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