The second victim was a twenty-nine-year-old, single mom who had been going home from her second job as a Whole Foods store manager. Selma Holt worked an admin office job during the day and then oversaw the store from six until closing at ten, three nights a week. Her body had been found in the Silver Lake Reservoir parking lot by a middle-aged couple on their evening walk. Her car had been recovered at the scene of the crime. Jacob wondered what had happened to her ten-year-old son, Jordan. Had someone told him that his mother had died from being strangled to death? He hoped not.
And then there was Jane Doe.
All three of the girls were petite brunettes with striking faces; all three of them had been conservatively dressed, either going to or from work, alone in the dark. They had all been found strangled to death, but fully clothed, and the autopsies had shown that none of them had been sexually assaulted either pre- or post-mortem. No unusual prints had been lifted from the crime scenes. Hell, not even a strand of hair had been lifted from any of the scenes. It was unusual.
To Jacob, everything seemed too clean. The crimes seemed connected, the girls too physically similar to assume otherwise. But something still wasn’t right. If the murders were connected, and the murderer had a type, a fetish for a specific looking woman, why hadn’t he molested them? He knew that the desires of serial killers varied wildly, but the specifics of the girls themselves suggested to him that the killer had physical motivation. Something that made him choose them.
When the door opened and Doug came in, Jacob nodded in greeting. The captain of the Northeast Division had donned his uniform for the day, and Jacob wondered what the occasion was. Even Doug’s thick, gray mustache had been freshly trimmed and although his eyes were circled with the seemingly ever-present hollow rings that accompanied his rank and title, his thick, broad face looked relaxed, calm.
“How’s the review going?”
“This entire case raises a lot of questions, Captain,” he said honestly. He swiveled the desk chair that he was in so that he could face Doug fully. “There’s something in this that’s bothering me.”
“Shoot.”
“Assuming that the cases are all connected?”
“Jake, I do not have to repeat our crime stats for you to know that these murders were committed by the same perp. Do you know how often single, young, everyday-jane females are murdered in our division?” he asked, his bushy eyebrows raised.
“Less than in Central,” Jacob confirmed with a shake of his head.
“Our murders are…standard. Committed by the obvious perpetrator for obvious reasons. Yeah, we have the occasional meth head offing his wife, but even those are few and far between. Some manslaughter, which is terrible whichever way you cut it. But cold-blooded, presumably pre-meditated murder one, with no apparent motive? It doesn’t happen; we’re basically stereotypical here.”
“I know. I would say to keep an open mind if there had been three different CODs, but considering they all have similar physical descriptions and were strangled within ten miles of each other…”
“We’re assuming we have a serial killer.”
Jacob nodded. “I’d say that it’s safer than not to pursue that line of logic.”
Doug conceded his point but crossed his arms over his chest. “I was expecting you to come to that conclusion, but it still rips my heart out. Those girls…”
“Will be vindicated.”
Doug nodded but didn’t reply right away and Jacob wondered if he thought of his daughters, thought of the fact that they probably walked in their neighborhoods at night too.
Because he felt that Doug needed the distraction, he brought them back to the case. “I’m wondering why a man with such a specific victim preference isn’t sexually assaulting them,” he said. “I mean, come on. We’re men. These ladies would have turned our heads and we’re not deviants. And yet…he lures them into dark, abandoned places, kills them, but doesn’t sexually assault them?”
“It’s odd, I’ll give you that.”
“Serial killing isn’t always about sexual desire or pleasure,” Jacob said, regurgitating facts that Doug knew in an attempt to gather his own thoughts, “but there’s a strong correlation.” Doug just nodded, so Jacob continued. “Strikeout sexual fantasy for just a moment. If he’s not motivated by sex or rape…What’s his MO?”
“Serial killers run the gambit.” Doug joined the back-and-forth process, knowing that the routine would help them lay out the facts. “Motives, other than a desire to kill, aren’t always clear. Anger. PTSD. Fear of rejection. Obsessions with the physical process of dying. A need to inflict their authority, to assert themselves. And those are just scenarios where we’re assuming no solo mental disorders like bipolar and schizophrenia—which are so correlated they may as well be causative. These fuckers really can’t be put into any one box.”
“And in the case of these very specific women?”
Doug thought about it for a moment. “Historic psychological trauma, maybe? Potentially inflicted at the hands of a woman with similar physical characteristics. A woman who wasn’t sexually desirable to the perp?”
Jacob nodded. “I’m thinking along those lines.”
“But why these three women in particular?”
“Standard selection process,” Jacob replied. “Availability, vulnerability, desirability.”
“So, these women happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and happened to all look the same?”
Jacob shifted in his chair and looked back at the board. Veronica Tally taunted him from inside the photograph, her eyes wide and glassy, her hands folded neatly over her stomach. He found it interesting that victim number one had been placed on her back. It was as if her killer had cared about how her body was found. Maybe even about the fact that he had killed her in the first place. The other two victims had been left where they’d dropped once they’d died, their limbs distorted or tucked underneath them in the position that they’d fallen in.
“Why,” he looked at Doug, “would three single women, living in an unsafe city, pull over their vehicles for a stranger in the middle of the night?”
The captain of the Northeast Division looked at the board himself. His posture, which had been so straight before, caved a little, his shoulders rounding at the top and making him seem smaller. The realization that Doug was thinking along the same lines as he’d been hit him with a sharp jolt.
“Maybe it was someone they recognized?” Doug offered.
Jacob shook his head. “Then we’re back to assuming that there are at least two different murderers. The case file said that the women didn’t know each other. None of their family or friends knew or, in the case of our Jane Doe, recognized the other two victims.”
“I know what you’re getting at, Jake.” Doug’s tone was calm, but Jacob sensed the steel in it.
“A woman, traveling alone in this city at night would only pull over for one reason, Doug.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. You think that one of my boys did this? You have some nerve, Simmone.”
Jacob held up a hand. “I’m not saying anything of the kind. I’m saying that there is a high probability that the women thought they were being pulled over. I mean, come on! You can buy blue, flashing lights on e-bay and an officer costume from a Halloween store. They wouldn’t have known the difference. And nobody else on the street or driving by would have suspected anything.”