“Did they know him? Maybe not his name, but his face. That nice older guy who comes into the bar now and again, or who takes a walk every evening, who I see at the market or the glide-cart.”
“Familiar.”
“Familiar enough, harmless-looking enough that if they saw him for an instant before the grab, the fight-or-flight wouldn’t kick in.”
Peabody set fresh black coffee on Eve’s desk.
“I follow.”
“Follow this,” Eve told her. “No like crimes, nothing pops. So as Mira profiled, something more recent caused the snap. I’m thinking he not only hasn’t killed before this, he hasn’t broken the law. Precise, careful, and so on. Maybe, until this point, a kind of rule-follower.”
“He’s damn good for a novice.”
“He’s taken his time, worked it all out. Inside, he’s broken, a snotty kid, but the other part of him knows how to think, control it, cover his bases, take the time to.”
“Maybe, like you thought with Mosebly, he goes into the bars in a group.”
“Maybe, but … I think I was off there. He’s a loner. At the core of him, he’s a loner. Probably friendly enough with coworkers if he has them, and neighbors, but not the social type. It’s the quiet life for him, especially in these last months. It takes plenty of alone time to plan all this out, to set all this up.”
Playing with angles and aspects, she took her coffee as she rose to walk to her window. “He documented their routines, but he didn’t know them—not in a genuine personal sense. If he had, he wouldn’t have staked out Covino on that night. He’d have known she planned to stay with Asshole Boyfriend, or considered it. So he’s not a friend, but yeah, familiar.”
She turned back to the board. “I’ve got Yancy’s projections of what the mother looks like at eighty, at seventy, at sixty—and he’s working on the younger decades. So far, no hits on face recognition.”
Turning, she eased a hip on the desk to face Peabody. “Long shot there anyway, not only because it’s a projection—no matter how good he is—but they’re not the mother. They’re just the type, the physical type.”
“It’s still a good angle.”
“It is, and we’ll keep running the program. But we need to ID the mother. If we’re right and Elder was his first kill, the break happened within the last year. Longer than that isn’t logical. Whatever triggered it, it’s this time period he’s fixed on.”
She tapped the photos of the two signs left with the bodies. “Childhood. Young childhood. Even I know that’s not the printing of, say, a ten-or twelve-year-old.”
“Four or five would be my guess. Maybe six.”
“So something happened during that period of his life, with his mother. Why does he want to go back here, to give up the freedom and choices of adulthood?”
“Maybe because of that. Young childhood means you don’t have to make decisions, work for a living. Somebody else is in charge, takes care of everything. They feed you, clothe you, protect you.”
“That’s good, but what if they do a crappy job of all that? Lots of parents and parental figures do a crappy job, and worse. Whether she was good at it or crap at it, he wants to go back there. That needy kid is still in there, but in this case, he’s doing the feeding, the clothing. He’s making the decisions right alongside the adult portion.”
“Are you thinking split personality? Multiple personality disorder?”
“MPD’s rare, really rare, and I’d only buy into it here if he hasn’t kept his job since the split or break. Not impossible,” she added, “but we’re not going to find that out until we find her.”
She tapped the signs again.
“Finding an unidentified woman of undetermined age, alive or dead unknown, place of origin unknown, current residence, if any, unknown.” Peabody pushed at her red-tipped hair. “Good luck to us.”
“Screw luck, we work the case. She looked enough like these women—as he created them—to give us a sense. We extrapolate she was in her early twenties, like his vics, when he was between four and six. That means if she’s the bio mother, she gave birth between the ages of—we’ll call it seventeen and twenty-one to make it stretch. He dresses her like a party girl, so we have that. He hunts bars, so we again extrapolate she worked in one or frequented same enough to keep that stuck in his head. We have the tat, and it matters. Why go to the time and trouble to ink her with that exact symbol if he hadn’t seen it on the mother?”