Текст книги "Killer Profile "

Автор книги: Max Collins

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Killer Profile

An elite team of FBI profilers is called in to help Chicago detectives investigate a series of bizarre murders. Though all are violent and disturbing, the crimes seem unrelated—until profiler David Rossi makes the connection. He recognizes each grisly tableau as one modeled on the crime scenes of three of the country’s most notorious serial killers: David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer.

Someone is taking the cult of true crime to terrifying extremes, and with so many killers left to emulate, Rossi wonders how he can possibly profile a killer who’s hiding within the killer profiles of others.

KILLER PROFILE

A Novel by

Max Allan Collins

Copyright © 2008

by ABC Studios and

CBS Studios Inc.

Special

Acknowledgement

I would like to acknowledge my assistant on this work, coplotter/researcher Matthew V. Clemens. Further acknowledgments appear at the conclusion of this novel.

M.A.C.

Dedication:

In memory of criminalist

Frank Louis Tarasi III,

who helped put the

puzzle pieces together.

Prologue

April 17 Oak Park, Illinois

    April showers bring May flowers,Connie told herself as she studied the red smear that (courtesy of The Weather Channel) seemed centered not just over Illinois or Chicago or even Oak Park, but their very house.

Her reassurance rang hollow because she also knew April showers, here in the Midwest, could bring lightning, hail, and high winds. Much as she loved the two towering oaks in the front yard, they concerned her in thunderstorms (like the one going on just beyond the bedroom windows): the trees’ sheltering presence could be cleaved by lightning into crashing timber.

And tornado season wasn’t that far away either.

Connie, watching the wall-mounted TV from her bed, would have been shocked to learn that many of her friends and family considered her an inveterate worrywart. She had tried hard not to be one, but her parents had been worriers, never able to enjoy anything, always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and never in a good way.

To her parents, children of the Depression that they’d been, God had it in for them and would watch for any sign of happiness so He could pounce and deliver a good old-fashioned dose of misfortune.

She had vowed not to live her life that way and, at first, she hadn’t; but now, with kids of her own, the trait seemed to come bubbling to the surface out of her DNA.

And what was there to worry about, really, in the comfortable brick house that offered, as Bob Dylan put it, shelter from the storm? Smack in the middle of the Frank Lloyd Wright historic district, their ranch-style home may not have not been designed by the great architect, but it fit right in with those that Wright and his Prairie Style cohorts had created.

Set sideways on its Linden Avenue lot, the house had a picture window in the family room that faced out toward the street on the west end. The rest of the house stretched toward the back of the lot, with a dining room, kitchen, three bedrooms and two baths. Off the north side, stood a tall, detached two-car garage more like a carriage house, with her husband’s locked work space upstairs.

Connie—a tall, slender, lovely brunette, forty, with high, sharp cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and full lips—lay on top of the covers wearing a pair of her husband’s gym shorts and a blue Cubs T-shirt. Her brown eyes were wide set and bright and her short hair didn’t look like she had been sleeping on it, though she had been until the call that came fifteen minutes ago, ordering her husband in to work in the middle of the night. And the middle of the storm.

The crawl on the TV and the superimposed map said the area was under a severe thunderstorm alert and she wondered if she should wake the boys and take them to the basement for safety’s sake. No sirens had sent her scurrying, but the threat was there.

Kevin and Kyle were thirteen and eleven respectively, and tomorrow was a school day, and of course she wanted them to get their sleep. She had sent them to bed at their normal time—ten—and now, glancing at the clock in the corner of the TV screen, she noted that not quite two hours had passed.

Outside, a lightning flash startled her, the nearly instantaneous thunderclap making her jump a little. Goose bumps crawled up her arms as she looked toward the curtained windows and the darkness beyond. She got under the covers. The TV and a dim light from the master bathroom, where her husband had the door ajar, provided the only illumination.

“It’s not like you’re with the power company,” she said, trying not to sound like a raving bitch. “The world doesn’t needyou to go out.…”

“But my boss does,” he said from the bathroom. “This is that dirty job that somebody’s got to do that you hear so much about.”

“I suppose,” she said. “But does it always have to be you?”

“If they want it done right, it does.”

He strode out into the bedroom now, in black Reeboks, black jeans, and a black T-shirt, still every bit as boyishly handsome as when she’d met him twenty years ago. His curly brown hair seemed to beg for her fingers to run through it and those green eyes seemed to be able to look right into her soul and read her every thought.

