My father put his hand to his forehead. “Okay, Lucas. You best get on your way, then. I’m sorry I mentioned her.”
I suddenly realized he was kicking me out of his church—politely, but kicking me out just the same. And that was fine by me. “Hey Dad, I can take a hint. See you around then. Tell Mom hello. And throw in a prayer for me.”
I whirled around and walked toward the exit doors, but heard him murmur something behind me. “What was that?” I asked, whirling around angrily.
My father only stared at me. “I said, ‘I do every night,’ Lucas.”
I frowned. “Do what?”
My father shook his head. “Never mind, Lucas. Just try to be—” he started to say, but I didn’t hear him finish.
I’d already walked out of the church as fast as I could.
The next morning Woodson and Terry were already in the field office when I arrived. I knew I needed to hide the bad mood plaguing me.
“What’s up, boss?” Terry asked. He and Woodson were leaning against a table, cups of steaming coffee in their hands.
“Plenty. We have a lot of territory to cover today. Let’s meet this afternoon and compare notes.”
“Sounds good.”
“Come prepared,” I said. “Then this afternoon Woodson and I will start hitting the bricks with an actual purpose in mind, for a change.”
Woodson glanced up at me, but didn’t challenge the statement. After going home last night in a sour mood following the conversation with my father, I’d realized that for the last two days I had been running around interviewing people just to cover my ass and prove to Raritan that I could still stay assigned to the case. I’d talked to Mara, her shrink, my brother, Mara’s father, Charlie, and my own father as well.
I’d decided that the rest of this investigation wasn’t going to center around the people of my past anymore. We needed to start funneling our energies into the search for the
actual
Snow White Killer, immediately. This new, almost angry sense of resolve had solidified my commitment to the case even further.
Terry spoke up. “The jeopardy surface should be ready by then.”
“Good. What are you up to this morning, Woodson?”
“Going back through the drug screens to see if anything else pops up. I still believe he’s drugging the victims before he starts in on them.”
I nodded. “Sounds good. Let’s plan on reconvening at two in the conference room.”
We parted ways, each heading off to work our respective angles.
* * *
Back in my office I sat at my desk and listed as many salient observations as I could.
Mara—dissociative, no recollection of SWK—dead end
Tyler—alibi at scientific conference—(and superpissed)
Charlie—solid alibis—rape charge from past—effect on Mara?
The next two facing pages, far more relevant in my opinion, contained the main list of all the salient crime scene observations to date.
Elevated caffeine in tox reports—any commonalities between victims, coffeehouses, etc.?
Pinpricks on finger of fourth victim—commonality or coincidence? Recent physical or physician visits? (Need to follow up with the other three victims/autopsy reports/MEs)
Linear slashes on still-living victims—implies restraint (no ligature bruises) or drugs (likely but none detected in tox screens)—Woodson reexamining the raw data
Razored apples—Gillette razors are dead end—apples are Ein Shemers (local?)—freshly picked each time before a murder. Symbolizes? Garden of Eden re-creation? Halloween urban legend? Death in the fruit? Danger in the fruit?
Message—a tan cat can’t—check with Shelly about any literary references now that it refers to something a tan cat can’t do—a tan cat can’t what?
Any significance regarding lack of an apostrophe in CANT on fourth victim’s forehead? Consider anagrams.
Body posturing—sexual but fully reclothed—killer uncomfortable around naked female victims? Homosexual-oriented predator who kills women? Highly unusual (no rapes in other cases, except Mara)—possibly an impotent heterosexual predator? Remorse for victims?
Crime scene locations—two of four—just coincidence with Charlie’s property?
UNSUB DNA—28 SNPs in the damnation signature—implies the killer uses own blood for the messages—no hits in CODIS, no previous incarcerations
Finally I turned to the last page I’d recorded in the notebook, entitled “Damnation Signature.”
