Sociopath Read online

  “He was my friend too. One of the best agents I ever worked with. And you know what? When I asked for agents to swarm this little town so we can find who killed him, you know what Kyle told me? He said they didn’t have the funds for it. So instead they flew out a rent-a-cop.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said. I didn’t have the stomach for confrontation right now. I felt queasy and weak and wanted to take out the package of Tums in my pocket, but I resisted and instead stood up and placed the chair back under the desk.

  “Adam, why don’t you grab us some coffee?”

  “They don’t have any here.”

  “I know, just run up the street. It’s not far.”

  He looked to me and to her and rolled his eyes as he walked out.

  “Sorry,” she said. “He’s taking this kinda hard.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for. I’m the outsider. I wouldn’t have come except I felt I owed it to David. He helped me on something when no one else would.”

  “He helped a lot of people. Even me.”

  I looked up to the photographs on the wall. “He had his problems, but he was a good man.”

  “So,” she said, glancing up to the photos, “you ready to dig in? David was close.”

  “How so?”

  “He had a good profile worked up. White male, mid-twenties, unemployed or underemployed but with an above average intelligence. Either an avid hunter or some law enforcement training because of the accuracy of the shot to the first victim’s face. Her boyfriend was in the car and he shot him with an arrow first before going after Tiffany. The arrow went right through the brain. David thought he did all this to humiliate her. That’s why he used the branch to rape her. I think that’s pretty spot-on actually.”

  I shook my head, not taking my eyes off the photo of Tiffany. “That’s not why he did it.”

  “You don’t think he wanted to humiliate her?”

  “That wasn’t his primary motivation. He would have been more public if he wanted her humiliated. He chose a quiet spot in the woods twenty miles from the nearest house or store. Especially now, it’s easy for this type of sociopath to attain humiliation for his victims. There’s been a surge of rapists forcing their victims to post photos on their Facebook accounts while they’re raped. It’s ultimate humiliation to force all their friends and family to have to see that. He didn’t want humiliation.”

  “Then what did he want?”

  “He wanted a substitute. That’s what the branch was. We’re looking for someone incapable of sex, at least that night. Either through injury or some sort of neurosis that won’t allow it. But he thought he would be able to perform. He would have brought something with him if he was certain he wouldn’t be able to do it rather than just grabbing a branch. He thought he’d be able to, but when he actually got there he wasn’t. So he grabbed whatever was nearby.”

  She shrugged. “That’s one theory I guess.”

  I rose and exhaled as I did so, feeling a tug of pain in my knees. I was old enough now that even getting up caused a slight bit of pain.

  “I’d like to meet her parents.”

  8

  The home was tucked away in what appeared like the back of the city. You had to wind through several neighborhoods to reach it, and Melissa, who was driving an FBI-issued sedan, only found it by using GPS. I was sitting in the backseat and Adam was in the passenger. He didn’t think I noticed but he would glance back at me in the rearview.

  Heber appeared like the type of place you would want to raise a family. It was small and quaint with hometown values. I could picture the high school football game being the highlight of any weekend followed by burgers and fries at the local burger joint.

  But small towns always had dark underbellies. People, particularly the young, grew bored easily and would search for ways to entertain themselves. High instances of drug and alcohol abuse were rampant in small Western and Midwestern towns and the new drug of choice was methamphetamine, not marijuana, mostly for the cost and the sustained high.

  With the drugs came burglaries and robberies, and with them came sexual assaults and murders. The FBI was reporting that all crime was down, but the vast majority of crimes occurred behind closed doors without anyone ever finding out. The spouse beaten nightly by an alcoholic husband, the child raped repeatedly by a stepfather, the housewife prostituting herself to keep up a methamphetamine addiction … these were rarely caught and prosecuted. If all crime were tallied and totaled and everyone was made aware, I’m not sure most of this country could sleep at night.

  We parked at the curb and I watched the house a moment.

  “Remember you’re not law enforcement,” Adam said, “so don’t hold yourself out as an officer.”

  I disregarded him and opened the door and stepped outside. The warm air had the scent of pine and though I was exhausted I felt like I had enough energy to ignore sleep.

  A paved driveway led to a walkway over the lawn and to the front door. I followed Melissa and Adam. He knocked and glanced to me to make certain I wasn’t, somehow, acting like law enforcement.

  A woman in her forties answered. “Can I help you?”

  Adam pulled out his badge. “Federal Bureau of Investigation. Do you mind if we have a minute?”

  “Um, yeah. Sure. What’s this about?”

  “It’s about your daughter.”

  She swallowed. “Come inside,” she said, visibly shaken.

  We entered the home and I tagged behind. Melissa and Adam were led to the living room and sat on a couch as Mrs. Ochoa sat on a recliner. She crossed her legs and didn’t allow herself to speak first. I looked to the mantle over the small fireplace. They were all photos of Tiffany at various stages of life, the last one being her high school graduation.

