Another day staring at whiteboards, I thought as we trudged into the Marshals' office a little after ten in the morning. We had slept in because of our early morning call. So far, patrol units hadn't found a body. Another delay in his pattern.
Agent Arons and Agent Gentry both sat in the room, watching us. I didn't know if they were waiting for us to pull a rabbit out of our hat or what, but I was pretty sure they weren't going to get it. Another Marshal stuck his head in the door.
"Uh, Marshal Henders," he said.
Gabriel was technically not a Marshal. I gave him a smile. He was supposed to be a suit and tie man with black shoes polished to a high shine. Working with us made him an Extra Special Agent, but most people just identified him as a US Marshal.
Gabriel stood and left the room. We all stared at the door like our grip on reality had just walked out of it. In some ways, this was true. Of the five of us, Gabriel was the least nuts.
Michael Giovanni walked into the room looking like warmed over death. He sat down and flipped open his laptop. Then he sneezed.
"Should you be out of bed?" I asked. "Your complexion matches the carpet in this room, like a turkey that has been baked in a pizza oven for six days by an incompetent fry cook."
"At least I am color coordinated. Just don't expect me to do miracles," Michael answered.
"I always expect miracles out of you," I told him. "That's why you are the computer guru and I am just the gunman."
"Gunwoman," Michael corrected. "And I think we should go with computer emperor, since I'm here with pneumonia."
"Are you still contagious?" I moved away from him.
"No, he hasn't been contagious since yesterday. We all know about your issues with germs," Xavier told me.
"Do you have a legally binding document that says that?" I asked.
"You have my expert opinion as a doctor," Xavier answered.
"Oh great, we are all going to die from pneumonia or plague," I said.
"Is this relevant?" Arons asked.
"Does it matter?" Lucas looked at him. "Are you in a hurry to return to the land of death? If so, perhaps you should seek a therapist."
Arons sat there for a moment, looking at Lucas. Lucas stared back, face set in stone, not cracking a smile. Finally, Arons sighed and looked away. Lucas had won the staring contest. I tried not to giggle.
"I've been keeping up with things and everything is tenuous at best," Michael brought us back into the land of death. Then he stopped. Agent Gentry offered him a mask. Michael waved it away and winked at me.
"Who is this?" Michael asked, then coughed. Agent Gentry gave up offering and tossed the mask at him.
"Special Agent in Charge Fred Arons and Special Agent Fiona Gentry," Lucas informed him.
"Feds," Michael said it with a grumble.
"We are feds too," I reminded him.
"We're different kinds of feds," Michael said. "Where's Gabriel?"
"Doing Gabriel things," I said.
"Do I wait?" Michael asked.
"Do you have world-altering news?" I asked.
"Not really," Michael sighed. "I do have the geographic profile built. It's a mess."
He hooked some stuff up to his computer and we were suddenly staring at a map of Anchorage on one of the whiteboards. In the corner was a "key." Red dots were kill sites, blue dots where the victims lived, and green dots where they worked. The dots were speckled all over the place.
"If we try to find a center and draw a circle, it is nearly impossible. If we draw a square, it works better, but you have to use the FBI office as the center. If we draw an oval, the center changes to the hospital. So, I drew a free form. There is no way to encompass all the dots and when you start leaving out a dot here because it's an outlier, you have to leave out this one and that one and . . .," he shrugged. "There is no way to create any geometric shape to include the majority of the dots unless you just circle the entire city of Anchorage."
"What if you eliminate all but the first three," Lucas asked. Michael typed some stuff into his computer. There were two dots in the north, two dots in the south, one in the dead center, and one way off the marked areas. It was red. I stared at that red dot.
"Which one is that?" I finally asked.
"Victim two. The first three were not covered in Pine-Sol. Something caught hold of it. The guess was a pack of wolves based on teeth marks, but we don't know how far from the original spot they moved it. The police never found the tree with the rope. They theorized that the rope had broken and the wolves had carried her off," Michael answered.
"How gruesome," I continued to stare at the dot. "Maybe it didn't break, maybe he dropped her to be found by wolves or other predators and carried off."
"You think victim two could have been known to our killer?" Lucas asked.
"It's possible. She seems to have gotten the most punishment," I shrugged.
"Who is victim two?" Xavier jumped into the conversation.
