A Different Dawn (Nina Guerrera) Read online

  “A lot of people put a newborn’s crib in the bedroom with them for the first few months,” Breck said. “It’s what my sister did.”

  Wade looked grim. “I don’t think he would have changed his plans if that were the case here.”

  “I don’t either,” Perez said. “He took out the father with a single gunshot to the heart. We figure he wanted to neutralize the husband quickly.”

  “Obviously, the sound would have awakened the wife,” Nina said. “And probably a few neighbors.”

  Perez shook his head. “These are five-acre lots, and the homes are well insulated. No one reported any noise that night.”

  After inspecting the nursery, which appeared undisturbed except for detritus from crime scene technicians collecting evidence, they walked down the hall into the master bedroom, retracing the killer’s steps. Nina followed the others inside, taking in the blood-soaked mattress and stained sheets.

  “Ballistics indicates the subject was standing about fifteen feet away when he shot the father,” Perez said. “Yet somehow, he managed to make a perfect kill shot in the dark.”

  “Night vision,” Kent said. “The technology was used during the Second World War. And maybe a laser sight too. They’ve been around since the eighties.”

  “You think this unsub is in the military?” Nina asked him.

  Kent’s background in special ops meant he had been deployed on many nighttime missions.

  “I don’t.” Kent didn’t hesitate. “But I’ll bet he’s had weapons training somewhere along the line. He could have purchased military-style equipment online or at a private gun club.”

  She agreed. If the murders had been going on for decades, the killer wouldn’t be able to continue in a military career where he had little control over his deployments. Plus, the kind of personality Kent and Wade described would not fit into an institution that demanded self-sacrifice and strict adherence to rules set by others in command.

  “What about one of those militias?” Breck asked.

  “This guy seems like a loner,” Kent said. “And he’s cagey enough to keep his gun collection a secret to avoid drawing attention to himself. He probably trains alone too.”

  “Plenty of places outside the city to set up target practice,” Perez said. “Phoenix is like an oasis surrounded by hundreds of miles of desert.” He continued to the master bathroom and picked up where he left off. “We believe he used the baby to control the mother, possibly threatened to harm the little girl if she didn’t cooperate.”

  Nina swallowed the obscenity welling in her throat as she put herself in the mother’s position. “The poor woman didn’t know her daughter was already dead, so she’d do anything the unsub told her to.”

  “That’s what we think,” Perez said. “Apparently, he ordered her to get into the bathtub, because there’s no evidence that she was dragged in there by force.”

  Nina looked at the streaks of blood splashed against the smooth white porcelain tiles just above the rim of the oversize soaking tub. The body was long gone, but she could make out the stained imprint of the woman who had died there a few short days ago.

  As Wade had taught her, she put herself in the mind of both the victim and the killer. “I wonder if she knew at the very end,” she said quietly.

  “Knew she was going to die?” Perez asked.

  “And that the rest of her family was dead,” she said. “Including her baby.”

  Wade glanced at her sharply. “I was thinking the same thing. I believe this unsub would have wanted her to know.”

  “Why do you say that?” Perez asked.

  Wade walked out of the bathroom, back through the bedroom, and into the hallway as he spoke. “There was no sexual assault, no robbery, no vandalism or destruction of property. The person who did this had another motive.” He paused and turned to the others, who had gathered around him. “He wanted to inflict as much mental torment as possible.”

  “But the father didn’t even know what hit him, and neither did the baby,” Perez pointed out.

  “Exactly.” Wade seemed completely confident in his conclusions. “The target of his rage—his fury, his retribution—was the mother.”

  The house grew silent as everyone considered the theory.

  Wade continued his assessment. “After torturing her with the worst pain any mother could possibly feel, he framed her for his crime so she would be further humiliated in death. Everyone would think she killed her own family, a crime so repugnant that it flies in the face of everything we think about motherhood.”

  Kent nodded. “When we find this guy, he’s going to have major issues with his mother.”

  What kind of soulless creature would do that? Nina had run across many bad people in her life, but now, striving to grasp the dark mind that had committed this horrific crime, she sensed evil in its purest form.

  Chapter 8

  An hour later, Nina glanced out the SUV’s window to see a massive metal sculpture featuring a fingerprint mounted to a cement base standing beside a towering saguaro cactus. Etched into the other side of the cement were the words FBI PHOENIX DIVISION. Ginsberg steered into the parking lot of a boxy five-story cream-and-rust-colored building behind imposing wrought-iron fencing. The exterior was unbroken except for staggered rectangular windows. If Nina had to sum up her overall impression of the structure, she would have called it postmodern desert. On the outside, at least.

  “This is our new facility,” Ginsberg said, pride evident in his voice. “We relocated from downtown to the north part of the city a few years ago. This is much more up to date, and it’s farther away from the traffic and congestion.”

  He led them inside the front doors to a reception area, where he greeted the woman working at the front desk. Apparently expecting them, she smiled and gestured toward a scanner. Nina duly pulled out her creds and access card, waving them in front of the beam along with the rest of her team. Ginsberg held open the entry door to the office area for them.

