The Bride Collector

4
OCTOBER IN DENVER. It could be cold one day and hot the next. Like working a case, Brad thought. The trail could turn at any moment. Usually due to fairly basic investigative work, collecting mounds of evidence and carefully sifting through them.
Someone once told him that good doctoring was a process of eliminating potential diseases until a physician was left with the most likely ailment to explain the symptoms. Detective work was the same.
As long as you were eliminating suspects in the investigative process, you were moving forward. It was sometimes Brad’s only consolation in the face of relentless pressure.
In the case of a serial killer like the Bride Collector, knowing that the suspect would continue turned the work from a simple elimination process into a chess match. Success wasn’t just a matter of sifting through the evidence from the past, but of trying to anticipate the future.
Anticipating a killer’s next move meant climbing into his mind. Not out of desire, of course. No one with any skill or a sane mind would ever relish that journey. It was only ever launched out of necessity.
Brad had settled himself with a late-night drink at McKenzie’s Pub, a block from his downtown condo, then spent the balance of the night alone, tossing and turning, climbing inside the Bride Collector’s mind.
He’d woken early and headed to the bathroom to shower, eager to return to the crime scene, before seeing that it was only three in the morning. He slipped back under the covers, pulled his second pillow tight, and thought about madness.
Insanity. The mentally ill.
The Bride Collector.
It was seven now—he’d slept in after missing sleep in the wee hours. Showered, shaved, and dressed in blue slacks and white shirt, he poured his half-finished cup of coffee down the drain, chased it with a squirt of lemon fresh, and rinsed it away.
Buttoning his shirt, he wandered over to the window and gazed out at the city.
His condo was on the fifth floor of a ten-story building off Colfax, a two-bedroom affair with floor-to-ceiling one-way glass for walls. Even with the lights on at night, there was no way to see inside, but from where Brad stood at the sink, he could look past the breakfast bar over an expansive view of downtown Denver.
Against the horizon, a row of Rocky Mountain summits wove in and out of view, knitted between the outlines of a crowded, gleaming skyline. To the south, he could imagine the summit of Pikes Peak in the distance. Turning right toward the north, he could also glimpse the massive slopes of Longs Peak, crown of Rocky Mountain National Park and rough northernmost boundary of the massive mountain chain.
He sighed. Somewhere between the two boundaries and within the urban sprawl before him, the killer was probably waking up as well.
Tragically, so was his next victim.
I see you but you can’t see me. Fitting for an investigator. Fitting for a killer. How many hours, days, had the killer hid behind the darkened glass of his car or van, watching others, potential victims, women who warranted his attention because they fit a certain profile? Beautiful, weak, trusting, innocent.
Who are you watching now? Whose peaceful world of hope will you soon crush?
He turned the water off and quickly scanned the kitchen. Spotless. As was the entire condo. The living room furniture was built around chrome frames with clean lines and black velvet coverings. Glass tables, but not the cheap kind available at any Rooms To Go. Brad’s tastes ran rich. A generous inheritance allowed him the opportunity to satisfy those tastes.
Two large urns sat against the far wall, filled with colored reeds. Nothing extravagant, but well made, well placed, and well kept. It was the way he liked his life. In order, so that he could maintain perspective in a disorganized and chaotic world.
He checked the tap, making sure it was firmly off. Glanced at the Movado on his wrist, saw that he had time, and called Nikki’s cell. He left a message asking her to meet him at the crime scene at nine, then strode to his bedroom for shoes. A spot of orange cloth caught his attention as he bent for the third pair of black leather loafers.
A woman’s top. He recognized it immediately. This was Lauren’s orange tankini, left from her visit three weeks ago. How it had found its way behind his hanging slacks and remained there without attracting his attention sooner was a mystery.
He picked up the top, recalling the specifics of that night. He’d known Lauren for nearly a year, a stunning woman who lived on the floor beneath him. She worked as a fashion consultant at Nordstrom, downtown. Lighthearted, carefree, and smothered in sensuality. Their relationship was casual, not intimate, and he had no ambition to ruin a strong friendship.
That night, however… Things got interesting that night. He had managed to avoid calling her since the following morning.
He checked his watch again: still plenty of time. He folded the article of clothing, placed it into a manila envelope, and wrote a note to Lauren with a Sharpie. Let’s talk soon.
Retrieving the soft leather briefcase he’d packed last night, he took the stairs to Lauren’s condo, wedged the package under her door, then rode the elevator to the ground floor.
The killer more than likely lived in an apartment or house out of the way, where his comings and goings at odd hours would be undetected. Or was he the kind that turned heads, a Ted Bundy of sorts, adapting to a suburban or city environment where he was greeted warmly by unsuspecting neighbors and clerks?
