“Mountain folk,” Gertha said. “They are different.”
“Excuse me?”
“I think you come from the mountains, like my husband. It’s hard to get him to talk.”
“Actually, I’m from a valley!”
They’d both laughed at that. In the four days since then, Gertha had gotten more than just a few words out of her. Perhaps it was due to the reassurance of opening up to someone she’d probably never see again, or because Inspector Gertha Schneider knew how to listen. Gertha had become a sympathetic ear for confidences and revelations Amaia had never shared with anyone. They’d talked until the wee hours of the night more than once. Gertha headed up a homicide investigation team of forty-five officers, thirty-eight of whom were men. She’d had her share of conflicts when she took charge, but she was singularly free of resentments.
Before Gertha said anything, a man in a suit dropped into the seat on the other side of Amaia.
“Assistant Inspector, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I thought you’d be in the break room with the others.” He gave her a smile to let her know his aggrieved tone was just an act. The smile lasted maybe a bit too long. Amaia deliberately looked away.
Emerson had been assigned as her point of contact, the agent responsible for orienting her, helping her get the most from the course, accompanying her, introducing her to her instructors, and using his own devices and passwords to provide access to the material she needed for the assignments. From time to time he got a bit too friendly.
“I came early to get a good seat. This is a subject that particularly interests me.”
“Seems you’re not the only one.” Emerson looked around the room, almost full by now. “Looks like our agent Dupree has a lot of fans. Ever hear him speak before?”
“I went to a lecture he gave in Boston three years ago, when I was a graduate student. I stood in line, got his autograph and a quick handshake. The schedule says Dupree’s going to conduct our seminar this afternoon. I want to be ready.”
Emerson raised one eyebrow and gave her a patronizing smile.
She saw he was dying to tell her more. “You know something I don’t?”
“Special Agent Dupree has his own style. His teaching methods can be unusual. He’s not an instructor; he heads a strike team. He does lecture from time to time, and sometimes he drafts an article for the Bureau’s intranet. It’s really unusual for him to agree to help train the Europol group.”
“You work for him, don’t you?”
“Not exactly . . . ,” Emerson was pained to admit. “Sometimes I travel with his team. I’d really like to be assigned to his unit, and maybe someday I will be. Right now I’m on the communications support team with Agent Stella Tucker, who works for Dupree. So I do work for him, but only indirectly. Profiling requires lots of different skills. They mostly use field agents on their strike teams, but quite a few support functions are based here. We back up the field agents looking for bad guys.”
He said “bad guys” as if talking to a child and gave her another one of his phony smiles. He changed his tone when she didn’t react. “Agents stationed here support all three strike teams. I specialize in data analysis. It doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s vital for their work.”
The conference room light dimmed, and the buzz of conversation died away as if controlled by the same switch. A spotlight came up on a bare lectern.
Agent Dupree emerged from the right side of the stage and walked into the pool of light. Dupree was slim and elegant, his short hair carefully combed, just as she remembered. The dark circles under his eyes emphasized the pallor of his complexion; he looked like a man who never got enough sleep. He wore a perfectly tailored midnight-blue suit, a matching tie, and a white shirt. He was clean shaven.
Dupree took his place behind the lectern. He appeared to have no text or notes. Amaia wondered if he’d had a script pre-positioned on the lectern; if so, that attention to detail might be a clue to his character. She made a mental note to watch to see if he picked up any papers afterward.
The brief bio in the course program said he was forty-four years old, a native of Louisiana with degrees in law, economics, art history, psychology, and criminology. For the past year he’d headed one of the three working groups at the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit.
Dupree raised his chin, put one foot forward, and shifted his weight to the other. His hands rested easily on his hips as he looked out at the faces in the auditorium.
He reached out and tapped the microphone. A thunderous sound filled the hall. He leaned forward slightly, looked up, and spoke to someone she couldn’t see at the back of the auditorium. “Could you please put some light on the audience? When I can’t see them, I feel as though I’m just talking to myself.” His voice was resigned. “I feel like that often enough already.”
The lights brightened just enough so Dupree could make out their faces.
He surveyed the rows of seats as if looking for someone. When he got to Amaia, he kept his gaze on her for a couple of seconds, then looked down at the lectern. The eye contact had been brief. She supposed he’d been studying someone behind her, but then she realized Agent Emerson was watching her. He hadn’t missed it.
Dupree looked up. “We all know the importance of establishing a victim profile, analyzing the criminal’s choice of known victims. But today I’m going to discuss the importance of identifying and registering possible victims as a means of detecting an unrecognized serial killer. We will first consider the type of victim chosen by the killer and cases in which the existence of a murder is in fact unknown.”
A shiver of excitement went through the room. Dupree looked at Amaia and directed every word to her. “One often supposes that a crime is the means by which a murderer purges his own suffering, since many killers were victims before they became executioners. Of all the possible assumptions, the most dangerous is the notion that, deep down, killers want to be caught, so their crimes are merely desperate pleas for recognition of their own suffering. This is certainly not true in the case of mental illness, but that is another question entirely.”
Amaia heard Emerson mutter in astonishment. “What the hell . . . ?”
Agent Dupree paused and looked around at the rest of the audience. “This hypothesis asserts that exhibitionism and savage behavior are cries for attention. Criminals resort to the same behavior again and again in their effort to be something, to be someone, to be important; their egotism is their undoing. Because they want attention and recognition, they take risks and make mistakes that give them away.
“But watch out. Assumptions are the investigator’s greatest enemy, and there’s ample proof that not all serial killers are compulsive and disorganized. Some of them are conscious of their own deviant behavior. Some serial killers, knowing something about police methods, use ruses and deceptions to throw us off the scent. This type of killer stages the scene carefully. He lays red herrings; he sends us down blind alleys. He takes his time and picks his opportunities carefully. He can go on murdering for years. He covers his tracks, maybe hides the bodies of his victims; perhaps he makes his murders look like accidents, suicides, or simple disappearances. Or maybe he selects vulnerable, marginalized individuals whose disappearances won’t be noticed: drug addicts, prostitutes, the homeless, illegal immigrants. Outcasts.”