  Adam opened up an iPad. I could see the heading on the document: WITNESS INTAKE SHEET.

  “Could you please state your daughter’s birthday, ma’am?”

  No, this was all wrong. I could see Mrs. Ochoa closing down. The blank stare and the body language that told me she had been through this several times and it was now routine. Her mind held more knowledge than she knew but she wouldn’t, or couldn’t access it. Not with people here asking her questions, getting a read on her. It was all so formal.

  “Mrs. Ochoa,” I said, before she could answer, “I just want you to know that I’ve done hundreds of cases just like this and it’s not your fault. I know it feels like it is, but you had nothing to do with this and nothing you ever did led to it. You couldn’t have stopped this.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. She put her hand up to her mouth and her lids closed as she wept a moment. Adam looked at me with anger in his eyes.

  “Why don’t you go wait in the car, Jon,” he said.

  “Actually, I’d like to see her bedroom, if that’s all right.”

  Mrs. Ochoa wiped away the tears. She stood up and straightened her blouse. “It’s upstairs.”

  I followed her up, leaving the two agents on the couch. More photos in the hallway and a few on the walls leading up the stairs. I glanced to the right as we climbed. In the kitchen I could see a Bible open on the dining table.

  We turned into a room and it was as I had anticipated. Parents of murder victims who still lived at home never touch the room. They leave it exactly the same as it had been the day they passed. I stepped inside.

  “Mrs. Ochoa, do you think I could have a moment alone?”

  She nodded. “And thank you for saying what you said. It’s … it’s just….”

  “I know. Everything that happens to them we take on ourselves.”

  She nodded and left the room, shutting the door behind her.

  I sat down on her bed and took in the room. It was adult in that it was sparse with almost no decorations, but also child-like with the few decorations there were of pop stars and stickers of brand names.

  I checked under the bed and then the closet and the dresser drawers. There was nothing that would in
dicate anyone other than a young woman out of high school lived here. But there was something here. She had been hiding something and this was the likely place she’d hid it. Whatever it was would be a link. This thing saw her somewhere, desired her from somewhere. And I needed to know where she had actually spent her time that he could see her, not where her parents or the sheriff thought she’d spent her time.

  The air conditioning clicked on and I could hear a noise that wasn’t there before. Like a bit of paper flapping in wind. I listened for it and it was coming near the bed.

  I bent down over a heating vent, lifted it up, and reached my hand in. Something felt like plastic with putty inside. I pulled it out. Marijuana in a small plastic baggie. I slipped the baggie into my pocket and replaced the vent cover.

  Nothing else of note, though I searched through all the drawers for a journal. A small calendar was stuck to her mirror and I flipped through it but it was empty.

  Going back down the stairs, I saw Melissa and Adam already standing by the door with Mrs. Ochoa.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She nodded and waited until we were on the driveway before shutting the door.

  Adam got in my face as soon as it was closed. “What the hell was that?”

  “Forms aren’t going to help you.”

  “Those forms were developed by agents a helluva lot smarter than you and used in thousands of cases just like this. And you know what, we catch the sick fucks.”

  “I’m not some reporter, Adam. Your numbers don’t trick me. Most of the sociopaths caught are caught because they screw up or because someone else turns them in. It has nothing to do with you.”

  He grinned. “You think you’re a hotshot? I was with Detroit Homicide for six years before joining the Bureau and I knew guys like you. Academics who thought what we did was so interesting. Well lemme tell you something, hotshot, the death of the innocent is not interesting. It’s not an experiment for you to run.”

  “Leave him alone, Adam.”

  He turned away from me and headed back to the car.

  “Sorry, Jon.”

  I pulled out the baggie of marijuana. “We should have this dusted for prints.”

  “Is that pot?”

  “She had it hid in her air vent. I don’t think the cops here will send in a request to the crime lab for me. It has to be you.”

  “You stole evidence?”

  “It’s not evidence. Not yet. And her mother didn’t need to know about this. She has an image in her mind of her daughter and I don’t want to tarnish that in any way.”

  Melissa lifted the baggie at the opening and looked at it. “Whose prints are we looking for?”

  “His.”

  9

  I sat at a bench in a small park. The print dusting would have taken a week but they’d put in a special request saying it was evidence in the murder of a law enforcement officer. We would have it back by tonight.

  I was pouring through the reports. Unfortunately, David never kept many notes so I wasn’t able to follow his line of thinking. On the autopsy report for Tiffany, he wrote, “Thumb,” and nothing else. I looked at the photos of her thumbs. One had suffered trauma. He’d attempted to cut through it, but there were injuries on both sides. A pair of sharp scissors or gardening shears might have done it, but why hadn’t he been able to simply cut it off?