Always a sexual being, Connie resisted the urge to pull him down onto the bed with her right now; images flickered through her mind of making love as lightning strobed through the bedroom windows. But her husband had been distant lately, and their lovemaking had become a regimented thing, not at all spontaneous, scheduled around times when the two boys were not at home.

Not that she thought, even for a moment, that things were bad between them. Despite his odd hours away, he was not having an affair; she was convinced of that—the only “other woman” was his job. Things were good now, they were comfortable with work and home, but when they had first met, things had been… well, they’d been perfect.

She’d been a model with the top agency in Chicago and he a photographer on the rise straddling the fashion and art worlds, already having had one successful gallery show and several big fashion magazine covers. When they met, the sparks had been instantaneous, two young attractive people making the kind of magic, both personally and professionally, that others could only dream about. They had fallen in bed, in love, and into a sort of muse/artist relationship that seemed to take his work to a new level. For two years, the work, the creativity, the money, the electricity of their sexual relationship, had flowed.

Then they got married, had their first child (Kevin), and, as in so many marriages she guessed, things had changed. Or, anyway, shifted.

Her husband was a good father, attentive and caring, but something had come unraveled in his professional life when Connie moved from muse to mother and stopped modeling to stay home with their son. Her husband began working with other models, but nothing really clicked. He seemed to lose the magic and the galleries lost interest and the big ticket clients in the fashion world (always a limited market in Chicago) moved on to the next hot prospect.

To his credit, he never seemed bitter and did not hold her responsible for him having to get what he called a “real” job, one that paid respectably and brought him genuine satisfaction as a photographer, with the only significant drawback that it sometimes caused him to have to leave in the middle of the night. They’d had their second son, Kyle, whom her husband adored; and theirs was, measured by any reasonable yardstick, a happy family life.

Even so, true to her nature, and like her parents, Connie spent a lot of time waiting for the other shoe to drop.…

Her husband crossed the room, bent down and hugged her to him and gave her a quick kiss.

“Get some sleep,” he said into her ear.

She held him an extra moment. “I sleep better with you next to me.”

He gave her another kiss. “That’ll be me, snuggling in next to you, before you know it.”

He drew away and moved toward the door.

Pulling the blankets up to her throat, Connie said, “Don’t forget your raincoat.”

“Not likely,” he said with a grin, “in this.”

“And don’t forget I love you.”

He said something that might have been, “I love you,” but she didn’t quite make it out. Then she heard the door close and he was gone.

Thunder rumbled and rain lashed the windows. She snapped off the TV and lay trembling. She began to cry. Not heaving sobs, just tiny self-pitying tears.

She’d been doing that a lot lately, and had no idea why.

April 17 Chicago Heights, Illinois

   Adrienne Andrews (Addie to her friends), with only one more month until prom, was determined not to be a virgin when that magical night arrived. A lanky, pale-skinned, light-blue-eyed girl who wore her blonde hair short and shaggy, thin Addie was sure she would look better if she could only, please, Jesus, lose another five pounds off her hips. Tonight, she had hidden the offenders under loose-fitting jeans. Her black T-shirt had been tucked in when she left the house, but once out of sight of her folks, she had pulled it out and knotted it so that her tummy (and pierced belly button) showed.

Addie had a straight nose and a nice mouth despite rather thin lips, and her crooked smile could turn the heads of a lot of the boys, especially, thankfully, Benny Mendoza’s.

Like Addie, Benny was a senior at St. Vincent’s Catholic High School on Ashland, and he was a babe, a stone fox. Tonight, the Hispanic boy wore a White Sox home jersey with his jeans, white with black pin-stripes, the name of his favorite player, THOME, stenciled on the back above the number twenty-five.

With his close-cropped black hair and slenderly muscular frame, Benny was everything Addie wanted in a guy—long, narrow, handsome face, with deep brown eyes and lips so full that Addie had to hold herself back from kissing them every time she saw them.

Now, for instance.

They sat next to each other in the bucket seats of his navy blue Hyundai Tiburon. The car was actually Benny’s mom’s, but Mrs. Mendoza rarely drove it, and the vehicle had become, in a de facto kind of way, his. Either that, Addie thought with a laugh, or his mom had left behind the Ozomatli CD they were listening to!

