Killer Profile

Eyes wide, Karl said, “Posed as a woman, and what? Picked him up somewhere, a bar maybe?”

“As a working hypothesis, yes.”

Reid faced the Aurora detective. “Where was the body buried?”

“Over here,” Ramirez told them, and led them to an area not far into the woods.

The grave had been shallow, blood still visible in the bottom.

Reid shook his head. “He couldn’t have thought this would fool anyone.…”

Peters said, “Maybe he wasn’t trying to hide the body.”

“He shouldhave,” Reid said. “That was part of the Siems crime. He got the date wrong too—that crime was July 4, 1990. He missed by over a month. This is, generally, the Siems scene… but he’s getting sloppy.”

Peters frowned. “How many has he killed?”

“Seven, that we know of.”

“How sloppy can he be, if he’s at large after seven of these atrocities?”

Reid said nothing. Turning to Ramirez, he asked, “Any evidence from the grave?”

“Just that he used a camp shovel to dig it. The marks on the sides aren’t wide enough to’ve been caused by a full-sized shovel.”

Looking back toward the parking lot, Reid asked, “How did you determine the UnSub left by bicycle?”

“I came across something,” Peters said, and led them over to a spot past the other side of the parking lot.

Soon they stood around a bare area of grass surrounded by piles of leaves.

Peters pointed. “He had something buried here under the leaves. Could have been a bike.”

Then Ramirez and Peters led them further into the woods to another area that had been cleaned away, this one larger than the first.

Rossi, hands on hips as he looked down, asked, “What do we have here?”

Ramirez said, “The escape route.”

“Yeah?”

Ramirez pointed to thin ruts in the grass. “Tire tracks from a mountain bike.”

“Could it have been a motorbike?” Lorenzon asked. “Kind of out in the boonies for a bike, aren’t we?”

“Maybe, but it’s not motorbike tracks. The killer had a bicycle snugged here and did his thing and just pedaled away.”

Rossi was nodding. “This guy’s organized,” he said.

Karl’s eyes went from Rossi to Reid and back again. “One of you says he’s organized, the other says he’s getting sloppy. Do you guys reallyknow what the hell you’re doing?”

Rossi gave the detective a sly smile. “Hard to believe, maybe, but we do. The UnSub has been organized in how he plansthe crimes, but he’s becoming more disorganized in his actual carrying out of the crimes.”

“Isn’t that a contradiction?” Peters asked.

Rossi’s smiled broadened. “Isn’t making murder an art form a contradiction in itself?”

Hotchner was livid.

He had spoken on the phone, personally, with the editor of the Daily World, who had gone on and on about the first amendment and freedom of the press when obstruction of justice was more like it. The team leader knew he should have left this critical work to Jareau and got off the phone as soon as he realized how futile the effort.

Shortly thereafter, Jareau came into the conference room. “I’ve got the court order! I found a federal judge who will let Garcia into the Daily World’s e-mail account.”

“Take Prentiss,” he said. “Go serve it to that editor.”

“You don’t want to go yourself?”

Shaking his head, Hotchner said, “I don’t think I can be in the same room with that defender of the freedom of press right now.”

Jareau smiled. “All right. But I intend to enjoy myself telling him to move over and let us in.”

“Enjoying yourself is allowed, if the job gets done.”

Jareau and Prentiss left.

Only Morgan remained in the room with Hotchner. Bent over his laptop, Morgan seemed deeply involved in something. Hotchner made himself put his anger aside and get back to work. Letting out a long breath, he rubbed his forehead and sat down at his computer.

This day was shaping up to be another long, bad one and he knew that the clock was ticking. With the UnSub back in business, and spreading news of his deeds to an even wider circle of the media, before long a full-blown panic would grip the nation’s Second City.

Even though Denson’s story had checked out—at least according to the cop’s ex-wife and his associates—the man had seemingly disappeared. The tail Hotchner had set up with local agents had lost Denson—hard to tail a cop, at least for long—and now no one could find the detective. In fact, no one had seen him since he’d turned over the Bangs Lake files to the BAU.

Hotchner hoped that was because Denson had taken his advice to stay away from the case, that the man was taking it easy somewhere and staying out of trouble.

Morgan looked up from his laptop screen to ask Hotchner, “Did you ever get the second picture from the forensic artist?”

Hotchner swung around in his chair. “After you left yesterday, the Demerol they gave Minchell for his broken nose kicked in, and he passed out before the artist could even get started. Artist is back over there now.”

Reid and Rossi entered, fresh from the latest crime scene. They took seats around the table and filled Hotchner and Morgan in about the new murder.

Hotchner wadded up a piece of paper, which was about as much emotion as he was willing to show. When he looked up, the others all stared at him.

“Sorry,” he said, and twitched a smile. “Frustration. We’ve been a step behind this UnSub since we got here. We still don’t know how he picks the victims, and we don’t know which killer he’s going to imitate next. How do we get out in front of him until we figure out how he’s choosing the killers and victims? He’s gone right down the line, Berkowitz, Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, Wuornos… there’s no way to know who’s next.”

“Alphabetical order,” Reid said quickly.

All eyes went to Reid.

“Simple,” Hotchner said. “And I noticed that a long time ago, Reid; but it doesn’t help us. Obviously not every serial killer in history is on his list—we could fill in plenty of others between all of those names.…"

Very quietly, Rossi said, “He skipped a chapter.”

They all turned to him.

“What?” Hotchner asked.

“He skippeda goddamn chapter,” Rossi said, and pounded the table with a fist. “Damnit. I didn’t put it together, Aaron, till you listed them just now.”

“Put what together?”

Rossi’s laugh was bitter. “I know how he’s picking which killer to imitate next. I was fooled because he skipped a chapter. Literally.”

Frowning, Morgan said, “Dave—what are you talking about?”

“Max Ryan’s book, Serial Killers and Mass Murderers:Profiling Why They Kill. Max Ryan, Jason Gideon’s mentor, my colleague. The UnSub, he’s doing the chapters of the book… in order.” Rossi held up a forefinger. “Except for one—he skipped Herman Kotchman. That’s probably what took me so long to put this together. He’s done them all, in order of the chapters in the Ryan book… except Kotchman.”

Reid said, “Herman Kotchman was a serial killer in the early seventies infamous for abducting middle-aged men who reminded him of his sexually predatory father, and burying them in coffins in his backyard. Dubbed ‘The Premature Burialist’ by the media, he claimed i

“Right,” Rossi said. “I helped catch the sick bastard.”

No one said anything—not even Reid.

Quietly, Rossi said, “One of our first cases—hell, we weren’t even the BAU back then. We were just a bunch of guys who thought that if you studied enough offenders, you could learn things from their behavior. Things that would help you stop them.”

Hotchner said, “You were right.”

Rossi said, “You know, at his trial? Kotchman said, ‘They had at least a week before they died of thirst. I’m i