“I’m your ticket to fame. It’s all at my expense.”
He paused, confused. “What’s this all about? Who are you?”
“Never mind that. You were doing so well. Not just the scoop on the victims, but the details about the killings.
Man, you had it exactly right. I was impressed. Even admired you. Then like a typical journalist, you turned and stabbed me in the back.”
“You mean this morning’s story?”
“No, I mean the
Peanuts
cartoon in the funnies, asshole.”
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THE INFORMANT
“What was wrong with the story?”
“What was
right
with it?”
“You tell me.”
“Nothing.” His voice grew louder, the anger coming through even with a scrambler. “Not a damn thing. You couldn’t resist, could you? You get a little momentum going, and all of a sudden you’re an authority on everything. You know all about the killings, so you think you know all about the killer. Well, let me tell you something: You don’t know shit about me.”
“Then set me straight.”
“Penile surrogate. Confused sexual identity. Possibly impotent. You left out every stereotype except how I hate pussy cats. Tired, cliché, bullshit. That’s what your so-called psychological profile is. And you
knew
it was bullshit.”
“Listen, just calm down, okay? I wouldn’t print anything I didn’t think was true.”
“You
liar
! You’d print anything to sell a fucking newspaper. You don’t care what you say or who you slam.
Just so long as you’re first. Better to be dead wrong than dead last. Isn’t that what you news creeps say?”
“Hey, I’m sorry if—”
“Don’t patronize me.” He was speaking louder and faster with every word. “You think you’re gonna get away with this, don’t you?”
“I don’t—”
“Shut up! You figure if you’re wrong, so what? Today’s deathless prose is tomorrow’s kitty-litter lining. Well, for
me,
pal, it doesn’t just go away. If it’s in black-and-white today, it’s in black-and-white forever. It 148
James Grippando
doesn’t end with the recycling bin. It’s already on the Internet. You know what that means? Right now some twelve-year-old, slanty-eyed, snot-nosed little shit is laughing at me in Singapore. It’s in the Library of Congress, you asshole. Know what that means? Little snot-nosed shits are gonna be laughing at me for the next two hundred and fifty fucking years. You understand me? It
never
ends.”
“We can—”
“I said
shut up!
You libeled me. I’ve been
defamed.
And I’m
not
going to stand for it!”
“Look, I can fix it. What do you want me to do?”
His breathing was heavy and erratic, giving eerie life to the robotic sound of his electronically scrambled voice.
“I want you,” he said in a low, angry tone, “to
hold
your fucking tongue.”
The phone slammed, and the killer was gone. Mike hung up slowly, then buried his head in his hands, shivering with the sinking realization that he’d finally met a man who sounded entirely capable of ripping out another’s tongue—over and over again.
149
v
ictoria arrived in Quantico, Virginia, for a team meeting at nine o’clock Monday morning. They met two floors underground, in a windowless room with bright fluorescent lighting. David Shapiro, chief of the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit, sat at the far end of the long rectangular conference table, flanked on the right by Victoria, and on the left by two other CASKU
agents, Steve Caldwell and Arnold Freeland. Bulging files stacked one atop the other rose from the table like broken columns from ancient ruins, each stack a different height.
Nine altogether, one for each of the unsolved cases. On the wall directly behind Shapiro hung a colored map of the United States. Blue-headed pushpins projected from the random spots the killer had chosen, from Miami to San Francisco, Eugene to New York. On arrival, Victoria had noted two new ones in South Carolina—victims eight and nine, the first double homicide.
For an hour, they compared the different victims and crime scenes, making judgments about the killer 153
THE INFORMANT
that were based as much on intuition as past experience.
Victoria’s interest piqued when they turned to Mike’s latest article.
“Let’s start with the
Tribune
profile,” said Shapiro.
“Totally bogus,” said Victoria.