"A woman by the name of Gina Leeks. She was reported missing over a week before some hikers found her," Michael answered. "The police did the usual stuff, but they didn't find anything in her background or any of the interviews with her associates. They marked it as a dead end."
"Maybe Lucas should spend some time talking to her family," I suggested.
"That's the dead end part, there isn't any. Well there is, but she didn't associate with them. She hadn't talked to her parents in over eight years. She ran away from home when she was sixteen. They live in California, didn't even know she was in Anchorage. She had a couple of friends and a roommate, but they all came back squeaky clean. You might have more friends than her, Ace," Michael added.
"That's sad, humans should have more connections than that," I said off-handedly.
"One day, I'm going to put a shock collar on you and every time you distance yourself from us frail and pathetic humans, I'm going to give you a good strong jolt," Lucas smiled at me.
"Just do not scramble my brains too badly, we might need them," I grinned back.
"Well," Gabriel made a grand entrance with a stack of stuff in his hands. "Our guy from this morning is Norman Bates. It sort of looks like his whole family might have some of Bates' insanity."
"What's up chief?" Xavier asked him.
"The blood was the suspect's father. But the father died of natural causes. When the police raided a storage unit, they found grandma, grandpa, great aunts, and uncles. It looks like they have been doing it for generations. It's a learned behavior."
"How did that go unnoticed?" Xavier held his mouth open.
"That would be a question for someone else. What are we looking at?"
"The geographical profile. It's a disaster," Michael answered. "And Lucas is considering fitting Ace with a shock collar."
"That might not be a bad idea," Gabriel smiled. "So, geographical profile. It looks like an amoeba."
"That it does, look like an amoeba, I mean. I am not real keen on the shock collar," I answered. "However, Michael, remove the first three victims."
Six dots disappeared from the screen. I turned sideways to look at it. There were still a ton of dots.
"Remove all workplaces that have daytime only hours or where our victim worked in the daytime," I said.
Dozens of dots disappeared. The screen looked clearer, but it was still spread out. They were too spread out to really get a good idea of what we were looking at.
"Wait, put those back on," I said. With a clacking of keys, the dots reappeared. I grabbed my pink marker and drew a circle on the whiteboard.
"What's in the center of that?" Gabriel asked.
"The FBI Headquarters," Michael answered.
"Did they build it in the exact center of town?" I asked looking at the two visiting agents.
"I don't know," Gentry answered.
"What about restaurants, diners, coffee shops?" I asked.
"The FBI is located there, of course there are amenities. There are at least two dozen restaurants, a half dozen diners, and about fifty places that sell coffee, including a Starbucks in the FBI building," Michael answered.
"Why stick a Starbucks in an FBI building?" I asked.
"Have you seen how much coffee feds drink?" Gabriel asked.
"You've got me there," I looked at the circle. "So this is useless. Based on it, our killer is most likely an FBI agent picking out victims while he has lunch and gets coffee."
"You think this is an agent?" Arons scoffed at me.
"No, I think it is a coincidence of enormous magnitude. I think our killer wants us to think it's an FBI agent," I said.
"Or his fixation might be an FBI agent, so he frequents where she frequents and picks out victims while he is there," Lucas offered.
"Oh, that would be good," I told him. "How many female FBI agents do you have here?"
"At least fifty," Gentry said to me.
"Well, that does not help," I looked at Lucas.
"She would have to be a woman in power," Lucas reminded me.
"All our directors are men and the Special Agent in Charge changes based on seniority and who is leading the investigation," Arons answered.
"Maybe he's just some nut who likes to hang around places that the FBI hangs around," I said.
"That would make him nutty," Arons quipped.
"Not really," Lucas countered. "It would give him a fixation or fetish. Maybe he wants to be an agent and can't for whatever reason."
"He'd probably fit in with our lot, if he wasn't a serial killer," Gabriel sat down. "Are we in agreement that this geographical profile is pretty unhelpful?"
"Yes, but it's because we do not have the data. Not all the victims were kidnapped from their home. Some were abducted leaving work, some we don't know where they were before they went missing," I said.
"The computer is limited by the information we give it," Michael agreed.
"Ok, so change the information," Gabriel said.
"To what?" Michael asked.
"Remove all the dots except the places where the bodies were found and the known sites of abduction," I said.