UNSUB DNA clustering result—SWK clusters with BTK and Zodiac (check p-values)
Predicted behavioral characteristics if DNA similarity results are significant—BTK and Zodiac taunted media and/or authority figures (no communications from SWK yet); Zodiac sent cryptograms/BTK alluded to the X factor (again, no communications from SWK); both capable of long periods of inactivity (opposed to the frenetic pace of SWK to date)
I sighed, pushing backwards in the chair. We had a lot to think about. And figuring out where to start seemed most important at this point. I glanced up at the clock above my office door. It was already nine thirty. I hoped Woodson or Terry was going to make a breakthrough. One of us needed to have one.
* * *
A little after two o’clock I made my way to the conference room where Woodson and Terry were waiting. “Let’s get to it.”
Terry tapped a button on his laptop and the projector sprang to life, illuminating the far wall of the conference room. “Okay,” he said, “so I’ve calculated a jeopardy surface based on the drop sites of the victims.” As he spoke, the blurry image on the screen began to resolve, pixel by pixel clicking into focus.
“The downloading graphic is a jeopardy map. To generate it, I input all the data about the victims’ abduction sites and body drop sites into a computer algorithm which outputs the data into the form of a contoured geographical map.”
Woodson stared intently at the image coming into focus. “We studied these in the academy, but I’ve never seen one before. How does it work?”
Terry pointed to a series of raised areas on the map. “It combines positions of the original crime scenes and all known routes to those crime scenes to yield a jeopardy surface.”
Woodson said, “Jeopardy surface. Areas of risk?”
“Yes, but more. It calculates both where the predator may live as well as where the predator may strike again.” Terry looked down at the laptop for a moment. “The blue contours indicate potential residences, while the red indicate potential predatory activity.”
I stared at the map with dismay as the data simply reinforced that our killer was both organized and mobile. Usually, jeopardy surfaces were calculated in a single city, but this killer’s range encompassed the entire southeastern corner of Mississippi and even parts of Louisiana, forming a triangle that spread from Bogalusa to Gulfport to Slidell and everything in between. It was so expansive that even a small town in my area, like Bay Saint Louis, rose as a minor peak of potential predatory activity. Peering more intently, I saw that a moderate peak swelled near Picayune as well. Katie’s and the girls’ hometown.
I had to remind myself that it was just statistics, just like the algorithms we used with DNA and behavior prediction. But the glowing jeopardy surface served as a sobering reminder that the SWK still roamed free out there, nonetheless.
“Look,” Woodson said to me, “it’s even picking your hometown as a possible place the killer might strike next. Better lock your doors,” she cautioned.
“Yeah, I noticed. But it’s just statistics. These algorithms are usually far more informative concerning the killer’s residence than predicting future crime scene locations.”
Terry nodded. “And jeopardy surfaces are far more effective for predicting movements of serial rapists than serial killers. Serial rapists tend to be opportunistic and stalk within a fairly defined radius, and once a pattern of victim selection is observed, jeopardy maps can provide valuable information. The jury’s still out on their effectiveness for wide-ranging serial killers, but we went ahead and ran a similar simulation for the Snow White Killer using our four abduction sites, just in case.”
Woodson squinted as she looked at the map. “So where does your simulation say the killer most likely lives?”
Terry pointed to areas on the blue contour map with the highest elevation. “Well, based on centrality to the crime scene locations, it’s a four-way toss-up among areas south of Wiggins, an area north of Slidell, an area north of Gulfport, and an area east of Bogalusa.”
“Again,” I added, “it’s all just probabilities. If you notice, those four areas also form the four corners of a box bounded by three highways and Interstate 10.”
Terry looked back and forth between us, but we had no more questions. “That’s all I’ve got,” he said, sitting back down.
“Thanks, Terry. I’m hoping we can use the jeopardy map along with everything else we’ve learned to date to better pinpoint these locations.”
Woodson frowned. “How do you propose to do that?”
“Well,” I said, “when we first came across our killer I asked Terry to dig up all the information he could find on Ein Shemer apple orchards in Mississippi. Recall that the apples left with the victims appear to be freshly picked from a tree, not store-bought. There are a limited number of these kinds of orchards in Mississippi, but still quite a few, around three or four hundred big ones. Based on where they’re primarily cultivated, in the richer soil near the Mississippi Delta, it makes it more likely that the killer probably resides in the western locations of the jeopardy surface, rather than the locations distal to the Mississippi River, like Gulfport or Wiggins.”
