Deaver, who’d moved on to the little heap of chopped carrots, beamed at Perry as if he was a star student. “Right on the button!”
Startled at the word, I blinked and stared at Deaver.
Still smiling, he nodded at me. “Oh, yes. Unlike most disorganized serial killers, the organized ones tend to be sane, in the legal sense, anyway. They know the difference between reality and fantasy, but they are still very disturbed individuals indeed.”
I let go of my surprise at Deaver’s use of the button phrase and focused instead on the essence of what he was saying. From how he’d explained it, the Button Man sounded “organized.” He’d planned at least enough to take a button, and sometimes a needle and thread, along on his hunting trips. But for all I knew, the dump sites could have been very chaotic indeed. Damn Singh for not sharing more information with me, for not letting me visit the latest site with all the bodies.
“Of course,” Deaver continued, impaling the last carrot on the tines of his fork, “there are scores of ways to classify both the killers and the killings, and the types overlap. What’s more, a killer may evince aspects of more than one type at various times in his career.”
His career?
“I’ve found that the more you try to narrow down the categories, the more exceptions you have. Nothing truly fits neatly, even though ‘experts’ in the field of profiling want you to believe that it’s a science rather than a combination of intuitive hunches and educated guesswork based on past experience.”
While I pondered what to ask next, Deaver ate two more pieces of chicken and dabbed at his mouth with a paper napkin also taken from his pocket. I wondered what else might be stashed in there. Packets of salt and pepper, some ketchup, dessert? The bee, meanwhile, flew circles around Perry’s head until he shooed it out the window with a piece of paper.
“Would you be able to tell from the dump site what the killer’s motive was?” I asked.
Deaver considered this for a moment. “Not necessarily, although the body itself can give you clues. For example, killers who want to exercise their sadism are more likely to bind and torture their victims, while the hedonistic killer motivated by lust is more likely to rape or to pose the body in sexualized poses.”
An image of that thumb penetrating that mouth, thrusting in and out, flashed across my mind’s eye.
“And if the killer took, or indeed left, something distinctive, that could provide insight into their motive,” Deaver continued.
I glanced up to find him staring at me expectantly. “Um, there isn’t much to go on in terms of the remains,” I said, even as I wondered if that was true for the latest site.
“Ah!” Deaver rubbed his hands together in pleasure like an old timey detective considering a fresh clue. “So there are only partial remains. Perhaps just skeletons? Then these would be old deaths. How do the police know they’re murders?”
“I— I’m not sure.” Deaver looked ready to pelt me with more questions, so I quickly steered his attention back to the part that most interested me. “Can you explain what you meant about things taken or left at the scene and the murderer’s motive?”
“Taking or leaving something would be a feature of a killer’s signature.” At Perry’s questioning glance, Deaver clarified, “His distinctive style. His stamp, if you will.”
“Such as?” I asked.
Deaver contemplated the remaining contents of his lunchbox. “A lot of things contribute to the signature. His choice of victim, for example, or his modus operandi. The killer might leave his mark — literally, sometimes — by carving a symbol onto the body or painting a message on a surface or inserting an object into an orifice.”
My ears pricked at that, and a flashback of a button sliding over teeth and onto a tongue, hovered at the edge of my attention. I dug the edge of a nail under a cuticle and pushed hard, welcoming the pain that kept me anchored to where I was now rather than letting me drift into what had happened back then.
“Or they might take a trophy, like a driver’s license or a piece of jewelry, some such small item belonging to the victim.”
I nodded. Ryan Jackson had told me a bit about trophies when I got involved in the last murder investigation.
Deaver stared up at the ceiling, thinking. “They may even take a body part.”
Perry tucked back his chin in surprise and said, “Come again?”
“Oh, yes. Often,” Deaver said. “Ted Bundy kept the decapitated heads of some of his victims in his apartment. Jack the Ripper made off with a victim’s kidney.”
“Bloody hell,” Perry said faintly. “Why?”
“To eat it.” Deaver chuckled, stabbing a chunk of beetroot and popping it into his mouth, leaving his lips bloodied by juice.
“Bugger me.”
“And Charles Albright, who killed three sex workers in Texas in the early nineties, carried their eyeballs off with him.” Deaver pointed his fork at my mismatched eyes and said, “He’d have loved to have collected yours, my dear.”
– 7 –
I winced at the idea of a killer scooping my eyeballs from their sockets. “Why did the killer take their eyes rather than any other body part?” I asked Deaver.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he replied. “Perhaps he didn’t want his victims looking at him, judging him. Or perhaps he did, ha-ha!”
I imagined a killer keeping that particular type of trophy in a bottle on his desk, where he and his victim could eyeball each other, and shuddered.
“Had someone in his history always said they’d be keeping an eye on him? Or did he perhaps believe that his victims were demons who could be destroyed in that way?” Deaver said. “This is psychology, not math; multiple interpretations are always possible. From what was learned subsequently in Albright’s case, it seemed he’d been obsessed with eyes since his work as a taxidermist. Perhaps he’d originally intended to stick his victims’ eyes into some of his stuffed animals.” Deaver ate the rest of his beetroot with gusto, the gruesome details of these murders seemingly not sufficient to kill his appetite. “Whatever the reason, Albright spent the years of his incarceration endlessly sketching female eyes, so clearly he hadn’t quenched his idée fixe.”
“But why take anything?” Perry asked.
“As a memento of the murder. A little keepsake, you see?”
From his expression, Perry didn’t see at all.
“They often keep a whole collection of souvenirs and pore over them, touching them” — Deaver rested the fork against the side of his lunch container and stretched out pale fingers as if reaching for a pair of earrings — “remembering the touch, the feel of the victim. Masturbating to relive the sexual excitement of the kill.” He closed his hands as though throttling an invisible throat and made a squelching noise.
This man was creeping me out. He seemed to enjoy the details of the crime and the violence of the killers entirely too much. Where was the respect for the victims? I cleared my throat. “So why would they leave an object at the scene?”
“What kind of object?” Deaver asked quickly.
“I can’t say.”