Powell stepped back to the podium and looked briefly at his notes, then up to the group.
“I’ve got a classified set of photos from the other crime scenes we’ve investigated that will be available for you to examine until I go back to Washington, which won’t be for another day or so. I also have a map of the eleven other cities, all different and apparently random, where the other murders were committed. I recommend that each of you spend extra time examining the Nashville crime-scene photos as well. What you’ll find is that there are a couple of things about this particular crime scene that are unique and different from the Alphabet Man’s normal routine.”
Powell stepped out from behind the podium, once again in the manner of a professor nearing the end of a lecture.
“First of all, this is the Alphabet Man’s first double homicide. He’s never done a twofer before, and if you examine closely the nature of the two murders, you see some obvious and profound differences. In the first set of slides, the one with the M painted on the wall in the victim’s blood, we see a degree of savagery that is in the great scheme of things quite subdued, at least by our guy’s standards.”
Powell walked over to the table by the far wall and picked up a poster-size blowup of a line drawing of the crime scene and held it out to his side.
“What does this mean?” he asked. “Here’s what we think happened. The Alphabet Man enters the business via this door and finds one of the girls …” Powell paused and looked down at his notes.
“… Allison Matthews at the reception desk. We know business is slow on Church Street, even on a Friday night, because of the intense cold. Practically nobody’s out, which is a tailor-made evening for our boy. Perhaps he was hoping to find just one girl there, or maybe for whatever reason, this time he didn’t care. His MO in the past has been to find women alone in places of business late at night. The D victim, for instance, was working alone in a convenience market. He went in there, subdued the victim, then closed the business and locked up. They found her the next morning in the walk-in cooler.”
Max Bransford turned in his seat and faced the detectives.
“We interviewed the manager, and he told us Allison had just started at the tanning parlor the week before. He also said that she was just the receptionist. She didn’t work in the back.”
“Did she know the second girl-” Maria Chavez spoke up, then looked down at her notes. “Sarah Burnham?”
“They were roommates and, apparently, best friends,”
Bransford answered. “Sarah got Allison the job.”
“The job that got her killed,” a voice from the back of the room whispered.
Bransford nodded, then turned back in his seat to face the front of the room. “Allison May Matthews was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Powell turned back to the diagram and pointed. “In any case, our guy somehow gets Allison to go back to this room, which is the first one you come to.”
“To coin a phrase …” a voice in the back spoke up.
Powell cleared his throat. “Yes, to coin a phrase. So he ties her up, gags her-”
Powell ran his finger down the hallway toward the second room, where the L girl was found.
“Then he scouts out the place and finds Sarah Burnham, the second girl. Maybe he walks in on her, startles her.
Maybe he offers her, as we’ve already speculated, a bond-age bonus, and maybe Sarah figures it’s been a slow night and she can use the extra, but then decides no, she’s not into that. Anyway, it takes a bit more to get Sarah down. It looks like she may have fought him some, but our boy’s an expert.
She goes down without too much trouble. So he ties her up as well. He checks the place out, figures it’s late. The restaurant next door is closed, the block is deserted. So just for grins, he decides not to gag her. And he takes his time.”
Powell turns, sets the poster down, and faces his audience grimly. “Meanwhile, Allison in the first room has to listen as her friend is slowly tortured to death. She hears the screaming, the shrieks of agony and fear, the begging and pleading, the crying for momma, and then this awful, terrible, deadly silence …”
“And then footsteps coming down the hall for her,” Bransford interjects.
“Exactly,” Powell said. “And by the time he gets to Allison-the M girl-who will be his thirteenth victim, he’s tired and he’s spent. So there’s just the slow, exquisite mental game of torturing someone to death. It’s not the death of a thousand cuts, but it’s damn close.”
Powell stood there for a few moments in his own terrible, deadly silence. His form seemed to droop as he finished his analysis and suppositions about what had happened sometime early Saturday morning at Exotica Tans on the coldest February night in Nashville, Tennessee, that anyone could remember in a long time.
Sergeant Frank Woessner, the Homicide Squad’s senior African-American investigator, a man who’d successfully attended a half-dozen summer courses at the FBI Academy, spoke up from the back row. It was the first time he’d spoken during the meeting. His voice was low and smooth, but coldly serious.
“So,” he asked calmly. “How do we catch this mother-fucker?”
Powell straightened, reached back for his notebook, and held it out in front of him.
“With this,” he said. “With the information we already have on this guy. We already know more about what makes this guy tick than his own momma.”
Powell turned, walked back behind the podium, and opened the notebook. “In the past twenty years or so, since the Psychological Profiling Program became a part of what was then called the Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, we’ve carried psychological profiling a long way. I can’t give you this guy’s name and address, but I can give you a very accurate estimate of the type of individual that commits this type of crime. This is a tool for you to use, but it’s only one tool. You have to use every other tool and investigative technique in your arsenal to solve this crime. And if you do, you hit the jackpot, guys. You get the grand slam.”
“So who the fuck we dealing with?” Gilley asked.
“I’ve got complete, detailed handouts for all of you, but to quickly summarize, the Alphabet Man is a classic, organized, psychopathic sexual sadist. This means that he is not-I repeat, not-a raving maniac who’s going to go nuts in the middle of traffic and start slashing people during rush hour. A psychopathic sexual sadist is, above all else, a person who is completely amoral and asocial. He has no capacity for remorse, guilt, or shame. He’s a sociopath, without a moral compass or any sense of ethics or responsibility.
He’s a charming person; if you met him at a party you’d like him, even gravitate to him, especially if you’re female. He’s intelligent, well-read, perhaps well-educated, although he’s more likely to have lots of excuses as to why he’s not well-educated.
“The Alphabet Man thinks entirely too much of himself.
His particular disorder is what the shrinks call paraphilia; sexual deviations that are marked or characterized by per-sistent sexual arousal patterns in which unusual or deviant sexual situations are required for the perp’s arousal. His fantasies revolve around completely dominating and objectify-ing his victims. While he’s torturing, having sex with, and then slowly killing his victims, he’s experiencing a kind of euphoria.”
Powell paused, his eyes roaming the room as some of the investigators frantically took notes while others sat staring, almost in awe, at the description of the man they were now hunting. Powell had seen all these reactions in hundreds of faces in his career, and yet it never ceased to fascinate him.
“On a more specific note, ladies and gentlemen, get your pencils out. First of all, he’s male and he’s Caucasian. He’s around thirty-two, give or take a year or two, and he’s good-looking, maybe even GQ quality. Somewhere around five-eleven, one-seventy-five, maybe one-eighty, with a body that he works hard to keep in shape. He might be married or have a serious girlfriend; in any case, he’s sexually competent and may frequently enjoy what we would consider normal het-erosexual relationships with a variety of partners. In fact, women may chase him, and those that he doesn’t torture, rape, and kill probably have a good time. He’s intelligent, maybe extremely intelligent. As I said, he may be well-educated, but-and this is probably an important key-he may have in his academic background a history of disciplinary problems. He was a firstborn child and probably an only child. His mother adored him and his father was present when he wasn’t working at his good, stable job. However, if he got any discipline at home as a child, it was inconsistent.