Turning to her in darkness cut only by the dashboard glow, Benny smiled and asked, “What is it, querida?”

She loved him calling her that. “Nothing,” she said, reaching across the console and touching his knee. Squeezing his knee…

After their third date, he had started calling her “ querida.” When she had asked him what it meant, he’d said, “ ‘Darling.’ Or it can also mean, you know, ‘lover.’ ”

His eyes had lowered then, his embarrassment obvious. But she had kissed his cheek and told him she liked it. Since then, she had been “ querida” whenever they were together.

Now, his eyes went back to watching the traffic on the rain-slicked Dixie Highway as they headed south, toward home. Traffic wasn’t heavy, but they weren’t the only ones out late on this windy, rainy night.

Normally, their parents would have pitched fits about them being out past midnight on a school night, but tonight was special. Benny had been invited by his baseball coach to a White Sox game at U.S. Cellular Field. And Benny had convinced the coach to let him bring Addie along as his guest. (And convinced her parents, too.)

They had met the coach outside the park and gotten the tickets. They had even enjoyed the first few innings as the Sox got an early lead on the visiting Detroit Tigers, but then the rains came. The trio had waited bravely with the other diehards for the storm to blow over, but the game had finally been called just before eleven and they had been trying to get home since.

“Tell me what you were laughing at,” he pressed.

She shook her head, her hand covering her mouth in embarrassment. “I can’t tell you.”

“Come on, querida,” he said, all honey-voiced. “You know you want to.” His fingertip touched her arm and she felt a surge of heat rush through her.

“No!” she squealed. “I’m not telling you.”

His hand moved, finding a rib and tickling.

She slapped it away. “Will you please drive?”

He grinned. “Yeah, drive you crazytill you tell me what was so damn funny.”

He tickled her ribs again, this time his hand brushing a breast and, even as she giggled, warmth surged through her. If they hadn’t been so late, tonight would have been the night– thenight.

But she wanted it perfect for them both, and this evening—which was supposed to be Benny’s big night at the ballpark—should have been just the thing. The coach seemed sure Benny would be taken early in the June amateur draft and that there would probably be some nice bonus money. Benny had worked hard for this, Addie knew, and he deserved it.

She’d been planning to top off his big night by finally giving in to him, but they were so late now, there was just no way. Another night would have to do.

Still, Addie knew one thing above all: she didn’t want to wait until prom night.

Some of the other girls, who had already done the deed, told her it would hurt a little ( at leasta little) and it could be messy ( wouldbe messy). That wasn’t the experience she had in mind for prom night, not to mention her prom dress. That night needed to be extra special perfect. Better to get the thing out of the way before, and hope it was fun, at least.

There would be other nights, no doubt, but she was so primed this night.…

“Tell me,” he said, tickling her once more.

“All right!” She pushed his hand away. “It’s just… embarrassing.”

He shrugged. “So what? Tell me.”

“I was just… thinking about the CD being in your mom’s car? Like how funny it would be if it was hermusic or something.”

“It is her music,” he said.

“You’re kidding!”

“No,” he said, his voice as calm as the sky wasn’t. “She really digs Ozomatli.”

“ Yourmom is into multiculti hip-hop rock?”

Benny nodded. “She’s not a hundred years old, you know.”

Part of the reason she loved Benny was she never knew for sure when he was serious and when he was just kidding her. Like now, for instance.

“Which song’s her fave, then?” she challenged.

“This one,” he said, skipping to song number eight on the live album—“Love and Hope.”

She listened carefully. The chorus was about how love and hope never die and, no matter what, your heart and soul will survive—a positive message sung over an almost traditional Mexican song with horns and hip-hop drop-ins.

Addie liked it immediately and wondered if she really waslistening to one of Mrs. Mendoza’s CDs.

Benny gave her a sideways look. “You’d believe anything I told you, wouldn’t you?”

She realized he had been pulling her leg the entire time. She smacked him in the shoulder. “You!”

“Ay, querida, you’re way too gullible.”

Mildly annoyed he’d fooled her yet again, she turned the tables. “Does that mean I should never believe anything you tell me?"

"Like what?"

“Like if you said you’d be careful not to get me pregnant, if we ever… you know.”

“ Querida, I don’t joke about serious things.”