“Don’t be so cavalier,” said Caldwell. He was a fifty-year-old academic type with curly salt-and-pepper hair, black-rimmed glasses, and an unlit pipe clenched between his tobacco-stained teeth, best known as the Academy’s full-time instructor in Sex Crimes and Applied Criminal Psychology. Caldwell had come to the CASKU “on loan”
from the Investigative Support Unit, which was the new name for the original Behavioral Science Unit that had pioneered criminal profiling. The formation of CASKU
had created a profiling turf war with the ISU, but when it was finally settled that CASKU would do its own profiling, the chief of the ISU sent Caldwell over to CASKU—ostensibly to help the new unit develop a profiling program, but more likely to rid himself of one highly intelligent but unbearably pompous pain in the ass.
“The
Tribune
profile is fairly consistent with the profile
we
created,” Caldwell continued. “I do believe we’re dealing with a sexually dysfunctional male. Possibly impotent, like Posten’s article said, which is precisely the reason we see no evidence of penile penetration in any of the victims. In the most extreme scenario, we may even be dealing with a rapist who’s had his penis bitten off or nearly bitten off during forced oral copulation, which would explain his rage and oral fixation. The tongue is a
quasi
-sexual organ he can sever from both men and women, so the mutilation is
154
James Grippando
indeed sexually motivated. The wide range of victims reminds me to some degree of the Richard Ramirez case, the California Night Stalker. Except with Ramirez
both
the victims
and
the killing methods were so varied, you would never suspect one person of doing it. Here it’s just the victims who vary. In either case, however, the variety doesn’t change
the reason
he kills.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think the killer is the typical sexually dysfunctional woman hater. There are too many male victims. Something else is driving him. It’s more domination. Manipulation. Control.”
He took the pipe from his mouth, shaking his head in condescending fashion. “This is a classic psychosexual turmoil. I like to call it the Osiris complex.”
“The
what
complex?”
“Osiris,” he said with a haughty affectation, as if any dolt should have heard of it. “In Egyptian mythology, when the god Osiris is killed and dismembered, his companion retrieves all the body parts. Except she can’t find the penis. So she makes a huge phallic replica and orders all Egyptians to worship it. It’s the proverbial quest for the missing penis and veneration of its substitute.
Here, the killer has made the tongue a substitute. In less extreme cases, the inadequate male who wishes to impress his wife or girlfriend might simply pay a plastic surgeon to inject fat cells into his scrotum. In more primitive cul-tures, like the sadhus of India, men tie a ten-pound weight around the penis and stretch it to lengths so absurd they can actually tie it into knots beneath their loincloth. If you can’t see the sexual motivation behind these killings, Victoria,
155
THE INFORMANT
then you’re simply overreacting to that last telephone call Posten received.”
“I’m not reacting to anything. I felt this way before then.”
He sighed impatiently. “Look, you’re relatively new here. We have to start with the premise that while few, if any, serial killers are psychotic, nearly all are psychopathic sexual sadists. That’s been true since the first documented serial killer, a nineteenth-century Frenchman who was a butcher by occupation, and who brought himself to orgasm by stabbing women to death. Why do you think we have so few women serial killers? The killer’s obsession with perverse sexual fantasy is something I’ve come to understand not just through literature, but through countless interviews with serial killers—all of which, I might add, were conducted long before you ever got to thinking it might be
fun
to be an FBI agent.”
She glared at the cheap shot, but tempered her response. “All right, Steven. Just for
fun
, why don’t you consider the possibility that maybe this one doesn’t fit your mold?”
Freeland jumped in. “I’m not choosing sides,” he said, mindful of Caldwell’s ego. “But I don’t think it’s totally absurd to postulate that if innocent people all over the country are suddenly getting their tongues cut out, it may be because they said the wrong thing, or possibly they spoke to someone they shouldn’t have spoken to. Maybe the motivation isn’t totally rooted in sexuality. He may be more mission oriented, like an assassin.”
“When you think about it,” said Victoria, “the fact 156
James Grippando
that he let Timothy Copeland’s roommate live tends to support an assassin profile rather than random sexual slayings. The guy doesn’t leave any more bodies than he has to, which is smart, since more victims means more physical evidence for us to study.”
