It has been conjectured that at least one percent of the population is psychopathic. Genetically, these individuals are fearless; they are people users and supreme manipulators. On the right side, they are terrific spies, war heroes, five star generals, corporate billionaires and James Bonds. On the wrong side, they are strikingly evil: the Neros, the Hitlers, the Richard Specks, the Ted Bundys, antisocial but clinically sane people who commit atrocities for which they feel no remorse and assume no blame.
“He’s a loner,” Wesley went on, “and has a difficult time with close relationships, though he may be considered pleasant or even charming to acquaintances. He wouldn’t be close to any one person. He’s the type to pick up a woman in a bar, have sex with her and find it frustrating and highly unsatisfactory.”
“Don’t I know the feeling,” Marino said, yawning.
Wesley elaborated, “He would gain far more satisfaction from violent pornography, detective magazines, S M, and probably entertained violent sexual fantasies long before he began to make the fantasies reality. The reality may have begun with his peeping into the windows of houses or apartments where women live alone. It gets more real. Next he rapes. The rapes get more violent, culminating in murder. This escalation will continue as he continues to become more violent and abusive with each victim. Rape is no longer the motive. Murder is. Murder is no longer enough. It has to be more sadistic.”
His arm extended, exposing a perfect margin of stiff white cuff, he reached for Lori Petersen’s photographs. Slowly he looked through them, one at a time, his face impassive. Lightly pushing the stack away from him, he turned to me. “It seems clear to me that in her case, in Dr. Petersen’s case, the killer introduced elements of torture. An accurate assessment?”
“Accurate,” I replied.
“What? Busting her fingers?”
Marino posed the question as if looking for an argument. “The Mob does shit like that. Sex murderers usually don’t. She played the violin, right? Busting her fingers seems kinda personal. Like the guy who did it knew her.”
As calmly as possible I said, “The surgical reference books on her desk, the violin – the killer didn’t have to be a genius to pick up a few clues about her.”
Wesley considered, “Another possibility is her broken fingers and fractured ribs are defense injuries.”
“They aren’t.”
I was sure of this. “I didn’t find anything to send me the message she struggled with him.”
Marino turned his flat, unfriendly eyes my way. “Really? I’m curious. What do you mean by defense injuries? According to your report, she had plenty of bruises.”
“Good examples of defense injuries,” – I met his gaze and held it – “are broken fingernails, scratches or injuries found in areas of the hands and arms that would have been exposed had the victim attempted to ward off blows. Her injuries are inconsistent with this.”
Wesley summarized, “Then we’re all in agreement. He was more violent this time.”
“Brutal’s the word,” Marino quickly said as if this were his favorite point to make. “That’s what I’m talking about. Lori Petersen’s different from the other three.”
I suppressed my fury. The first three victims were tied up, raped and strangled. Wasn’t that brutal? Did they need to have their bones broken, too? Wesley grimly predicted, “If there’s another one, there will be more pronounced signs of violence, of torture. He kills because it’s a compulsion, an attempt to fill some need. The more he does it the stronger this need becomes and the more frustrated he gets, therefore the stronger the urge will become. He’s becoming increasingly desensitized and it’s taking more with each killing to satiate him. The satiation is temporary. Over the subsequent days or weeks, the tension builds until he finds his next target, stalks her and does it again. The intervals between each killing may get shorter. He may escalate, finally, into a spree murderer, as Bundy did.”
I was thinking of the time frame. The first woman had been murdered on April 19, the second on May 10, the third on May 31. Lori Petersen was murdered a week later, on the seventh of June.