The Silent Wife (Will Trent #10) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,114
found. I’m sure as hell not one of those ‘the killer wants to be stopped’ kind of guys—I think killers never want to be caught—but this sick mofo was definitely taking some big-ass risks.”
Amanda asked, “Sara?”
She said, “I can see what they mean. Grant was a small, insular town. The killer was targeting young white women who were students, part of the community, with extended families. That’s asking for a lot of scrutiny.”
Nick said, “He could’ve done his thing night and day in Atlanta with prostitutes and dumped their bodies in the Chattahoochee and nobody would’ve put any of it together.”
“Question.” Faith raised her hand. “If he has Daddy issues, why didn’t he kill men? And why the mutilation?”
“Because he hated his mother.”
Bingo.
“Anyway,” Nick continued. “The profile hits Daryl Nesbitt in the sweetmeats. Stepdad was a successful business-owner, at least until the law caught up to him. He never formally adopted Daryl, so the kid felt unwanted. Mom was a speed freak who tricked herself out. She OD’d when Daryl was eight. He dropped out of high school at sixteen and worked a series of menial jobs. He thought he was gonna be Tony Hawk, but he ended up being a day-laborer taking cash under the table to get out of paying taxes.”
Sara said, “I don’t want to make sweeping statements, but the entire family was considered bad news. The stepfather’s shop was busted a few years ago for stripping stolen cars for parts.”
Will said, “You’d need a machinist’s hammer for that.”
“Correct,” Nick said. “All the evidence pointed right at Daryl Nesbitt. He lived in the vicinity. He had access to the hammer, which was a very particular type, even though it was readily available. He was connected to the victims. Motive, means, opportunity. It was all there.”
Faith chewed at her tongue so she didn’t counter with the obvious, which was that their suspect was still out there killing, so the evidence wasn’t really evidence, it was more like a debunked alternate theory.
She said, “Maybe, in the beginning, the killer wanted to get caught. But then he realized that he could make it more exciting by getting away with it.”
Will cleared his throat. “If he’s really learning with each kill, then spreading his victims out all over the state is a smart move.”
Faith said, “Bundy did that, too.”
Amanda gave her a stern look of warning. Faith shrugged. She could only say the truth, and the truth was they were talking about a serial killer.
Sara said, “To Faith’s point, if you want to discuss the thanatological aspect of the crime, I have some statistics.”
Amanda never shut Sara down the way she did with everyone else. “They are?”
“In sixteen percent of serial murders, you see some form of post-mortem mutilation. Desecration falls at under ten percent. Necrophilia and cannibalism less than five. Three percent of the time, there’s posing of the body for some kind of shock value.”
Amanda asked, “Would you say Caterino and Truong were posed?”
“They were effectively paralyzed, but both found on their backs. We have to assume the killer posed them that way. Alexandra McAllister could’ve been left on her back, but the predators fought over her body, so she was moved post-mortem.”
“Okay.” Faith had to make a chart to keep track of this. “We’ve got four solid links between Humphrey, Truong and McAllister. The hammer to the head, the blue Gatorade, the paralyzing, and the mutilation. Caterino had the hammer, the Gatorade, the paralyzing, but not the mutilation. Truong and Caterino were missing personal items, the headband and the banana clip, respectively.”
Will said, “Gerald Caterino hedged on the missing headband. It could be that things were missing because things were missing.”
Faith looked at the grid she’d drawn on the page. She silently checked through the other victims from Daryl Nesbitt’s newspaper articles. She had to try one more time with Amanda.
She asked, “Can we just go there for a minute?”
Amanda knew where the where was. “Thirty seconds.”
“You’re telling us that we can’t call this guy a serial killer, that we have a hunch but not concrete links because there’s no evidence that he’s killed three or more women, right?”
Amanda looked at her watch.
“So, we’ve got eight possible victims from the newspaper articles. In order to get evidence that they were murdered and not all coincidentally a bunch of clumsy hikers, we’d have to talk to the investigators and coroners and any witnesses on all of those cases, right?”