Hurdle brought them up to speed on Gregory Greeling, the deputy murdered at Jasmine Marcks’s house, then nodded at Curtis. “You two find anything out after I left?”
Curtis brushed back his hair, which was beginning to show gray streaks. “Based on Jasmine Marcks’s account of when she last saw him and when a neighbor discovered the body, he was killed in a window that we can narrow down to between 11:35 AM and 1:00 PM. That fit with what the ME estimated from liver temp.”
“That timeline also fits with what happened at Potter,” Vail said. “If Marcks escaped from the truck around 9:00 AM, he had time to get into Virginia and over to Jasmine’s house by the time the officer was killed.”
“You think Marcks did Greeling?” Tarkoff asked.
Curtis turned to Vail. This was clearly her call.
“There were odd markings on Greeling’s body, the abdomen specifically. Postmortem slices through the skin, adipose, and fascia to the muscle layer. Parallel lines. And his genitals were excised.”
A few of the men winced.
“I’m not trying to be graphic,” she said. “It’s significant because we’ve seen this before. Most of Roscoe Lee Marcks’s victims had this same pattern carved into them. Same with the genitalia. I know you’re all intimately familiar with MO. But it doesn’t really apply here relative to the previous Blood Lines murders because it’s a different scenario, different situation. If we assume that Marcks is responsible for this deputy’s murder, he was not selecting his victim based on the same set of criteria he used for his previous vics. This was an opportunistic kill, one out of necessity. He’s presumably after Jasmine. Greeling was in his way and presented the biggest threat. So he took him out.”
“But the markings,” Walters said. “The ‘blood lines.’ It’s a pattern, so more than likely it’s the same guy. It’s Marcks.”
“In the Behavioral Analysis Unit, we call these ‘patterns’ ritual behavior. Bottom line is that it’s things the offender does with the body, or crime scene, before or after he kills the victim. These are things that have nothing to do with succeeding in his crime. He measures success as murdering the person and doing it without getting discovered. The things he does to successfully kill his victim and get away with it make up his MO.
“These postmortem ‘blood line’ markings have meaning to him. We may not be able to make sense of what they mean, or why he’s doing them—but all that matters for the moment is that he felt the need to make them. It feeds some inner desire. It’s comforting to him in some way. Because of that, the offender does it on all his victims, or almost all, depending on the situation. He enjoys doing it and it becomes like a signature that allows us to link his kills.”
“So,” Walters said, spreading his hands apart, “what you’re saying is that I was right.”
“Do we know what kind of knife or implement he used to make those lines?” Tarkoff asked. “Kitchen knife that he found at the scene or—”
“Great question, Ben,” Vail said. “No, this was something we’re almost certain he brought with him.”
“At one of the earlier crime scenes,” Curtis said, “we found a karambit.”
Tarkoff leaned forward. “A what?”
“One nasty weapon,” Ramos said. “A guy in my unit in Iraq, he had one. He picked it up in Southeast Asia. Indonesia, I think. Curved blade, looks like an animal’s claw. There are a lot of variations but the more modern ones have double-sided edges and are used for slashing and fighting. The original karambits are small and have a finger ring and extend down from the fist, attached to the pinky. When you punch your enemy, he never sees the blade and you do some serious damage. Like I said, if you know how it to use it, it’s deadly in seconds with a minimum of effort.”
“So where the hell did Marcks get one of these?” Hurdle asked.
“You can get ’em anywhere,” Ramos said. “There are several manufacturers that put their own spin on the design. Just about any store or website that sells knives has them now.”
Morrison leaned back in his chair. “You think Marcks left the karambit behind at that crime scene on purpose?”
“We didn’t think so,” Curtis said. “It wasn’t anywhere near the body. It was in the grass, about ten yards away, like he dropped it on the way back to his van.”
“Obviously he replaced it,” Ramos said. “But why’d he choose such an unusual knife in the first place?”
“We never found out,” Vail said. “We can read into something like this, and we did, but bottom line is it could simply be that a friend told him about it. Or he saw it used in a movie, or whatever, and he thought it’d fit his needs. Might not be any meaning to it at all other than it came across his desk, he tried it, liked the way it felt, and started using it on his vics, got excited by it. Or it related to something done to him as a kid.”