“Oh? Then tell me something I canbelieve.”

Benny, casual as could be, said, “You can believe I love you.”

Addie sat there for the longest moment, not knowing what to say. She adored hearing him finally say those words, but even the throwaway way he’d spoken them seemed to have sucked all the air out of the car.

When the Dixie Highway veered at One-hundred-eighty-third Street, Benny turned left. They stayed off the expressways—one of the rules Benny’s mom had laid down for him being able to use the car.

Finally finding her voice, Addie said, “You love me? Really love me?”

Benny didn’t hesitate. “Sure I do.”

“You better not be fooling.”

“No way, querida,” he said, his voice softer now. “I told you before I don’t joke about serious things. I love you.”

Once Benny graduated in June, he would almost certainly be drafted by a major league team, meaning he would spend the rest of the summer playing minor league ball. Addie wasn’t sure how or where she fit into that plan, but she knew two things for certain: they were going to prom together, and she was in love with Benny Mendoza.

“I love you, too,” she said.

He grinned at her and she smiled back.

Leaning over, Benny gave her a quick kiss.

“Drive,” she said, pushing him away. She wanted to pull him to her, but waiting until they weren’t driving in a rainstorm with cars all around them might be a safer plan.

He took the right that jogged back to the Dixie Highway and once again headed south. Addie had learned a long time ago that few things ran straight in the Chicago area. Streets veering off in odd directions all over the place was an accepted part of living in the city. She still remembered, as a child, commenting about nothing being straight in the city, and her father replying, “You think the streets are something? Wait until you’re old enough to understand politics.”

The answer had stuck with her because it made no sense when she was six, but now, as her government class studied how things in the city worked, Addie realized what her father had meant. The streets weren’t the only things in the city that were crooked.

They wove southeast until Benny took the short right onto Ashland that carried them south to Joe Orr Road, then right again and back west to Travers Avenue, and a left south until the right onto her street, Hutchinson Avenue.

Technically, Addie lived on Two-hundred-seventh Street, but since she lived on the corner, Benny liked to park next to her house on the Hutchinson side. That kept her father from spying on them through the front door while they kissed good night. And kissing good night sometimes lasted a while with Addie and Benny.

Most people, especially those from anywhere other than Chicago Heights, immediately thought “slum” when they were told of the suburb’s location on the south side of the city. That wasn’t true at all.

The neighborhood where Addie lived was a multiracial middle-class neighborhood with blacktop streets, no sidewalks, and houses varying from ranches to split foyers to the new brick castles coming up when the old houses were razed.

One of those brick monstrosities sat across the street to the east from her parents’ modest ranch with its one-car garage and flowers planted everywhere. Houses lined the south side of Two-hundred-seventh right up to where Hutchinson teed into it, then east of the intersection, on the south side, Swanson Park spread before them, an oasis of green with its soccer fields and softball diamonds.

Benny pulled the Tiburon in alongside Addie’s house and killed the lights. They were pointed south on Hutchinson, the park visible through the pounding rain, the parking lot on its far side obscured by the downpour.

She caught a glimpse of the clock as Benny turned off the car: 1:15. Her parents were going to be mightily pissed. Addie had wanted tonight to be thenight, but there was just no way.…

Benny undid his seat belt, slipped it off, leaned over and kissed her.

The rush she felt as his tongue snaked its way into her mouth was like nothing she had ever felt before. Heat rushed from her lips to her tongue, down her throat, extending out through every fiber of her being, to burn somewhere just south of her waist.

His arms were around her, then they were unfastening her seat belt. Next his hands were roving all over her T-shirt, leaving a wildfire trail in their wake.

Benny’s hands were at her back now, sliding up under her shirt, soothingly cool as they met hot flesh. She wanted him to touch her everywhere at once. She felt the clasp release on her flimsy bra and then his hands were under the shirt in front, inching up, cupping, squeezing, all the time his tongue like a wild animal in her mouth.

Control was slipping away and even though it was nearly 1:30 in the morning on a school night, her parents less than a hundred feet away (certainly not asleep and almost certainly waiting up for her), Addie was about to let Benny Mendoza get her ready for the prom.…

Not like this, she told herself as she wrestled for control. Not a quickie in a Hyundai, even if it was with Benny, the man she loved. Make it perfect, her voice said in her brain, make it perfect.

