FBI Field Office, New York Angelita Fernandez put down the desk phone and grimaced as she turned to Howie Baumguard. The big guy really looked as though he could do with a break. And this wasn't going to be it. 'I just talked to Gene Saunders out at Myrtle. Seems our man Stan is a no-show.'
'He ever done that before?' asked Howie, lost in some work on his computer.
'Nope. Doesn't seem that way. His boss at UMail2 Anywhere says he's a good kid. Always bang on time. Never swings a day off without asking, or at least calling in with a reason rather than an excuse.'
'Sounds like Jack's right,' said Howie, typing with two fingers. 'Poor kid.'
Fernandez tried to picture what the delivery boy looked like and settled on young, thin and scrawny, still trying to make his way in life. 'You really think Stan got wasted before BRK did a runner from Myrtle?'
'It's sure starting to look that way,' said Howie.
Fernandez picked up a pencil and twirled it like a baton through the fingers of one hand. It was a trick she'd picked up in high school and somehow it helped her concentrate. 'I'll check on the bones downstairs. Dental should have some results now on Kearney. You think it's a match?'
'I'm banking on it,' said Howie. He'd asked for the dental check to make doubly sure that the skull they'd found was really Sarah Kearney's and not someone else's. He didn't want the embarrassment of finding out later that they had all been jerked around yet another time by BRK. He stopped typing and turned to Fernandez. 'You know much about necrophilia?'
'You're kidding, right?' she said, shooting him a disapproving stare. 'I've dated some deadbeats in my time, ex-husband top of the list, but not literally.'
'Necrophiles,' said Howie, paraphrasing an FBI entry on his screen, 'get their rocks off having sex with dead bodies.'
'Go away. I would never have guessed that. Now I see why you got the big stripes.'
'Shut up and listen, I might just need your help here.'
She twirled her pencil again and thought he was kind of cute when he pretended to be annoyed.
'The word is Greek in origin, comes from nekros meaning corpse and philia, which as we all know means love.'
'I kind of like those two words when they're not in the same sentence,' said Fernandez.
Howie shot her another shut-the-fuck-up glance. 'The psych notes say necrophiles have poor self-esteem, have a need for power over or revenge against something or someone that makes them feel inadequate, and have been deprived of certain key emotional contact.'
'Hang on though,' said Fernandez, getting serious for a moment. 'What little I know about these creeps, which again I stress is not through any personal dating, is that they don't usually kill. They like their meat cooked already. Ain't that right? As you so eloquently said yourself, they "get their rocks off" by messing around with dead bodies, not by making people dead for them to mess around with.'
'Subtle difference, but yeah, you got a point,' admitted Howie, searching the on-screen files for more info. 'But let's agree that having sex with a dead body isn't normal. Now, from that intellectual standpoint, it ain't too big a leap of faith to think that an abnormal guy, who likes stiffing it to a stiff, might just start making stiffs for himself if his regular stiff supply has run dry.'
'You got a natural gift with words, anyone ever tell you that?' said Fernandez sarcastically.
'I'm constantly fighting the urge to write poetry,' countered Howie, scrolling to a new page.
'Why does BRK qualify as a necrophile?' asked Fernandez.
Howie started to run through a list. 'He keeps the bodies after death. Look at how long he kept the Barbuggiani girl after he killed her. He takes trophies from them. He goes back to graves, digs up their corpses and hacks off their heads. Sounds like a necrophile to me.'
'So this guy could be a serial killer and a necrophile. A kind of hybrid?'
'That's what I'm thinking,' said Howie 'A double-trouble psycho. Maybe he started killing for a non-sexual reason.'
'Revenge, accident, opportunity?' suggested Fernandez.
'Something like that. Then when he was faced with a dead body, he suddenly got turned on by it.'
'You got any case studies in there that I can read up on?' she asked.
Howie hit a search function. 'Yeah, here you go. Man, there's one hell of a list coming up: Carl Tanzler, Richard Chase, Winston Moseley, our old pals Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy – those last three seem to be pretty much in every classification there is.'
'Lazy research,' said Fernandez, scribbling down their names. 'If everything that was written about Bundy was true, he'd have had to have lived three lifetimes.'
'This is interesting,' said Howie, ignoring her pet rant about Bundy. 'There's a bullet-point summary. It says necrophiles are usually fearful of rejection by women they sexually desire. Can you imagine what a necrophile would do in the kind of situation where he feels rejected?'
Fernandez was in step with his thoughts. 'You mean he'd kill her to keep her?'
'Exactly!'
Fernandez mused on it. 'Maybe BRK got badly jilted once, and he just couldn't bear the idea of anyone else walking out on him.'
'Once bitten twice shy,' said Howie.
'He couldn't face the idea of being on his own? Maybe he was just shit-scared of the whole thought of being lonely. A kind of lonelyphobia?'
'I think that's it,' said Howie. 'Death is the way he ensures that they never jilt him, that they stay with him, devoted to him, for ever.'
'Hmm,' said Fernandez. 'I'll remember that next time I give some Brad Pitt lookalike my number in a bar.'