  Trailing him, Nina surveyed the contemporary office space. Members of her former unit at the Washington field office in DC would have killed for this kind of spacious, sleek, well-designed work area. The WFO was cramped, and no amount of remodeling could create more square footage.

  Ginsberg opened a double door that led to a windowless conference room. “This will be your base of operations while you’re here. We’ve set it up as a combination command center and briefing area.”

  A rectangular graphite-colored conference table occupied the middle of the room and an expansive whiteboard took up most of one wall while four flatscreens were mounted on another.

  Breck strode directly to a monitor and keyboard resting on the far end of the table. “Dibs.”

  No one argued.

  After Nina and Wade took seats on one side of the table, Kent and Buxton sat opposite them. Ginsberg, who had disappeared while they looked around, returned a few moments later with a slender Asian woman in her late forties.

  “This is Special Agent in Charge Jennifer Wong. She’ll be keeping tabs on the investigation.”

  Buxton stood to shake her hand. “Supervisory Special Agent Gerard Buxton.”

  Nina had grown accustomed to working with Buxton, but Wong oversaw the entire Phoenix field division, so she outranked him. Nina wasn’t sure how this additional layer of managerial oversight would play out. How involved would Wong be? Would she break Nina’s crayons and send her home for coloring outside the lines? If the Phoenix SAC turned out to be a stickler for rules and regulations, that could be a problem.

  Wong took a seat at the head of the table, and Ginsberg sat to her right. “I won’t be present at most meetings, but I wanted an overview of the case,” she said, then turned to Buxton. “After that, you can keep me apprised of developments.”

  Nina glanced at Wade. Hopefully, Wong wasn’t going to be territorial.

  “Why don’t we go to your office and I can loop you in on what we’ve got so far?” Buxton said. “The t
eam can move forward more quickly without reviewing our progress to date.”

  As the two left the room, Nina appreciated that her boss had neatly removed management from the space, leaving the field to the players.

  Ginsberg watched them go before addressing the rest of the group. “I’ve been detailed to help your team with whatever you need.”

  “Much appreciated,” Breck said to him. “You know this city better than we do.”

  “I’m glad you got us into that crime scene before it was cleaned up,” Wade said to him, apparently anxious to get started on analysis. “Helped me get a better feel for the unsub.”

  Wade hadn’t spoken much on the trip from the Doyle home to the Phoenix field office, but he had apparently spent the time analyzing what he’d seen.

  “The staging was very elaborate,” Wade began. “I believe it served two purposes.” He raised a finger. “First, to create the story he wanted police to believe.” He raised another finger. “Second, to satisfy an emotional need.”

  “Then you believe the staging is part of the MO as well as the signature?” Nina asked him.

  Ginsberg shook his head. “Signature?”

  “I can explain it best with an illustration,” Wade said to him. “Imagine a killer who abducts random women in Central Park after dark in a blitz attack from behind and strangles them. That’s his MO. He draws a circle on their stomachs with a black marker after they die. That constitutes his signature.” Wade steepled his fingers, warming to his subject. “Something about those rituals fulfills a need that has nothing to do with how he commits the murders.”

  “Does he have a compulsion to kill, or to perform the rituals?” Ginsberg asked.

  “Both,” Wade said simply. “But one element is changeable, while the other is constant.” He paused briefly. “Let’s say the police increase patrols in the park, so the killer begins breaking into women’s homes and strangling them in their beds. His MO has changed, but he continues to draw a circle on their bodies, which is his signature. That’s how we can link the crimes even though some involve an opportunistic attack in a public place, while others involve a burglary with a preselected victim.”

  Ginsberg appeared to consider the information. “Did you come up with that?”

  “Wish I could take credit,” Wade said. “But the term signature was coined by John Douglas, who was one of the first FBI profilers decades ago.”

  Nina leaned forward, drawing the conversation back to the staged crime scenes. “Applying that concept to our unsub, part of the reason he poses the bodies in certain positions speaks to what spurred him to kill in the first place?”

  Wade nodded. “As I said before, this all goes back to his mother somehow.”

  “You think she abused him?” Breck asked.

  “Not necessarily in the way you and I would define abuse,” Wade said. “But the unsub has interpreted her actions as a severe injustice or personal insult. What we’re looking for is a point of inflection.”

  “What do you mean?” Nina asked.

  “An event that starts a person on a different course,” Wade said, moving his hands in the air to illustrate. “A change in trajectory. If it never happened, the person’s entire life would have been different.”

  Nina thought she understood. “If we can figure out what triggered this guy, that would help ID him?”

  “Exactly.” Wade turned to Kent, who had yet to offer his own opinion. “What did you see?”

  “Ritual and undoing, along with a heavy dose of displacement,” Kent said.

  Nina blew out a sigh. “I speak English and Spanish but not psychobabble.”

  Kent chuckled. “Those are some of Sigmund Freud’s ego defense mechanisms. Basically, the human mind always works to defend itself against inconvenient truths. According to Freud, we’ve all developed a variety of coping mechanisms.”

  “Okay,” Nina said. “But how did you see that in the crime scene?”

