Vail 01 - The 7th Victim by Alan Jacobson Read Free Book Online Page B

describe the face of the killer.
     
    “So without further ado, I’d like to have Special Agent Vail come to the podium.”
     
    All heads swiveled in Vail’s direction, but there was no clapping. Usually, the instructor gave her such a buildup that the new agents felt compelled to stand and bow as if she were some demigod. Or at least welcome her with a warm round of applause. But this instructor was new, and he didn’t seem to go into her background as much as the others had. At least, she didn’t think he did. Her mind was on Melanie Hoffman, and she wasn’t really listening.
     
    She made her way to the front, opened her laptop, and gazed at the inclined classroom—at the eager faces staring at her. She remembered that look, that feeling of excitement at beginning something new. She still loved her work—in an odd sort of way given what she did—and still felt challenged. But it was no longer fresh, and like the exhilaration one feels at the start of a budding romantic relationship, the magic had faded with time. The challenge, instead of only coming from the job, morphed into a struggle to keep it interesting.
     
    “I’m Karen Vail,” she started. “I know, you were probably expecting a man. I can see it in your faces.” She liked to start by putting them on the defensive. Part of the new agent initiation protocol. Either that or she’d done too many interrogations—after a while, you started looking for the upper hand in all conversations.
     
    “Profiling isn’t an exact science, no matter what anyone tells you. Now I can just assign you one of Douglas’s books to read, then come back in a couple of days to answer questions, but that’s not my style. I’m here to give you a perspective on the sick minds we’re tracking out there. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. The violence they perpetrate on others is sick, for sure, but they’re not mentally ill—they know damn well what they’re doing. We’ll talk more about this later.”
     
    After spending a few moments outlining the organizational chart for her unit, she sensed it was time to pick up the pace. A couple of the agents in the back row were slumped over, heads resting in their hands, no doubt thinking about lunch in the dining hall.
     
    “Let’s go into some actual examples to give you an idea of how we look at things.” She lifted the lid of her laptop, then pressed a button on the lectern’s AV panel. The classroom lights dimmed and the rear projection screen behind her glowed with yellow and white text against a black background. “Critical Incident Response Group, Behavioral Profiling Analysis” was boldly emblazoned across the screen. She pressed the Bluetooth remote and advanced to the next PowerPoint slide. In public school, when Vail was growing up, they used real slides. They jammed, they faded if you left them under the projection light too long, and you didn’t have near the creativity of the graphics she was able to produce for her FBI presentations on PowerPoint. Now her slides zipped across the screen with fancy corner-to-corner wipes, dissolves, and all sorts of neat effects. Her students still fell asleep on her. So much for technology.
     
    “This is the case I’m currently working on,” Vail said. “The Dead Eyes killer.” She heard a few snickers. “This isn’t a laughing matter,” she barked at them. The room got very quiet very quickly. “What you’re about to see is disgusting, the product of a monster. I hope none of you have to come upon a crime scene like this one. But my goal is that if you do, you’ll at least know something about what you’re looking at. And how to go about helping catch the bastard.”
     
    She hit the button on the remote and the first slide dissolved on the screen. A woman’s bedroom beamed from the computer. Her brutalized torso lay on the bed in front of a mirror, the now-familiar sight of steak knives protruding from both eye orbits. “This was the first victim.