Authors: Alan Jacobson
Jackson had finished placing markers and a ruler beside, and then shooting photos of, the drag marks. He joined Friedberg, snapped pictures of the coil of yellow rope, and then the inspector gathered it up in gloved hands and examined it.
“Looks like the kind used for climbing, or search-and-rescue,” Jackson said. “Braided nylon sheath, probably over a nylon strand core. And it’s frayed.” He looked around and said, “If you’re going to use a rope, you need a pulley-type system. Or an anchor.”
A moment later, Burden knelt in front of the massive concrete pot. “I think I found that pulley.”
Jackson shot photos of the lower portion of the urn, which was round, slightly ridged, and narrow at its base. “I’m guessing these yellow particles here are nylon fragments.”
They looked at the rope, then at the colored specks dotting the rough surface of the pedestal.
“So,” Friedberg said, “the UNSUB wrapped the rope around this thing and pulled the body up from below. Then what about the drag marks?”
“Sometimes we see what we want to see,” Vail said. “And sometimes we don’t have all the answers to reach a valid conclusion.”
“Right,” Jackson said. “Maybe they’re not drag marks. Document and figure it out later.”
“Pretty ingenious, if that’s what he did,” Burden said.
“Given the type of rope he used,” Friedberg said, “any chance this guy’s a mountain climber?”
“Yeah,” Vail said. “There’s a chance. But I’d say a small one. Without other hobby-specific equipment, like those anchors Jackson mentioned, the kind climbers hammer into the rock face, or footprints from special types of climbing boots, I think we just have to look at this rope as, well, rope—sturdy, reinforced rope. The kind that’d help the offender accomplish his task.”
Vail stood there a moment working the scene through her mind. She swiveled a bit, looking around, then said, “From what I’m seeing here, it’s safe to conclude this offender planned the kill—and the location and positioning of the body. So if he scoped out the place, he’s been here more than once. Maybe someone saw him, a regular—you said an ice cream vendor found him. If the guy’s here a lot, maybe he saw someone looking around, doing things the typical tourist doesn’t do.” She swung back to Burden. “Cameras?”
“I’ll have to check on that. Maybe in the parking lot. Nothing in here, I don’t think.”
Vail stepped over to the body. A large number 37 was scrawled in black marker across the man’s forehead. “Any San Francisco relevance to the number 37?” Vail asked.
The inspectors thought a moment. “There’s a Pier 37.”
“What’s there?”
“It’s on the Embarcadero, near North Beach,” Burden said. “Other than that, not much. It’s small, not commercialized like 39 and 35 are.”
“What else?”
“Golden Gate Bridge was completed in 1937,” Friedberg said.
That’s not it.
Vail sucked on her cheek. “Anything else?”
“It’s a MUNI route,” Burden said. “Public transportation. Starts at the Haight, I think.”
“The what?” Vail asked. “The hate?”
“H-a-i-g-h-t,” Friedberg spelled. “Famous area of the city. It’s kind of considered the melting pot of the sixties hippie movement, when it was a haven for drugs, cheap rooms, and plunging property values. It’s had a mixed history. It’s still kind of bohemian.”
“Bohemian,” Vail said. “Hippies.”
This isn’t helping.
Burden moved in front of the body and looked at the forehead marking. “Don’t forget the painted ladies.”
Painted ladies.
“Is that an old case?”
Burden grinned. “Victorian homes. Colorfully painted rowhouses. They’re called painted ladies. They’re really kinda nice.”
“I don’t think so,” Vail said. “Thirty-seven’s gotta have some other meaning.” A moment later, she tapped Jackson on the shoulder. “Rex, can you process Mr. Anderson so we can cut him down? I want to get a look at his back. If he was pulled up with that rope, we’re going to see scrape marks on the skin and the clothing. His front looks clean.”
Friedberg had gone quiet. He was staring out at the Bay, his back to them. “This doesn’t look right to me.”
“How do you mean?” Vail asked.
He turned to face them. “Well, think about it a minute. If you saw this body here, and his wife’s body at their townhouse—but they weren’t husband and wife—would you think it was the same killer? Or just two unrelated murders, killed by two different killers? Point is, is it the same guy who offed both Andersons?”
“Maybe we’ve got two killers,” Burden said. “Working together, each with his own—what do you call it? Signature?”