  “A husband who gets angry at his boss, then goes home and beats his wife because he can’t punch the one who signs his paycheck is using displacement. In this case, the unsub took out his rage over his own family, especially about his mother, on the Doyles.”

  “What about ritual and undoing?” Nina asked.

  “The unsub is trying to compensate for his bad feelings about himself by performing certain rituals that act as countermeasures.” At Nina’s raised brow, he continued, “Similar to someone who keeps washing his hands to cleanse himself of imaginary stains, the unsub is trying to go back and fix something in his past by reenacting a scenario he’s created to represent what occurred. Unfortunately, like all coping mechanisms, it never solves the problem, so he’s stuck in an endless cycle of repetition.”

  A flash of insight struck Nina. “Whatever went wrong—his point of inflection—happened on a leap day. That’s why he tries to fix it every leap day. When it doesn’t work, he has to wait another four years to try again.”

  Wade gave her an appreciative nod. “I agree. Whenever we have a pool of suspects, we should look into that date to see what was going on in their lives.”

  “To do that, we need to develop some suspects,” Nina said. “Whatever his deep-seated personal reasons for killing the family were, it looks like he was trying to recreate the Llorona case where he succeeded twenty-eight years ago. Only he failed this time. Why would someone so experienced make errors?”

  Breck shrugged. “Maybe he hasn’t been keeping up with technology and forensic science.”

  “Are you kidding?” Nina said. “You can learn enough from searching the internet to get a bachelor’s in forensics these days.”

  “Then what?” Breck looked at the two profilers. “A subconscious desire to get caught?”

  Wade snorted. “Not this guy.”

  “Is he devolving?” Nina asked, recalling the broad categories for killers. “Going from organized to disorganized?”

  “I don’t think so,” Wade said. “I believe he legitimately made mistakes on the two most recent cases, and it caught up to him.”

  “What will that do to his mindset?” Nina asked.

  “Most likely, trigger him to act out in a new way,” Wade said. “In the past, he had everything under control, which is essential to this guy. His narcissism and his antisocial personality compel him to orchestrate every part of the drama he’s playing out.”

  Nina wanted a way to turn the insight into action. “Getting back to my previous question. How do we grind up all this sausage to develop a suspect?”

  The room grew quiet, silencing even the clacking of Breck’s keyboard while everyone gave it some thought.

  “He travels to various cities to commit the crimes,” Breck finally said. “But we can’t check flight manifests going back twenty-eight years, and we also don’t know where his home base is, so that would be pointless anyway.”

  Nina looked at Kent. “Earlier you mentioned night vision and laser sights,” she said. “How would he get on a plane with that kind of gear and a gun?”

  “I can answer that one for you,” Breck said. “I made a spreadsheet. The only murders involving firearms were committed in Phoenix.”

  “The oldest and most recent cases are the only ones he didn’t have to fly to,” Nina said, latching on to the idea of the unsub’s starting point. She turned to Wade. “You’ve always maintained that a serial killer’s first crime is the most revealing. In this case, the location of his first crime is also the only city he’s hit twice. When things went south on him in New York, what if he came back to Phoenix to push the reset button?”

  “The place where it all began,” Wade said. “A place of comfort, a place of strength . . . a home base.” He stroked his jaw in a characteristic gesture of concentration. “Highly likely that he either lives inside the Phoenix city limits or somewhere close by. I would estimate no more than two hours’ drive.”

  Breck connected the terminal where she was working to one of the flatscreens on the wall. In less th
an a minute, she had pulled up a map of Arizona and generated a red circle in a radius around Phoenix. “The largest cities that fit that description are Tucson, Mesa, and Scottsdale, in order of population,” she said.

  Wade gazed at the map. “He may have killed people all over the country, but he lives somewhere inside that circle.”

  Nina stood beside Wade, staring at the map as if she could see the unsub. “We’re here now,” she muttered. “And we’re coming for you.”

  Chapter 9

  Nina zipped her empty suitcase and stashed it under one of the two queen beds. “This place is nice,” she said, looking around the spacious hotel room.

  “Government rates,” Breck said. “Otherwise, Uncle Sam wouldn’t foot the bill for pricey digs like these.”

  Ginsberg had driven the team downtown to the Phoenix Royal Suites after their meeting at the command center in the PFO. SAC Wong had arranged for another agent to follow in a second black Suburban, leaving the keys with Buxton so they would have a Bureau car at their disposal during their stay.

  At check-in Nina and Breck had been assigned to share the suite that adjoined Wade and Kent’s. Buxton had a room to himself across the hall. They had each showered and changed into casual clothes, not planning to go out again for the night.

  A light knock at the door separating the pair of suites interrupted their conversation. They exchanged glances before Nina crossed the room. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Wade and Kent.” The exasperated response came from Kent. “Who the hell else would it be?”

  She flipped the lock and opened the door. Kent didn’t wait for an invitation, striding straight past her. “Turn on the news.”

  “I could’ve been in my undies,” Breck said, putting a hand on her hip. “Could’ve been just out of the shower and buck naked.”

  Kent made no response, snatching up the remote before Nina could get to it. Wade had trailed Kent into the room, his expression somber.