“I’ll bet he knew that too,” Nina said. “He planned everything else, it would be logical for him to scope out the site in advance.”
“We focused on a ten-hour window beginning two hours before she was seen alive in the bodega and the time she was found in the dumpster,” Breck said. “But we can do another search with an expanded time frame.”
“You get anything?” Wade asked.
Breck’s face split into a grin. “Watch this.”
She spun her laptop, facing the screen outward. They all leaned in, focusing on a video of M Street cast in the eerie glow of streetlights and neon signs. The late-night party zone, bordering on seedy, bustled with a mixture of motorized and foot traffic, many in various states of inebriation.
Breck clicked a key, and each vehicle vanished, along with its floating time stamp. Pedestrians strolled along sidewalks or darted across the busy thoroughfare, serpentining between now-invisible cars beneath the circles of light cascading down from streetlamps, everyone shadowed by a unique time stamp.
Breck narrated as they watched, her southern accent growing stronger with excitement. “We used a face-rec filter to spot the victim, but she never appeared in any footage along this street in the ten-hour window we checked.”
“She didn’t walk into the alley, then,” Nina said. “Someone took her there.”
“We’ve already established that the trash hadn’t been emptied for several days prior,” Wade said. “So she couldn’t have been transported into the alley in a garbage truck. How else would he have gotten her there?”
Nina considered the possibilities. “Can you narrow the visual parameters to people carrying boxes or carts? Anyone making deliveries.”
“Not only can I do it, I can make it look easy.” Breck typed a command. “Check it out.”
Men with dollies or boxes wended their way down the strangely empty sidewalk. One of them stopped short, waving his arms and shouting before crossing the street. Nina chuckled as the man spun to jab his middle finger in the air, the commonplace behavior made comical by the digital subtraction of the vehicle that must have almost hit him.
Kent leaned forward, eyes locked on the screen. “Can you eliminate everyone except people going into the Triple Threat club?”
Breck’s pale fingers flashed on the keys. More images vaporized. They watched in rapt silence.
“There.” Nina pointed. A heavyset man in a dark uniform with a pronounced limp wheeled a handcart with a large, bulky cardboard box into the nightclub. The bill of his ball cap hid the upper half of his face and a dense beard blurred the lower half. Time sped by, then slowed again as he pushed the empty cart out, unhurried steps meandering down M Street until he left the frame.
“Where’s his truck?” Nina said.
“Let me tag him.” Breck entered another command. “Okay, I’m picking him up here.”
The man sauntered toward a Ford Econoline van, hauled open the rear doors, and thrust the dolly inside.
Nina’s blood chilled when she saw the vehicle.
He limped around to the driver’s door, hoisted himself inside with obvious effort, and drove off.
“License plate?” Kent said.
Breck zoomed in. “Van doesn’t have one.”
“Traffic cams,” Buxton said, agitated. “Follow him.”
“We only pulled video from a two-mile radius around the scene.” A hint of pink flushed Breck’s porcelain skin. “I’ll expand the search parameters. Now that we have a suspect vehicle, I can go back and track it.”
Nina concentrated on their remaining option. “Can you search databases for face-rec on the delivery man too?”
“Let me see if I can get a better look at his face,” Breck said. “It’s dark, but we can probably lighten the image enough to clear it up.”
“Something’s not right,” Nina said. “The man who attacked me was physically fit and muscular.” She pointed at Kent. “Built like him. This guy looks obese, and he limps on his right foot.”
“You haven’t seen him in eleven years.” Wade gestured up and down his body. “Take it from me, a lot can go south on a man’s physique in that amount of time. Especially if he injured his leg and couldn’t work out.”
Breck swiveled the laptop back toward herself and began typing. “I’ll map his gait and enter it into the system. If a suspect candidate shows up on video, we can compare his limp to this one.”
Kent slid off his glasses. “If I wanted to defeat face-rec . . . could I put on a fake nose, a beard, or glasses to confuse the system?”
Breck shook her head. “Facial recognition works off your overall facial bone structure, so stuff like that won’t matter. You’d have to go a lot farther to fool the kind of tech we have now.”
“But it could be done with cosmetic implants or surgery?”
She gave him a dubious frown. “Theoretically.”
“Either way, we have our first viable lead now.” Buxton interrupted the ancillary discussion. “Agent Breck will follow up on it. In the meantime, let’s get to the profiling.”
Nina perked up. This is what she had been most anxious to hear. Though his reputation had taken a hit, Dr. Jeffrey Wade was still the Bureau’s most experienced mind hunter. How would he mentally dissect the psyche of the monster?
“It all comes down to motive,” Wade said. “The unsub’s behavior reflects his personality, which will conform to certain patterns. These patterns provide insight into what makes him tick.” He steepled his fingers, tapping them against his chin. “This killer is methodical. He chose Sofia as his victim specifically to draw Guerrera into the investigation. His note makes it clear he’s connecting this crime to the one he attempted to complete eleven years ago. It’s wish fulfillment. We can reasonably conclude that he acted out after seeing Guerrera in the viral video.”
Kent furrowed his brows. “You’re saying the video was the precipitating stressor?”
“That’s the most logical assumption,” Wade said. He glanced at Nina. “Killers may fantasize about their crimes for quite some time before acting on them. Usually a series of circumstances or events converge in a way that spurs action. Seeing you again—especially where you are in a position of authority, decisively taking down a predator—could certainly set him off.”
She assumed Wade was providing more background for her benefit and possibly Breck’s. As the two people in the room with no background in profiling, they would benefit from more information.
She took advantage of the opportunity. “What kind of predator hits twice in eleven years?”
“A truly obsessed stalker who found another victim to take your place,” Wade said. “Someone who had repressed his urges until they were triggered by a stressor.”
Kent pushed his glasses back on. “Or a predator who’s been flying under the radar but has killed others during the last decade or so. We can’t be sure Guerrera was his first or his last before this murder occurred.”
“I would be surprised if someone with such a unique and consistent pattern wouldn’t red flag in the system,” Wade said.
Buxton shook his head. “There aren’t any similar cases in ViCAP, and we didn’t get a match in the forensics database on trace material at the scene. That includes hair, fiber, fluids, the works. As I mentioned before, though, this was just a preliminary check. We’ll have a more complete report shortly once they process everything at the lab.”