Velocity (The Karen Vail Series, Book 3) by Alan Jacobson

Author:Alan Jacobson [Jacobson, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

51

Vail pushed through the door while simultaneously pulling out her BlackBerry. Dialed Roxxann Dixon.“I’ve got something, Roxx. You in a place you can talk?”

“I’m sitting in the conference room with the task force.”

“Perfect. Call me back so you can put me on speaker.”

Seconds later, her phone buzzed. “Okay,” Vail said. “I think I’ve put a lot of this shit together. All these parts that were dangling out there, things I couldn’t add up because they didn’t seem to make sense. I think I’ve got it. Or most of it.”

“Go on,” Brix said.

“All of Mayfield’s murders, I had such a hard time profiling him, because the more information we got the less sense it all made to me. Because male serial killers don’t kill for profit. Right?”

“That’s what you kept saying,” Dixon said.

“One thing I’ve learned is there are exceptions to most of what we think is behavioral fact. There are general guidelines and tenets, but people are different. Circumstances are different. And when two converging powers find one another, they discover they have desires and needs that come together in a symbiotic relationship. That’s what we’re talking about here. Symbiosis.”

“Karen,” Austin Mann said, “you’ve lost me.”

“John Mayfield killed because it filled a psychosexual need. He marked the bodies the way he did, severing the breasts, slicing the wrists, yanking off the toenail. He did those things for reasons he wasn’t consciously aware of. He did them because they comforted him. And that made sense to me. It fit our paradigms of serial killer behaviors. But then he also did things that didn’t make sense, that didn’t add up. It was almost like he was a schizophrenic killer. The male victim, for one. That didn’t fit.”

“And you’ve figured it out,” Gordon said.

“I think so.” Vail thought another moment, then continued. “It seemed at times like he was killing for a profit motive, while at other times the victims appeared to be unrelated. So here’s what I think was going on. John Mayfield was a bona fide serial killer, with classic childhood pathologies that shaped him into what he became: someone who was selecting victims that reminded him of his mother. But there was more to this than just the classic serial killer behavioral patterns. He was working with César Guevara. This is where the symbiosis comes into play.

“Mayfield was a psychopath, but the reason why some of his victims didn’t match his ritual was because he was killing vics chosen for him, by Guevara. And they used his behavioral murder patterns as a cover to divert attention from the Guevara-ordered killings, so no one would suspect they were contract kills. And we fell into that trap.”

“But what’s Guevara’s role?” Gordon asked. “Why did he choose these particular victims?”

“Guevara’s a lieutenant with the Cortez drug cartel. They smuggle liquid cocaine in wine bottles all over the country. Heroin and LSD in the labels. And the synthetic corks—they have ultra high potency, very expensive Fentanyl hidden within them.”

“That’s why,” Dixon said, “Superior almost exclusively uses synthetic corks—because they can hollow them out and fill the inside with drugs.

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