is. Posing is something the killer can't control, it's part of his ritual… He has to degrade the body for psychological reasons, dealing with a whole range of emotions-anger, hatred of women or his mother, sexual fantasy. Staging, on the other hand, is a post-mortem behavior aimed at throwing the police off"

Stiner looked at her for a long moment. "No kidding?" She nodded and looked again at the pictures. "So which is this?" he continued.

"I don't know for sure… Let me take a guess." She looked at the spot on the floor where Candice had died… then back up at Stiner and Lockwood. Malavida was still at the window, but he had turned slightly to listen to her.

"This crime scene was organized," she said, studying the pictures. "That means the guy we're dealing with is slightly older than the mean age of sex killers, which is twenty-five. He's more sophisticated, less frenzied. He cleaned up after himself. Probably used garbage bags to carry the limbs out, because there's no blood trail I can see from the crime scene pictures of the hall or the staircase."

"That's what we figured," Detective Stiner said.

"My guess is that since he cleaned up after himself, this thing with the books probably isn't ritual. He was trying to throw the police off somehow. I think it's staging."

"How would that do anything?" Stiner asked, puzzled.

Lockwood moved away from them and stood looking out the window. He could see down into the still-wet street and he wondered if the killer had watched her from there. Her desk was near the window. After a minute, Karen moved over to where he was standing and noticed a frown on his face. "What is it?" she asked.

"Karen, did you ever take any pre-med when you were getting your doctorates?"