“Morning, Mr. Raines.” Mason, one of half a dozen guards who rotated duty from the counter, nodded.
Brad glanced out at the blue sky. “Looks like a nice one.”
“That it is. Sure’s got Miami beat. But come January you’ll be wishing you were back in Florida.”
“You forget I’ve already lived through winter here.”
“True. Beats Minneapolis.” Mason grinned.
Brad left the parking garage beneath the building and wound his way to Maci’s, a breakfast-and-lunch café. He glanced at his watch again: seven twenty-three. In no hurry to battle traffic, he grabbed a paper at the front door and let Becky, the proprietor, seat him at a street window near the back. “Amanda will be right with you, Brad.”
“Thanks, Becky.”
Amanda approached wearing the same yellow dress and white apron all the waitresses wore, a cute cut that was supposed to convey a faint country motif but looked a little more candy striper on Amanda, twenty-eight and divorced.
“Coffee with stevia,” she said, setting down a cup and bowl of the sweetener.
“Thanks for remembering.”
“You may be good looking, sweetie, but that doesn’t mean I swoon at first sight like the rest of the ladies you string along.”
She grinned and he laughed to cover his blush. “I’m not sure whether to take that as a compliment or a slap on the wrist.”
“Uh-huh. I don’t see a ring on your finger yet.”
“I guess I’m not one to rush into a relationship.”
“I don’t blame you for a second.” Her flirting came from a place of familiarity. The safety she offered him was one reason he was attracted to Maci’s Café. But she’d never been quite this flirtatious.
“I’ll have your eggs right out. Over easy with two pieces of whole-grain toast, half an orange, peeled. Like clockwork.”
He offered her a smile and thanked her. She strode away, wearing an amused grin. This was home. Although he’d only been in Denver one year, his living habits had returned him to the same restaurants, stores, and gas stations so often that he’d become a fixture in their worlds.
If the Bride Collector was psychotic, truly mentally ill, he would have a harder time fitting into normal social contexts. Unless his intelligence compensated for the instability of his mind.
Brad left Maci’s Café at seven forty-four, headed north on the Denver-Boulder Turnpike, and arrived at the scene off 96th at eight twenty-nine. He parked his BMW next to a patrol car, gathered his briefcase, and approached the officer on duty beside a yellow-tape perimeter.
“Morning, Officer.” He flashed his identification. “Brad Raines, FBI.”
“Morning, sir.”
“All quiet?”
“Since I took over at six. We’re a ways out.”
“I want some time. No one comes in but Nikki, okay?”
“You got it.”
He stepped over the yellow tape and walked up to the shed, thinking the sound of his feet on the gravel would have been similar to the sound the killer had heard on his approach. But he’d had Caroline with him. Had she walked willingly? Had he carried her? There were no fibers on her person to indicate she’d been wrapped. No bruises on her wrists to suggest she’d struggled against restraints. Drugged, but enough for such complete compliance?
What do you tell them? How do you win their submission?
The room was as he’d last seen it, minus the body, the rough shape of which was now outlined in chalk.
He scooted the single chair to the table, withdrew several books on mental illness, his laptop, a drill. On the wall next to the outline, he posted eight-by-ten photographs of each victim, placing the image of Caroline where her body had been. Surrounding each photograph, he pinned a dozen more, detailing their angelic forms and drilled feet.
The drill went on the table.
He wrote the Bride Collector’s confession on the adjacent wall using a fresh piece of chalk.
The Beauty Eden id Lost
Where intelligence does centered
I came do her and she smashed da Serpent head
I searched and find the seventh and beautiful
She will rest in my Serpent’s hole
And I will live again

Brad set the chalk on the table, stepped back, gently pressed his palms together in front of his chin, and stared at his approximation of the Bride Collector’s work. The shed, the women, the drill. The confession.
What had crossed through his mind, taking the drill for the first time, pressing the bit against flesh, feeling it hit bone? Like a dentist drilling for his goal.
In this case, blood. He took a deep breath and settled. The roof creaked as it expanded under the sun’s heat. He let himself sink into the scene, in no rush to coax truth from what could not yet be seen.
From his own mind.
For a few moments, Brad felt himself become, however faintly, the Bride Collector. Or at the very least, he felt himself stepping first one foot, then another foot into the Bride Collector’s shoes.
“I’m psychotic,” he whispered aloud. “No one knows I’m psychotic—why?”
“Because you appear normal,” Nikki’s voice said softly behind him.
She was early.
He spoke without turning. “Good morning, Nikki.”
“Morning. Sleep well?”