“Ritual,” Vail said. “And that scenario is certainly possible.” She stopped, thought a moment.
Burden tilted his head back. “Ritual. I remember that term from that violent crime symposium you people did out here in ’06.”
“I’m sure it was discussed,” Vail said. “Ritual refers to those things the offender does with the body, things that aren’t necessary for him to pull off the crime without getting caught. They’re the things that tell us the most about the killer. It’s not stuff he does consciously—well, I should say that he knows he’s doing it, but he doesn’t know why. To him, it’s sexually gratifying. It fills the need to be powerful and in control. That could manifest as cutting off a body part or writing numbers on the face. Those peculiar behaviors form what we call ritual. So if we’ve got two psychopaths, each with his own deep-seated needs, yeah, we’d probably see two different crime scenes like these. But not necessarily.”
“But if there were two of them,” Friedberg said, “you wouldn’t need the rope to hoist Mr. Anderson here up to the column. Much easier to just carry him. Really, the vic’s so slight that even if there was only one of them, he could’ve still been able to carry him over his shoulder.”
“I think there were two killers,” Burden said. “Two different rituals, two different killers.”
Vail winced. This was dangerous territory for a profiler. Behavioral analysis was a science, yes, but it was also dynamic, based on the totality of what you know at the time. You took the information, compared it to what you knew of other crime scenes and behaviors and killers, analyzed the psychology behind the actions taken by the killer and the victimology of your victims, and drew conclusions based on your assimilation of all those factors.
Asking for a quick and dirty analysis at this early stage risked forcing her into making incorrect assumptions. She didn’t want to lose their confidence—or, worse, send the investigation in the wrong direction.
Vail crouched near the victim’s feet. “Look at the raw facts. Husband and wife. Both murdered, both exhibiting blunt force trauma. The time frame is important, too, but for the moment, I think it’s best to assume it’s a single killer until proven definitively otherwise. Besides, despite the glaring differences in the scenes, we don’t have anything solid that tells me we’re looking at two offenders here. There are other explanations for the disparity.”
“Such as?” Burden asked.
Vail frowned. “A high degree of variation in a series of crimes could also be because we’ve got an offender with a tremendous amount of impulsivity. Another thing to factor in is that psychopaths get bored. It’s part of who they are. So they might vary their crimes just to keep it interesting.”
“Fair enough,” Friedberg said.
“Until we know what the emotions, or motivations, are behind these murders, we can’t know if the offender’s making a statement by brutally raping and torturing the woman and doing far less to the male—yet still killing him. It could simply be that his real target was the wife, and the husband got in the way. He could’ve knocked him unconscious, had his way with the wife, then decided to make a statement by displaying him here. Or maybe he tied the guy up and made him watch, like you thought back at the townhouse. Once he was done with the wife, he couldn’t leave a witness, so he offed the husband.”
“I’m not convinced,” Burden said.
A bluster of wind snaked through the loose knit of Vail’s sweater. She drew her arms in close to her body. “An important determination will be whether or not he planned out the husband’s murder. Looks like he did. And if he did come here once or twice to sketch it all out, then we’re looking at something more involved than what it appears to be right now.”
Jackson folded up his kit. “I’m ready to cut him down. I’ll need a hand.”
“You got gloves?”
Jackson pulled two from his kit and passed them over to Vail, who unfurled them and shimmied her fingers in as Burden and Friedberg helped the CSI lower the body carefully to the ground.
“I don’t think he’s even one-thirty-five,” Friedberg said. “He’s pretty freaking light.”
Jackson collected the nylon fishing line while Friedberg and Burden rolled the stiff corpse of William Anderson onto its side.
Vail tugged on Anderson’s shirt and examined his back, then his neck and head. “Right here,” she said.
Burden pointed to a spot lower on the body. “And there. Abrasions on the pants. The buttocks, and down by the shoes. The black leather’s pretty chewed up. Probably from scraping along the cement facing as he was pulled up.”
“How does he do this without anyone seeing?” Friedberg said. “I mean, it’s gotta take a good three to five minutes to pull the body up with that rope.”
Burden, still kneeling beside the body, swiveled around and took in the lay of the land. “Unless he did it at night, or the early morning hours. No one’s around.”
