“Really?” Nick swiveled his chair, grinning. “Did he say why?”
“He thinks you have more experience.” Harry made a double quotes gesture with his fingers. “We’ll see what he thinks tomorrow when you make a mess of it.”
Nick snorted. “Whatever. Forward what you have so far. Maybe some of it is barely usable.”
“Yeah, yeah. And where are we at with the Lamb story?”
“I have the interview with the father, but it’s done. I already gave it to Daniel. And the detective in charge just sent me a picture of someone they’re looking for. You know the drill: the police are looking for this man, if anyone has information about him, yada yada yada. I’ll forward you the details. There’s a template somewhere. Even you can’t mess this up, Harry-Barry-Larry.”
“Send me the detective’s contact number too. I might have some follow-up questions.”
Nick had already turned his back, ignoring him. Harry returned to his seat, his earlier gloating mood replaced with something much better.
Excitement and anticipation.
CHAPTER 14
Tatum sat by the desk at the FBI field office, logged into ViCAP from his laptop, and began reviewing cases that involved blood consumption or any unusual interaction with blood.
Violent cases with actual blood consumption were few and far between. Tatum first checked the closed cases, reviewing the perpetrators’ identities and the locations of the crimes. He followed up on any case that seemed to be even remotely connected, making calls to the detectives in charge of the case. Several of the apprehended criminals were still incarcerated. Two were dead. But he ended up with four names, though none of them had a last known address in Illinois. He made a note to check the current address of each of those men and see if they would fit as suspects.
He expanded the search of cases in Chicago, using looser search terms. There were two open cases in Chicago in which the killer wrote messages with the victim’s blood. The cases weren’t linked—the DNA samples and fingerprints definitely pointed to two different men. Tatum rolled his chair out of his own cubicle and drove it Flintstones-style into Zoe’s cubicle.
Her earphones were plugged in her ears, and he heard the vague sounds of pop music from them. How loud was Zoe playing her abysmal music? His grandma had always warned him that if he listened to his music too loud, it would rip his eardrums to shreds, and her vivid descriptions had managed to instill a slight anxiety in him.
Zoe chewed her pen, her notebook in front of her. She had kicked her shoes off under her desk and sat cross-legged, her left foot jiggling with the music. She almost looked like a bored teenager, trying to think of her next diary entry. Aside from the horrific photos spread around her, of course. Still, it made Tatum smile.
She must’ve felt his eyes on her, because she turned her head, her eyes catching his, the teenager look gone in an instant. She removed her earphones. “What?”
“I talked to Mancuso earlier. She gave us a few more days, and we need to send her daily reports.”
“Good.” She turned back to the computer, already replacing her earphones.
Tatum cleared his throat. “I wondered about two cases here. Messages written in the victims’ blood on the wall. What do you think? Is it relevant?”
She removed the earphones again. “It depends. Unsub beta consumed the victim’s blood. The medical examiner said it had to be done quite vigorously to leave that mark. The question is why.”
“Because he’s batshit crazy.” He said that mostly to poke the bear. Zoe hated when investigators reduced the actions of murderers to “crazy.”
She didn’t rise to the bait. “Well, one option is some sort of psychotic disorder that would lead to a temporary loss of control. In that case, anything is possible, not just writing with blood on the wall. His actions would be spurred by hallucinations or delusions that we’d have no way of foretelling.”
“But you said Glover wouldn’t work with a gibbering madman.”
“That’s true, but there’s a spectrum, and many people with psychotic disorders function reasonably well in society. We can’t rule it out. But if that’s the case, like I said, there’s no point in looking closely at any particular case, because there might not be any pattern. Previous cases could have involved blood, or cannibalism, or nothing of the sort.”
“What are the other options?”
“Paraphilia, focusing on blood.”
Paraphilia. That was Zoe’s professional way of saying people who get off on really weird kinky shit. Tatum mulled it over. “If it’s paraphilia, it would probably be focused on blood consumption, not messages in blood.”
“I’d say it depends on the message,” Zoe said. “Writing with the victim’s blood could be an earlier fantasy, which had since mutated to blood consumption. But then I’d expect the messages to be sexual, and there would probably be semen at the scene.”
“Not the case,” Tatum said. “In one instance, the murderer wrote bitch on the wall. In the other, part of a verse from the Bible. And they found no semen in either scene.”
“Right.” Zoe counted the options on her fingers. She raised a third one. “The third option is named Renfield’s syndrome.”
“Renfield? He’s the freaky dude from Dracula, right?”
Zoe’s eyebrows shot up, and Tatum let out a short laugh. “What?” he asked. “Surprised that I read books?”
“I . . . no, I mean . . .”
She seemed so flustered that he laughed again. “Don’t worry about it. Okay, so what’s Renfield’s syndrome?”
“Renfield’s syndrome, or clinical vampirism, is a condition in which the person suffering from it is obsessed with drinking blood, for no other reason than blood consumption. There’s no sexual aspect and no hallucinations or delusions.”
“So we’re talking about people who just feel like drinking blood. Like what, a culinary choice?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” Zoe admitted. “It’s not entirely clear if that’s even a thing. I actually wrote an acquaintance of mine who’s researching it. Hang on, I’ll check to see if he responded.” She opened her email.
“But if that’s the case, then the messages on the wall aren’t relevant either, right? Because as far as we know, blood wasn’t consumed.”
She turned her eyes from the screen. “That’s true. There’s no reason for someone suffering from Renfield’s syndrome to write messages on walls with blood. It makes no sense.”
“So that’s out.”
“Then those cases probably aren’t related, since those are the possible reasons.” She frowned at the screen, reading an email. “Looks like I have a meeting with a vampire.”
Tatum was caught off guard. “Wait, what?”
“A clinical vampire. My acquaintance answered my email. Like I said, he specializes in clinical vampirism. He asked around, and it turns out there’s a community of supposed vampires in Chicago. He organized a meeting with one.”
“Today?”
“He said she’d be there until six. Not a lot of time left.”