The keys clicked and clacked as Michael began furiously typing. The dots slowly began melting away. I noticed the problem as the other dots left my field of vision.
"Ok, so most of the outliers are the kill sites," I said.
"Most, but not all," Lucas answered.
"Most is better than what we were looking at," I told him.
"Agreed," Lucas gave me a look.
"But the known abduction sites fall into a pattern," I continued. "Unfortunately, it isn't a circle, but a shape is a shape."
"That's my neighborhood," Agent Gentry said pointing at one of the dots.
"And mine," Agent Arons pointed to another one.
"Check the other dots with known FBI agents," I told Michael.
More clacking. The dots began changing colors. Michael updated the key at the bottom to show how many were near homes of FBI agents.
"I think someone is stalking the FBI," I said.
"We'll need a list of how many staff the bureau employs here," Gabriel told Arons. Arons looked a little green.
"Since they haven't struck the FBI directly, it is just a power play. A show if you will," Lucas assured them.
"Why taunt the FBI?" I asked.
"Why not? Around here, the Marshals and the FBI are the enemy," Gabriel answered.
"Ok, we'll go with that," I answered unsatisfied. For a killer that targeted women, the FBI agents in the area seemed out of place. Besides, how did our killer have so much time to stalk FBI agents as well as his victims? It was another jigsaw piece that didn't fit and seemed to belong to an entirely different puzzle.
I went back to staring at the map and the whiteboard. Nothing made sense with any of it. The geographical profile was all over the place. The whiteboards were filled with information, none of it useful. I sighed without realizing it.
"What?" Gabriel asked.
"I do not know, I just feel like we are chasing our own tails," I answered. "The geographical profile is useless. The information on the whiteboards aren't getting us anywhere and now, he's broken pattern again."
"You think the pattern breaks are the most important?" Arons asked.
"Overall? No. But today? Yes. I mean twice in a week? He's been at it for months and only broken the pattern once. And it was a long break. So either he was away for the holidays or he was in the hospital or something," I said.
"Why not jail?" Gentry answered.
"Because this guy is not the jail type. The worst he's probably had is a speeding ticket," Lucas answered. "You don't get where this guy is with a criminal record."
"Thought you didn't like profiling?" Arons asked.
"I don't, it isn't profiling. I don't know much about him, but his victims are all women who do not trust easily and, yet, they go with him. So he has to be clean-cut and somewhat attractive. You don't get that with a serious criminal record," Lucas said. "Think Dennis Rader."
"It took over twenty years to catch him," Gentry said. "And then it was because of his vanity."
"True, but vanity is an interesting thing," Lucas said. "Our killer is vain as well. He just isn't ready to send us a floppy disk with all his information on it."
"Speaking of vanity, is it possible that's why he's taunting the FBI?" I asked.
"Yes, quite likely. The women in the FBI are his type. They are usually no nonsense when on the job. There isn't a lot of room for personality in the FBI," Lucas answered. "Unlike the Marshals. There is more wiggle room for personality and expression of such. Using the two females in this room, we can see the difference in the way they dress, carry themselves, everything. Part of it is just because of Ace being herself, but the FBI wouldn't allow her jeans and t-shirt. They would approve of the bun though."
"That's why I am not an FBI agent," I reminded him.
"There are a lot of reasons you aren't an FBI agent, Ace," Xavier gave a snicker.
"Or you," I smiled at him. "How is vanity going to help us catch him?"
"I'd say all are sparked by the need to dominate a woman, but a few are also vanity kills. Women that personally slighted him, we find them, we find him," Lucas said.
"We have talked about that and other than the teacher, we have no idea which ones are vanity kills," I said.
"No, but if you and I go through all the crime scene photos . . .," Lucas was interrupted.
"That might have to wait," Gabriel said. "They want us to talk to Norman."
"Who's Norman?" I asked.
"How did you forget the creepy guy who is stuffing his dead relatives that quickly?" Arons asked.
"He is a nonentity for me. He isn't a serial killer. I do not have to chase him down. I do not need to wrestle victims from his clutches. Why remember?" I asked.
"You're strange, Marshal Cain. I mean this in the best possible way, I think alligators are more socially oriented than you," Arons said.
"They are," I agreed. "You guys do that, I will stay here and stare at the whiteboards to see if I can find anything."