“Not really, no.”
“Me neither.”
He’d wanted to be alone, but he felt comforted by her response.
“I choose beautiful women,” Brad said, staying in the killer’s role. “Tell me why without thinking too much.”
She stepped up beside him. “Because you’re jealous.”
“I kill out of jealousy, why?”
“Because you were made to feel ugly.”
“If killing beautiful women makes me feel better about myself, why don’t I abuse the bodies?”
Nikki hesitated. She had been the first to employ this form of rapid response, plumbing the mind for thoughts that sometimes only surfaced in a form of pressured speech.
“You let them have their beauty but take their soul.”
“Why do I take their soul?”
“You need it to make you beautiful on the inside.”
“Why do I drain their blood?”
“Because the blood is their life force. Their soul.”
“No, I take their blood to make them beautiful,” he said.
Another hesitation. Brad felt a trickle of sweat break from his hairline. It was all conjecture at this point. Nikki stepped into the role of interrogator.
“Why do you drill their heels?”
“Because it’s the lowest point in the body, largely unseen, so it doesn’t spoil their beauty.”
“Why do you need to kill seven beautiful women?”
“Because seven is the number of perfection. The number for God.”
“Do you fear God?”
“Yes.”
“Are you religious?”
“Deeply.”
“Are you a Christian?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you Catholic?”
“No.”
“Protestant?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They’re all liars. Unable to live the life they suggest others live.”
“But you, on the other hand, live the truth?”
“All of it. That’s what makes me special. That’s why I kill, to be true to myself.”
“Why seven women?”
“I told you, because seven is a perfect number.”
Cycling back provided a thread of intellectual honesty that mirrored normal interrogation techniques. A simple aid to both of them.
“Okay, let’s talk about how you choose your victims. Why—”
“They’re not victims.”
“What are they?”
“I’m not hurting them.”
She paused, probably because he hadn’t answered her questions.
“Why is Eden lost?” she asked.
“The beauty of Eden is lost. Innocence was corrupted.”
“Where is intelligence centered?”
“In the mind. Innocence was lost in the mind.”
“Are you the serpent?”
“No.”
“Who smashed the serpent’s head?”
“She did.” Brad nodded at the wall of crime scene photographs.
“She hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not the serpent. Are you the serpent?”
“No. Not always.”
“Why do you kill her?”
“So that I can kill again.”
Only that’s not what Brad meant to say. He lifted his hand, considering the response.
“Kill again, or live again?” Nikki asked. “‘She will rest in my Serpent’s hole. And I will live again.’ His poem seems to indicate that he’s doing this so that he can live again.”
“I meant to say live again.”
They both stared at the confession posted on the wall.
“But if he’s playing the role of the serpent in this self-fulfilling tale of his, it does stand to reason that he kills so that he can live as the serpent and kill again,” Nikki said.
“It does.”
She looked at him. “So then, Temple could be right. We’re looking for a delusional schizophrenic who’s suffered a psychotic break.” She swept a long strand of dark hair from her cheek and absently touched her neck where it met her jaw. Long, delicate fingers, French manicure.
He had always found Nikki’s attention to seemingly insignificant detail appealing. She lived her life with passion; truth be told, with far more energy than he could usually muster. Running an hour every day to bring stability, she said. Putting in long, twelve-hour days. She seemed to have energy left over to keep up an active nightlife, if all the stories were true, and he had no reason to think they weren’t.
Their relationship had always remained purely platonic. There were times when Brad regretted his avoidance.
“Maybe,” Brad said. “We established last night that he was probably psychotic.”
“You might have, but I’m not convinced. A mentally ill serial killer is atypical, short of mental illness caused by severe trauma to the frontal lobe through a head injury. Otherwise, nearly all pattern killers are middle- to high-income earners, are good looking in general, and usually articulate. Nearly all kill out of either a sexual compulsion or a need for revenge. In both cases, most have been severely abused by their mothers and are reacting to that abuse through some ritualistic act, which relieves their compulsion for gratification or revenge. Environment, not psychosis, forms most serial killers. This is not the profile of the mentally ill.”
He knew all of this, naturally, but investigative work was an exercise in rehearsing details, coaxing new truth from them.
“And yet the note indicates delusions of grandeur, which is a form of psychosis.”
“Yes,” she said.
He looked at the drill, pacing. “His killing doesn’t appear to be sexually motivated. It’s ritualistic. He’s courting delusions of grandeur. He’s intelligent. He’s killing so that he can kill again, because in his mind, unless he carries out his role, he can no longer play that role and live.”
“Right,” she said. “And whatever that role is, it’s not the role of executioner or punisher. He thinks he’s serving his victims well. He’s loving them.”
