Vail 01 - The 7th Victim by Alan Jacobson Page A

slide, a wide-angle view of the exterior of the house. “Bledsoe is checking into Melanie Hoffman’s past and present accounting firms. It’s possible whoever did her might have met her through the workplace. Co-workers, clients, support staff, everyone’s being looked at. There’s also an ex-husband. Marriage was annulled three years ago.”
     
    She hit the remote a few more times, showing the photos of what was once a beautiful young woman. Again and again slides flicked across the screen, the latest one being a close-up of Melanie’s head and trunk.
     
    “This is his fourth victim.” Vail said it as if they should feel shame for not having helped catch the offender before he’d taken another young life.
     
    “You mean third. This is his third vic,” Del Monaco said. “That last one wasn’t the same guy.”
     
    “You know my thoughts on that.” And indeed he did. Everyone knew her opinion, because a year ago, when Dead Eyes had last struck, she made her opinion well-known.
     
    “What does Bledsoe think?”
     
    Vail glared at Del Monaco. “He’s operating under the same assumption.”
     
    “Uh huh.”
     
    “What’s your problem, Frank?”
     
    “All we have with that other vic is a very loose connection to Dead Eyes. Vic was killed and disemboweled. That’s it. No wrapping of the intestines around the thigh, no stabbing of the eyes, no severing of the hand, almost no other signature evidence. We’ve seen scenes like that a hundred times before. Nothing links the vic, or the offender, to Dead Eyes.”
     
    Vail scanned the faces in the room. No one seemed to be disagreeing with Del Monaco. If anything, their expressions seemed to put the onus on her to prove his opinion wrong. But her brain was foggy from the rotten night’s sleep and she didn’t feel like getting into it with him. She tried to focus. Before her brain had the sense to back off, her mouth was moving. “True, the eyes weren’t stabbed. So what?”
     
    “So what?” Del Monaco looked around the room, as if to garner support for his consternation. Since most gazes remained on Vail, he turned his attention back to her. “So, Karen, the signature is all wrong. Just about all the behaviors are missing. You’ve got some parallel aspects between the killings but there’s no linkage.”
     
    “We’ve been through all this before,” another profiler said.
     
    “Copycat,” Hutchings said. “That’s all it was, if you could even call it that.”
     
    Vail was shaking her head in disagreement. “You’re all missing the point. True, there are things the offender didn’t do with this victim, but I believe it’s the same guy. I mean, just look at the crime scene.”
     
    “We looked, a year ago,” Rooney said. His voice was even more scratchy now. “There’s no convincing linkage there.”
     
    “Art, there were only a few defensive wounds, and there was a lot of blood.” She stopped, then realized she should review the photos from the scene, in case the offender had left the same murals. If she recalled, there was no blood at all on the walls. If that was correct, it would do nothing to support her linkage theory.
     
    “Were there any Impressionist blood murals?” Del Monaco asked.
     
    “I’ll have to check—”
     
    “And what about food? Did he eat his usual peanut butter and cream cheese ketchup sandwich at the scene, postmortem?”
     
    “No.”
     
    “And the incapacitating blow?” Del Monaco was flipping pages as he spoke.
     
    “Disabling skull wound. Same as vics one and two—”
     
    “You can’t say that, Karen.” This from Rooney, whose eyes were fixed on a particular document. “You can’t say it was the same. Vics one and two were hit from behind, the other one from the side.”
     
    “So she suddenly realized what was happening and turned her head at the last second.”
     
    “When you turn your head to duck, you throw your hands up. It would’ve broken a few fingers. Hell, even a