“Let’s proceed on both fronts,” said Shapiro, settling it. “Who wants to follow up on this?”
“I’m already on it,” said Victoria. “I’ve been exploring whether the victims or the killer might be a government informant or somehow connected to one.”
Shapiro raised an eyebrow. “Where do you stand?”
“I’m working with the Information Management Division to check the names of every confidential informant still alive, every person who’s entered the federal witness protection program since Bobby Kennedy started it. None of them are victims. As far as we can tell so far, none of them are related to any of the victims, either.”
He leaned back, folding his hands behind his head.
“How about looking at it the other way. Any leads as to whether one of them might be the killer—or connected to the killer?”
“That’s a bigger undertaking,” she said. “At any given point in time we’ve got three thousand people in witness protection, about two hundred new ones going in every year. Plenty of people have entered it and turned bitter.
They lose their past, lose their families, can’t find a decent job once they start a new life. There’s plenty more who considered going into it, put their life on the line by testifying, and then decided not to go through with it once they saw
157
THE INFORMANT
what it entailed. And that’s just the
federal
program. We got fifty states to deal with on top of that.”
“Keep at it, Victoria.”
“We are. Of course, the witness protection programs are just the tip of the iceberg. At the federal level alone we’ve got volumes of informants who have nothing to do with the program. Add to that every person who might have a grudge against an informant and your list of suspects is endless. I’ve got everyone we can spare looking into it. Everyone with security clearance, that is.”
Shapiro narrowed his eyes pensively. “Seems to me we’re overlooking one obvious category.”
“What’s that?”
“Assuming this has anything to do with informants, it doesn’t necessarily have to be
government
informants.
The victims could be people who talked to the media. Or the killer could be some journalist’s confidential source.”
“That’s a list of names we’ll never see,” she said. “Even if we were entitled to it legally, it’d be logistically impossible to get it.”
“I agree. But for some reason this informant has singled out one reporter from a Miami newspaper. We at least need a list of
his
informants.”
Caldwell scoffed, tapping his pipe on the table as he spoke. “I would hardly expect a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to betray the confidence of every informant he’s ever dealt with. And I don’t think there’s any judge in America who would force him to do it, either. Confidential sources are protected by the First Amendment.”
158
James Grippando
“I wasn’t suggesting we ask a judge to force it out of him. But I think Victoria could persuade him.”
A prurient gleam came to Caldwell’s eye. “Sounds delicious. Do I hear the makings of an offer he can’t refuse?”
“Enough of that,” said Shapiro.
Victoria ignored it, speaking directly to Shapiro. “At the risk of breaking precedent, I agree with Steve. I can’t see a journalist divulging his sources. After all, it was Posten’s obsession with the need to protect a
potentially
legitimate source that was the basis for our unusual arrangement with the
Tribune
in the first place.”
“I know it’s a tough assignment,” said Shapiro, “but your supervisors would be very impressed. Maybe even impressed enough to forget about a certain memo you wrote to Assistant Director Dougherty, saying the informant’s not the killer.”
She averted her eyes, then looked right back at him.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said, “but I’m not fooling myself. I know there’s only one way you’re going to forget about that memo.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
She looked around the table, meeting each set of eyes.
“If I was right.”
159
v
ictoria arrived in Miami just after three o’clock that Monday afternoon. Over the next several days she would have to contact each of the twenty-six different state and local law enforcement agencies and eight different FBI field offices that were now searching for the same killer. With Mike’s “profile” having been front-page news in Sunday’s
Tribune,
it was important to explain how it did and, more important,
didn’t
affect the FBI’s profile of their UNSUB—FBI jargon for “unknown subject.”
Shapiro had told her to start in Miami.
The Miami task force meeting was held at the FBI’s field office in northwest Miami, a large gray building that housed most of Miami’s 380 agents—the fifth largest in the Bureau. Victoria checked in with the receptionist behind the bulletproof glass in the austere lobby on the second floor. Two plaques hung on the wall by the elevators to commemorate agents who had made the supreme sacrifice. Victoria recognized the