“Aha.”
“Anyway, we’ll see. There are other parameters we can couple to the map and hopefully narrow our area of focus down even further. But before that, what about this caffeine observation of yours, Woodson? Any updates?”
“You could say that,” she said, plugging her laptop into the projector and displaying a chromatogram on the far wall. I recognized the series of peaks as a chromatographic separation of a standard panel of narcotics typically analyzed in postmortem blood samples—amphetamines, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, cannabinoids, cocaine, methadone, opiates, PCP; all the usual suspects.
“Here,” Woodson shined a laser pointer on one of the peaks, “is caffeine.”
“But we already knew from the toxicology reports that caffeine levels were high,” Terry said.
“Right, but look closely at your caffeine peak.” She flipped to another slide, which zoomed in on the very top of the caffeine peak.
I followed the laser pointer to the top of the peak and suddenly understood Woodson’s interest. The top of the caffeine peak wasn’t a single peak but rather a doublet, indicating there was a second chemical in the victims’ blood that had been mistaken for caffeine. But the toxicology analysis had only detected caffeine, not the mystery compound, when the samples were analyzed.
“So we finally understand why these victims all appeared to have high levels of caffeine,” I said. “Not because they had high caffeine, but because they had high levels of something very similar to caffeine in their blood?”
“Exactly,” Woodson said, circling the top of the peak with the laser pointer. “But we don’t know what it is.”
“This could be huge,” I said, looking at Terry.
Terry nodded, already anticipating my next question. “I’m already on it. I’ll order several different chromatography columns for overnight delivery. We’ll get the caffeine and our mystery chemical separated as fast as we can, put it on our mass spec, and should figure out what else is in their blood in a matter of a few days.”
“This could be the break we’ve needed. If it’s some sort of sedative, maybe we can trace it to our killer. Nice, Woodson.”
“It may bring a lot into focus,” she said. “If it turns out to be a sedative, it could explain a lot. The pinpricks on the fingers, the lack of struggle from the victims, the lack of physical restraint.”
“Absolutely, which is why it will be critical for Terry here to start screening every database we can think of once he solves the pattern of our mystery peak.”
“I’ll place a call to Linda Warren over at the National Institutes of Health and ask her for access to the mass spec library for all FDA-approved drugs,” Woodson said. “If we’re lucky, and it is a drug, we should find our mystery peak in there.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “Anything else?”
“That’s all I’ve got for now.”
“Okay then, next items.” I glanced at the list. “The ever-elongating message on the foreheads. Any new ideas?”
Woodson spoke up. “I did a little digging yesterday after you guys showed me the DNA analysis that clustered SWK with BTK and Zodiac. I looked back through the original BTK and Zodiac communications to the police. Maybe it’s coincidence, but those guys were poor spellers and had even poorer grammar. Maybe the lack of an apostrophe in the word
can’t
isn’t so unusual.”
“And he really may be communicating with authority figures here,” Terry said. “He’s just not using a pen and paper. He’s using his own blood smeared on the foreheads of his victims.”
“Perhaps,” I said, and looked at Woodson. “Did you find any other similarities—or differences—between our guy and BTK or Zodiac?”
“There seem to be only differences after that. Both BTK and Zodiac went for long periods of inactivity, whereas our guy apparently can’t.”
“Perhaps he’s just started up again after a long period of inactivity,” Terry suggested.
“But we’ve looked at ViCAP and haven’t found any similar kills anywhere in the United States, going back as far as a decade,” Woodson said.
“Well, maybe a dead end. Let’s leave it for now, come back to it if it can help us down the road. Terry, how long before we have anything from the mass spec?”
“I’ll be spending the entire weekend setting everything up. We should have something by end of next week.”
“Great. But don’t burn out. I don’t want any of us getting sick or immunocompromised or anything. Take a break, okay?”