“Do you want to give it another try? With what we know now? And without Rod Glover interfering?” Tatum asked. “I mean . . . I know you’re resting, but—”
“Come on,” Zoe said, standing up. She went to her office room and turned around. She watched Tatum’s eyes shift around as he entered the office and took in the new decor.
“Holy crap,” he muttered.
Zoe approached the wall and snapped off one of the taped articles. “Help me take these down,” she said, removing another one. “I want to clear my mind for this.”
CHAPTER 65
Zoe’s home office made Tatum feel like he was walking around inside the psychologist’s brain, and it was a mess. He helped her remove all the items related to the Maynard serial killer and to the 2008 Chicago killings. Now they were left with five dead women, three of them embalmed. Zoe began reorganizing the images according to a pattern she somehow deemed helpful, while Tatum went to the kitchen to make some coffee. He made the pot extra strong, knowing this was going to be a long night.
He returned with the pot and two mugs and poured each of them some coffee. He handed one of the steaming mugs to Zoe, who thanked him distractedly, staring at the whiteboard. Tatum followed her eyes and cataloged the five faces on it. He had personally seen the bodies of two of the victims—Krista Barker, who had been left on the beach, and Lily Ramos, whom they had managed to contact before she died. Seeing their pictures alongside the three other women tugged at Tatum’s emotions. This killer roamed Chicago freely, killing at whim, neither the FBI nor the police managing to stop him. He turned to Zoe, waiting for her to speak. When she didn’t, he sighed.
“Okay, listen,” he said. “This won’t work like that.”
“What won’t work?” Zoe asked, glancing at him.
“You’re locked in your own head. You never try and talk it out.”
“Yes, I do. I talk to you all the time.”
“Only when you know what you want to say,” Tatum pointed out. “Then, you’re more than happy to lecture me and tell me about your amazing conclusions. But if you’re unsure, you just keep working by yourself.”
She opened her mouth, her eyes narrowing, then closed it. Tatum folded his arms and waited.
“Fine,” she finally spat. “What do you want?”
“Well, you say what you’re thinking about, then I contribute my own thoughts on the matter. Maybe I have a different idea. Then, instead of shooting me down, try going along with what I say, even if it’s dumb. I call it brainstorming.”
“Don’t patronize me. I know what brainstorming is.”
Tatum grinned.
“All right, you start,” Zoe challenged him.
“You’ve been spending the past few days assuming the killer was Glover, but I think we both agree now that it’s likely there is another killer out there, right?”
“Yes.”
“I think we should start by looking at our existing possible suspects, narrow the pool down. Maybe one of them meets the narrow profile you created.”
“I don’t think that’s the way to—”
Tatum raised an eyebrow. “Don’t shoot it down yet,” he said. “Roll with me.”
“Okay, okay,” Zoe grumbled. “So we’re looking at people who knew Susan Warner, right? We have an ex-boyfriend, a handicapped uncle, some friends from college . . .” A thought occurred to her. “It could, for example, be Daniella’s boyfriend, right? What was his name? Ryan.”
Tatum smiled, enjoying the new spark in her eye. “There you go. Does he fit the profile?”
“He’s the right age; he has a van. She mentioned that he disappears without telling her where, which might mean he has another place to stay . . . he works as an auto mechanic, which displays a lot of the characteristics we’re looking for. He was in Susan’s apartment. He is a very likely suspect.” She was clearly getting excited.
“That’s great.” Tatum grinned. “Except he has an alibi.”
“What alibi?”
“He was in Venice as an exchange student when all those animals got embalmed and taxidermied.”
“Oh, right,” Zoe said, slumping, and then she glared at Tatum. “You’ve already thought of all that.”
“Maybe.” He looked at her innocently. “Still, it’s worth considering other possible suspects, right?”
“I . . . it’s not a bad idea.”
He laughed, feeling a surge of warmth for the irate psychologist. “What are your thoughts? Want to share?”
Her lips moved a bit, no sound emerging, as if she were trying this new concept of conversation and failing at it. Finally, some words emerged. “The killings are all motivated by his fantasy, right? All four recent killings. We can see an arc of improvement in his implementation, though we don’t know what the purpose is yet.”
“Right,” Tatum agreed. “It looks like he’s creating and playing with human dolls.”
“Right.” She became silent again.
Did she think they were done brainstorming? “What is his fantasy, then?” he asked.
“It looks like some sort of power play, except he already had them tied up . . . and he can’t have sex with them once he embalms them, and that seems like a loss of power, right?”
“I suppose it is,” Tatum said slowly.
“So something else motivates him here. What is it?”
“Maybe he gets turned on by their immobile state and masturbates to it.”
“No, that’s not it. It doesn’t fit,” Zoe said impatiently and bit her lip.
Tatum cleared his throat. When this didn’t elicit a reaction, he said, “Brainstorming, remember?”
Zoe looked at him and rolled her eyes. “Okay. Let’s suppose he is turned on by their immobile state. Why is the flexibility so important? Why does he dress them up in clothes, put jewelry on them? Why not use some other, less complex method of preservation, like freezing them?”
“Okay, maybe he’s posing them like a certain image or a situation in his mind,” Tatum said.
“Like what?” Zoe asked. She sounded curious. Good sign.
“I don’t know. What is he saying in those scenes?”
“What scenes?”
“The last two crime scenes? They’re like . . . fragments of a story, right? When you played with dolls as a child, you used to sit Barbie on her chair and put some teacups on the doll table, and voilà, she was having a tea party.”
“I never had dolls.”
Tatum raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”
“I suppose I had some, but I’ve never played with them. I gave them all to Andrea. Did you play with dolls?”
“Well . . . not dolls, but you know. I had a bunch of Playmobil figures, and I’d act out all sorts of stories. For example, they would fight and shoot each other. Then I’d remove their hair and change it around—”
“Why?”
“Because it’s pretty much the only detachable thing.”
“That’s very strange.”
“Not as strange as a Playmobil figure without the hair. Their heads are hollow, and they look really freaky, and at a certain point you lose all the hair pieces, so you just have a bunch of lobotomized figures—”
“This isn’t helpful,” Zoe interjected sharply.
“Anyway, the point I was making is that when you pose those dolls, you’re acting out your own story, right? So what’s the story here?”
They looked at the pictures. Monique Silva standing on the bridge, hands on the rail, staring at the stream. Krista Barker sitting on the beach, face buried in her hands.
“They’re sad,” Zoe said.
“Yeah, Krista is posed like she’s crying.”
“Why are they sad?”
“Maybe the killer posed them like that because they’re sad they’re dead,” Tatum suggested.
“No . . .” Zoe said, shaking her head. “They were missing for a while. You’re right; there’s a whole story here. If they were just sad they’re dead, he’d drop them off as soon as he embalmed them. But he spent a long time with them, and in the end, he dropped them, posing them as if they’re sad.”
“Yeah.”
“They’re sad,” Zoe said ponderously, “because he dropped them off.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a ring on Krista Barker’s finger,” Zoe said. “An engagement ring.”
“Well . . . it was a ring.”
“It was an engagement ring. Susan Warner was found wearing an evening dress, as if she were out on a big date. And then, when he leaves them, they’re sad.”