“If he’s a psychopath,” Vail said, “and I think that’s likely, they’re not nearly as affected by stress like you and I would be. So interacting with a dead body, out in public, wouldn’t cause the UNSUB the kind of anxiety we’d feel. And that’s why we often see a boldness to a psychopath’s behavior, a brazenness. They just don’t experience fear to the same depth that we do.” She curled some hair behind her right ear. “Do we have a TOD on the wife’s body?”
“About three hours before I called your boss,” Burden said.
Friedberg adjusted the glove on his left hand. “So either the UNSUB kept Mr. Anderson around for a while, or he killed him at the same time and stored him somewhere till he was ready to...do this. Transport him here and tie him up.”
Burden grumbled, “If it’s the same guy.”
“Doesn’t make sense he’d kill the husband at the house,” Vail said.
“Because...” Burden said.
“Because I’m assuming he planned all along to display the guy here. This was part of his plan. So why kill the guy at the house, then have to lug a dead body around? But if you could incapacitate him, tie him up and gag him, then have him walk wherever you want him to go, kill him closer to where we are, then pose him. It becomes a logistics issue.”
“How so?” Friedberg asked.
“Transporting a dead body bears a high degree of risk for the offender, right? He’s gotta drive around with a DB in his car. He gets stopped by a cop, he’s got a big goddamn problem. So where’s he gonna put it? Not in the backseat, in plain sight. Generally, the more risky it is, the more thrilling it is for these guys. So while he’d probably get off on the risk, there’s a difference between it being thrilling and just plain stupid. So he’d have to put it in the trunk.”
“Yeah, but lifting a DB out of a trunk isn’t fun, and it isn’t easy,” Burden said.
“Right. So that’s what I was saying. The best way to do this is to control him somehow. Using a gun, or a drug to make him drowsy, you can do pretty much what you want. Control is the key.”
Friedberg looked up at the column where the body had been fastened. “Soon as the ME gets us a time and a definite cause of death, we’ll be able to piece this all together. For now, we should look into the vics’ backgrounds.”
Vail lifted Anderson’s right hand and examined the fingers. “No defensive wounds.” She reached across the body and checked out the left. “Hmm.” She stood up and looked out, through the columns ahead of her. “What’s around here, in this area?” Vail asked.
Friedberg pointed. “Out ahead of us is a man-made lagoon. They do lots of weddings there. Navigating the seagulls can be a challenge.”
As if on cue, a cacophony of birdsong built to a crescendo. Vail ducked as several gulls sped past her head and swept through the rotunda. “What the hell’s that?”
“Every once in a while they go nuts. Hundreds of them.” He gestured out over the expansive, irregularly shaped pond, where the large gray birds were diving and climbing, darting and swooping. “Lasts a minute or two, then they quiet down.”
Over the water, the cloud of gulls eventually calmed, as Friedberg predicted.
“As I was saying,” Friedberg continued. “There are homes along the perimeter. Expensive ones, well maintained. That building you saw when we parked, directly adjacent to the property, is the Exploratorium. Kind of a hands-on science museum.”
A science museum. Perfect
. “Let’s head back there, I’ll bet they’ve got some expensive equipment in there. With expensive equipment comes security cameras.”
“Hang on a minute,” Jackson said. “You may want to see this.”
They gathered around the criminalist. His gloved fingers spread the hair on the back of Anderson’s head, toward the base of his skull.
“Blood?” Burden asked.
“Looks like it. Bruising of the cranium. And over here,” he said, gesturing at the throat. “Those marks you were talking about, anterior C-spine. I don’t think they’re finger impressions, but we’ll know more once the ME examines him.”
Friedberg said, “Just like the wife. Assuming it’s the same UNSUB.”
“Or,” Vail said, “he could’ve struck his head on the cement while he was being pulled up on the rope. Or he could’ve fallen when he was killed. We don’t know at this point.”
Leaving Rex Jackson to finish his work, they headed back toward their cars.
As they entered the small parking lot, Vail stopped. “There.” She nodded at a panoramic lens mounted atop the tall adobe-tinted Exploratorium building, near an inside corner overlooking the arched glass doors of the museum. She traced the line of sight to where she was standing, at the mouth of the Fine Arts entrance. “But that might be a problem.” Below and in front of the building was a grouping of three gnarled and heavily leaved trees, partially blocking the view.