With more strength than she knew she had, Addie broke away.

Benny’s concern was instant and sincere. “What is it, querida? What’s wrong?”

“I can… can’t,” she said.

“I thought this was something you wanted.”

“It is,” she said, and, despite her best efforts, she found herself crying.

His arms engulfed her as she wept full tilt now, sobbing into his shoulder. It felt good there, in his arms, and slowly her tears subsided.

“ Querida,” he soothed. “There’s plenty of time for that. I love you. We’ll wait for the right moment. No rush. I’m not going anywhere.”

She pulled back from him a little to look into his eyes. “You will go away… this summer.…”

“Addie,” he said, gazing at her, “that’s just one summer. We’re going to be together forever.”

She kissed him again, with a painful urgency. When their kiss broke, she thought she saw someone standing next to the driver’s door, outside in the rain. Oh shit, she thought. Was it her dad?

Instinctively, she pulled away a little from Benny, who looked confused.

The form outside the car was definitely a person. Addie saw something come up between the figure and the car, then there was a flash that caused Addie to blink. When her eyes opened, the window shattered and Benny’s left eye exploded in a pink cloud, splashing her face like rain from within the car.

Finally, she heard the roar of the gunshot and something else, someone screaming– herself.

As Benny’s body slumped into her, his head a broken melon, only one eye and a corner of his mouth looking like something that had been a face, Addie realized he had been right.

They weregoing to be together forever.

She saw the pistol rising again, the small black hole pointed at her face, Benny’s voice in her mind: Togetherforever, querida.That thought gave her a moment of peace as Adrienne Andrews saw the last thing she ever saw: a muzzle flash.

April 17 Oak Park, Illinois

   Connie had not slept particularly well. She never did when her husband worked odd hours, and now she rolled over and looked at the alarm clock for the zillionth time since he’d left last night.

Just after five, she fought the urge to just say, “Screw it,” and get out of bed. She could read or watch TV or something. The kids wouldn’t be up for another hour and a half.

But she decided to give it one more chance and rolled over. Squeezing her eyes shut, Connie thought back to those early days when she and her husband had been so happy. Though she loved her kids and knew they were easily the greatest thing she’d done in her life, she still reflected on those earlier days as the happiest of her marriage.

Whenever she needed to calm herself, Connie went back to a day before they were married, before they were dating even.

They were doing a photo shoot, their first together.

She had been the ingenue, the new girl on the Michigan Avenue block, while her photographer was the hot young shooter who was already a star and in from New York to do the fashion magazine layout. Another model had gotten the cover but Connie had garnered the spot for a well-known fashion line the photographer was also shooting.

She wore a bikini for the summer issue, though the temperature outside the old Chicago Water Tower in early March hovered just above freezing. Her photographer wore a wool turtleneck and down vest over his jeans. He looked toasty warm while she was freezing her ass off.

Still, he was doing everything he could to keep her comfortable and happy until the rain came. After the sudden cloudburst, the two ran for his rental car parked just across Michigan Avenue on a side street while the rest of the crew tried to keep the set from getting ruined.

He held the door for her, closed it after her, got soaked running around the car and, when he finally got in and they were out of the rain, they started laughing. He got the engine running, turned on the heater and they sat there talking for a while, then the talk turned to kissing and the kissing to serious necking, and she and the photographer moved to the back and her bikini came off and she couldn’t believe what they were doing right there off the Magnificent Mile. Steam had covered the windows, though, and they couldn’t see out. She hoped no one could see in.

Her eyes still shut, Connie felt more relaxed than she had in days. They were about to make love in the backseat of his rental car when she went to sleep.

She felt him climb into the bed next to her, the mattress creaking slightly as he settled in. She stirred.

“Shhh,” he said, his voice soothing. “It’s not time to get up yet.”

He touched her shoulder and she felt herself sliding back into the backseat dream.

She was almost completely in the dream moment when a harsh voice said, “WLS News talk 890 time is six oh five, let’s get the first on-demand traffic report from our traffic reporter Marin Ashe.”

Connie hit the snooze and rolled toward her husband. “How did it go?”

His face was pale and he was wet either from the rain or a shower she had not heard him take when he got home. She didn’t know which.

He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes blank.

Finally, he managed a thin smile. “Think I got some good shots.”

“That’s nice, dear. That’s nice.”