They stood in silence for a full minute.
“So. We take an exhaustive look at the mental health facilities in the Four Corners state hospitals,” Nikki said. “Residential care facilities, nursing homes, state prisons, convictions involving the mentally ill… That’s a ton of data.”
“Frank’s got six agents buried in the data already. We’ve put in a request for additional assistance from the field offices in Cheyenne, Colorado Springs, and Albuquerque. I’ve asked him to cross-reference the confession with all related databases. He left the note because he wants us to find something.”
“Agreed.”
He put his hands on his hips and studied the walls. “Meanwhile, we have the mysteries hidden here, in his place of work.”
Nikki nodded. “You ever get tired of it?”
“Fieldwork?”
“Trying to see past what a person allows you to see.”
An odd choice of words. “Can’t say that I do.”
“I mean, think about it, we all have our mysteries, right? We live our lives letting people see only what we want them to see. It takes years, even in a marriage, to know someone. Not that you’d know that, Brad.”
She’d said the last part with a good-natured smirk.
“Even then,” she continued, “how many spouses are eventually blindsided by some deep, dark revelation about the person they thought they knew?”
“No argument here,” he said, hoping he’d avoided the whole morass. “Everyone hides something.”
She nodded. “Classic existentialism. In the end the human being is alone. We are all confronted by our own complexity, which we try to unravel, but all the while we’re confronted by our own isolation. This is what we eventually learn. It’s why so many lean on faith, a relationship that isn’t dependent on another human being.” She crossed her arms and studied him. “So how about it, Brad? What mysteries are you hiding?”
At first he wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. They’d always been candid with each other, but never probing. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about it.
“I don’t mean to pry,” she said. “Not too deep, anyway.”
A smile softened her face, and looking into her soft blue eyes, he suddenly wanted to tell her everything. About how he’d fallen in love with a young tennis player named Ruby while attending UT in Austin, the wild carefree days when the world was at both of their fingertips and everyone who saw them together knew it. About the way her eyes twinkled and her laugh echoed on the tennis court, about how completely he’d given himself to Ruby.
About her suicide.
The thought of it brought a familiar lump to his throat. It had taken Brad three years to uncover the secrets that had led to Ruby’s decision to take her life.
“Think about it, Brad. The killer’s playing us. Probing us. Tempting us, egging us on, daring us to stop him. My job is to take his challenge and beat him at his own game. Uncover his true self. So how do you get someone to reveal their secrets?”
She was talking about the killer, but as much about Brad.
He motioned at the wall with a nod. “They do what they do out of pain, and a small part of me can understand that. Not the way they react to it, of course, but the pain itself. Let’s just say I’ve loved and I’ve felt the pain of a terrible loss. A woman I once knew. It’s why I can identify.”
He stopped, not knowing where he was heading. Suddenly uncomfortable.
After a pause, Nikki stepped up to him and touched his shoulder in a show of empathy. But she seemed awkward, and he felt the same. She removed her hand and faced the wall.
“You’ve never mentioned that before. I never knew.”
“I know. We were talking about long-harbored secrets, remember?”
She nodded. A long pause flowed between them, one Brad made no effort to end.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” she finally said.
“It’s okay. We all do at some point.”
But he wasn’t sure about that. The pain he’d felt had left him wishing for death. In a way, he was waging his own personal campaign against death even now. It was why he’d joined the FBI, now that he thought of it.
“But you’re right,” he said, resuming an earlier thread, “part of understanding someone else comes from exposing yourself.”
She looked at him, then grinned at his choice of words.
“So to speak…” There, he thought with a surge of relief. Back on familiar ground—the tinged banter. Their usual territory.
His cell rang and he picked it up, thankful for the interruption.
It was Frank. The staff had registered an interesting hit while cross-referencing the killer’s note with the mental health facilities database.
“You ever hear of a place called the Center for Wellness and Intelligence?”
“No, I don’t think so. Hold on.” Brad asked Nikki if she’d heard of the facility. She stared upward for a moment, then shook her head.
“It’s a private residential facility in the hills south of Boulder that only takes mentally ill patients with high IQs,” Frank said. “As far as we can gather.”
Brad glanced at the wall. The confession. A single line expanded in his field of view.
Where intelligence does centered.

The Center for Wellness and Intelligence. Nikki followed his eyes and saw what he saw.
“The program picked up on the words center—”
“I got it, Frank. Text me the address and advise the administrator that we’re on our way.”
“Yes, sir.”
He snapped the phone shut.
“You think it’s something?”
“It’s a lead,” he said. “He’s playing us, right? So let’s play.”