She almost responded with a bitter comment, mentioning that Andrea could have been sleeping in “big-sis’s” apartment right now. But she didn’t. Instead, she wrote, Missing you, and added a heart emoji for good measure.
They had hardly talked in the past two weeks. Zoe wasn’t sure why. Their few phone calls were stunted and slow, with Andrea trying to find topics for conversation and Zoe struggling not to drop the ball of the conversation completely. Was this because of Glover’s attack on Andrea? Did talking to Zoe remind her sister of that night? Or did those conversations actually remind Zoe of how Andrea had almost been raped and murdered because of her?
Maybe a bit of both.
She put down her phone and opened her case folder.
O’Donnell had sent them a digital copy of the current case file, and Zoe had printed the initial report and eight of the crime scene photos. She set them next to each other, two rows of four pictures each. Pictures of Catherine Lamb, covered and uncovered with the blanket. A picture of the bloody footprints. One picture of the bedroom, one of the bathroom, bloodstains on the sink.
It was a savage act, two men breaking into a woman’s apartment, raping and murdering her. At first glance, that was all it was, a torrent of violence. Surely that was how Catherine had experienced it.
But looking carefully, she saw it wasn’t one act; it was a series of smaller acts. And each of them had been initiated by one of the men.
Who chose the victim? Who planned the assault? Who jabbed her with a needle? Each of the acts said something about the attacker. Usually the details of the crime interlocked to create an image of one man. But here, she first had to painstakingly separate the acts into two different groups.
As a child, she’d had a jigsaw puzzle box she loved. The box contained two different puzzles of Mickey Mouse, each a hundred pieces. Golfing Mickey and Skiing Mickey. But the pieces inevitably mixed together in the box. When she began assembling the jigsaw, she always had to sort them into two separate piles before she could really get to work. The pieces had marks on the back so she could tell them apart. Xs for Skiing Mickey, circles for Golfing Mickey.
In a way, it was similar here. She couldn’t profile the killers without knowing each one’s role in Catherine’s murder. She had to sort them. Unfortunately, there were no marks to tell them apart.
She grabbed her notebook and began to make a list.
Familiarity with victim
Victim choice
Plan
Needle wounds
Rape
Murder by strangulation
Covering victim
Bloody footsteps
Trophy
Necklace
She looked at the list and thought about the two killers and their relationship. There were several cases of murderers working in pairs. Some were romantically involved, working as equals, but she doubted this was the case. There was too much disparity in the actions. No, in this case, one killer was dominant, and the other was a follower. This was a common rapport between violent criminals who worked together. She named the unknown subjects unsub alpha and unsub beta.
The plan had been hatched by alpha. Probably not just the plan, but the whole idea. He was the one in charge. He chose the victim, as well. It didn’t necessarily mean he was the one who knew the victim. Maybe the other one, beta, was the one who was familiar with the victim, and alpha chose her to convince his partner or manipulate him.
Despite her resolve to set her assumptions about Glover aside, she couldn’t avoid noticing the body’s posture and ligature marks were identical to ones she’d seen in Glover’s murder victims. Women who were strangled while being raped. The murder and the rape went together. That was an act that spoke of obsessiveness with power and domination. This was the work of the alpha as well.
Biting her lip, she circled each of the actions she assumed was committed by the alpha killer. In the background, Adele’s soft voice asked someone to let her down gently. Someone tapped on her shoulder, invoking a flash of irritation. She hated being interrupted midsong. She paused it and turned to look at Tatum. “What?”
He grinned, raising an eyebrow at her sharp tone. “O’Donnell just called me. The medical examiner did the thingy with the microscope.”
“The thingy?” Zoe clicked her pen repeatedly, following the unheard rhythm of the now-paused song.
“You know what I’m talking about. To check for saliva.”
“Fluorescent spectroscopy.”
“That’s it.”
“There’s no microscope involved.”
“Are you interested to hear what she found? Or do you want to keep mocking my ignorance?”
“What did she find?” Click-click-click, her thumb kept abusing her pen.
“Traces of human saliva around the large puncture wound. You were right.”
Zoe nodded, her thumb pausing. “He sucked her blood.”
“That’s what it looks like. She said they’re still waiting for the toxicology report, can’t know for sure he didn’t use the needle to inject her with something.”
“Uh-huh.” Zoe turned to her list and scratched out the words Needle wounds, writing next to them Blood consumption.
“Listen, I’m getting hungry. Do you feel like grabbing dinner?”
“In a bit,” she muttered distractedly. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“Don’t wait too long. I might eat my keyboard.”
A second after Tatum walked away, Adele resumed singing, but Zoe didn’t join her, not even in the chorus. Blood consumption. One of the killers had sucked the victim’s blood. Perhaps extracted some for later use.
Contrary to what people understandably thought, merely consuming human blood wasn’t a definite sign of insanity. It indicated a very extreme, unconventional fantasy. But there were cases of people who turned to cannibalism or drinking blood but weren’t, medically speaking, insane. And not all of them were killers.
Depending on who you talked to in psychological circles, clinical vampirism, or Renfield’s syndrome, was either a myth or a real condition. There were definitely several cases of people drinking blood, but many psychologists claimed it was nothing more than a symptom of something else, like schizophrenia, and not an actual separate condition. Though Zoe wasn’t sure where the debate stood and how extensive the documentations of Renfield’s syndrome cases were, she knew a researcher in Atlanta who had studied the phenomenon for the past seven years.
She found his email address online and drafted a quick message. She explained that she might have run into a case of clinical vampirism in one of her investigations and asked if he was aware of any people who suffered from it in Chicago.
She returned to her list. So far, she’d attributed all the aggressive acts to unsub alpha. It was possible unsub beta had simply been a spectator, that everything had been done by the alpha, but Zoe doubted it. The man who covered the body, who put the necklace on her, wasn’t the same one who took the trophy. It was someone who felt guilty. And that meant he did more than watch. He participated in the attack. Which probably meant he was the one who drank the blood.
Albert had told them that Catherine almost always wore the silver necklace. That indicated the person who put the necklace on her was the one familiar with the victim. He’d seen it was missing, went to look for it, and put it on her.