“Then do you think there’s significance to his biting his victims’ palms and feet?” Berger asks. She has a strong, modulated voice. I would almost call it a television voice: Low-pitched and refined, it gets your attention. “Maybe because those are the only areas of his own body that aren’t covered with hair? Well, I don’t know,” she reconsiders. “But I would have to suppose there’s some sort of sexual association, like people, for example, who have foot fetishes. But I’ve never seen a case where someone bites hands and feet.”
I turn on lights in the front office and pass an electronic key over the lock of the fireproof vault we call the evidence room, where the door and walls are reinforced with steel, and a computer system logs the code of whoever enters and when and how long he stays. We rarely have much in the way of personal effects locked up in here. Generally, the police take such items to the property room or we return them to the families. My reason for having this room built is I face the reality that no office is immune from leaks and I need a secure place
to store extremely sensitive cases. Against a back wall are
heavy steel cabinets, and I unlock one of them and pull out two thick files sealed with heavy tape that I have initialed so no one can snoop without my knowing. I enter Kim Luong’s and Diane Bray’s case numbers in the log book beside the printer that has just hammered out my code and the time. Berger and I continue talking as we follow the hallway back to the conference room where Marino awaits us, impatiently, tensely.
“Why haven’t you had a profiler look at these cases?” Berger asks me as we pass through the doorway.
I set the files on the table and give Marino a look. He can take this one. It is not my responsibility to send cases to profilers.
“A profiler? What for?” he answers Berger in a manner that can only be described as confrontational. ‘The point of profiling is to figure out what sort of squirrel did it. We already know what sort of squirrel did it.”
“But the why? The meaning, the emotion, the symbolism? Those sorts of analyses. I would like to hear what a profiler has to say.” She pays no attention to him. “Especially about the hands and feet. Weird.” She is still focused on that detail.
“You ask me, most profiling is smoke and mirrors,” Marino holds forth. “Not that I don’t think there are some guys who really got the gift, but most of it’s bullshit. You get some squirrel like Chandonne who’s into biting hands and feet and it don’t take no FBI profiler to consider that maybe those body parts have some significance to him. Like maybe he’s got something oddball with his own hands and feetor in this case, it’s the opposite. Those are the only places he ain’t got hair, except inside his friggin’ mouth and maybe his asshole.”
“I can understand him destroying what he hates in himself, mutilating those areas of his victims’ bodies, such as their faces.” She will not be bullied by Marino. “But I don’t know. The hands and feet. There’s something more to that.” Berger rebuffs him by her every gesture and inflection.
“Yeah, but his favorite part of the chicken’s the white
meat,” Marino pushes. He and Berger treat each other like lovers who have turned on each other. “That’s his thing. Women with big tits. He’s got some mother-thing going when he selects victims with certain body types. Don’t take no FBI profiler to connect them dots, either.”
I say nothing but give Marino a look that tells him plenty. He is acting like an insensitive ass, apparently so intent on battling this woman that he fails to realize what he is saying in front of me. He knows damn well that Benton had a genuine gift based on science and a significant database the Bureau has been building by studying and interviewing thousands of violent offenders. And I don’t appreciate references to the victims’ body types since mine was selected by Chandonne, too.