  I glanced through the boyfriend’s autopsy report as well. One arrow wound from a bow or crossbow through the cheek. The round had shattered the bone, entered the skull, and severed the brain stem from the brain before exiting out of the neck. It would have to be something high-powered to do that kind of damage. Amazingly, there wasn’t a ballistics report. Ballistic specialists were expensive but the state crime lab or even a bigger, neighboring city would have sent someone for free.

  I took out my cell phone and dialed the number Melissa had given me as her cell.

  “This is Agent Harding.”

  “Melissa, Jon Stanton. I had a quick question if you had a minute.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why wasn’t there a ballistics analysis done?”

  “Oh, we talked to the sheriff about that. She had asked one of her deputies to call the state lab and have them send someone and he just completely forgot. By the time it was all sorted out, the family had already buried the victim.”

  “Does the ME still have the arrow?”

  “He’s given it back to the sheriff’s office. David didn’t really follow up because he didn’t believe the boyfriend was the primary target of these murders.”

  “Can we get a ballistics report?” Silence on the other end. “Hey, look, I know this isn’t my case and I’m not even law enforcement anymore. I’m just trying to do what I can.”

  “I know. And Kyle said to help you in any way we can. Sure, I think we should send it back to Quantico or have the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s laboratories do it.”

  “What’s the turnaround time in Quantico?”

  “If it was involved in David’s death, we’ll be first.”

  “Okay. I appreciate that, thank you.”

  “Welcome.”

  I hung up, grateful that Melissa had been the special agent assigned. I recalled days back in Homicide when the feds would come in and bulldoze a case. They would become the pointmen for witnesses, media, laboratories, and even the victim’s families. Detectives would clam up and not provide new evidence that had been uncovered and it would usually disintegrate into two separate investigations, neither helping the other.

  I flipped through the rest of the report and Sheriff Cannon’s notes on Dale Christensen interested me. He had been the one to find the bodies, claiming he had been dumped by friends in a nearby location and came upon them by accident. Given how far into the woods the bodies had been found, that seemed extremely improbable. He was currently held at the jail on unrelated charges.

  Driving to a jail made my heart pound in my chest and I saw the rings of sweat around my underarms as I parked. Each jail was different only in architecture. The interiors were all the same. A poet I liked had once said that you knew society was crumbling when the madhouses were closed and the jails were full.

  The mentally ill were not given breaks in the criminal justice system. Most of them were housed in jails or prisons and force-fed medication in an attempt to keep them docile. But without proper treatment under a psychiatric staff, they spent their lives in quiet lunacy, ruled by hallucinations and ghosts.

  I stepped out and walked across the parking lot to the entrance, hesitating a moment before opening the door. Walking inside, I found the check-in desk. Visiting hours were over.

  “Dale Christensen, please.”

  “You’ll have to come back in the evening after dinner.”

  “I’m a professional visit.” I pulled out my wallet and inside was my private investigator license for California.

  She glanced from the photo to my face and back before saying, “Just a minute.”

  It was a good twenty minutes before they were ready for me. I went through the metal detectors and was then wanded before the metal doors clicked and slid open. I stood outside them a minute, staring at the gray walls.

  “You goin’ or stayin’?”

  I walked past the guard and inside the cell block. The corridor wasn’t long and I walked slowly until I found the visitors room. I sat down on a metal stool and behind glass sat a man who was probably in his forties but looked in his sixties. A life of hard and fast living shone on his face and revealed a heart and mind that was just as old. He was a man who was beaten down and bitter and I saw the tip of a swastika tattoo sticking out from his sleeve.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Jon Stanton. I’m a friend of the FBI agent that was killed, David Lines.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Nice dude. Snuck me in some cigarettes in exchange for some info.”

  I grinned. “That sounds like him.”

  “Well what’dya need?”

 
“I think the same person that killed Tiffany Ochoa killed David. I just wanted to go through what you remembered about that day.”

  “Man, I spoke with like five cops that day. Can’t you just go read them reports?”

  “I’d rather hear it from you.”

  He shrugged. “Ain’t really that much to tell. I woke up near the campsite we was at. My fuckin’ so called friends left me there ‘cause I got loaded and I got up and started walkin’. I saw them bodies and when I got to town I called the cops.”

  “What’d you see exactly?”

  “The car and the dude that was in the driver seat. The girl was tied up to the tree.”

  “Did you see anything around? Anything on the ground?”

  “Nah, nothin’ like that. I saw the girl with her guts hangin’ out and I walked away, man.”

  “Who did you speak with when you called the police?”

  “I dunno, some dude.”

  “Did they take you back to the site?”

  “Yeah, just to show ‘em where it was. Then all the cops in the town came out and pulled out their yellow tape’n shit and they give me a ride home.”

  “What friends left you out there?”

  “I dunno, man. They was barely my friends. I didn’t know ‘em good.”

  I had studied micro-facial expressions in depth in my doctorate program with an eye toward application in law enforcement. I’d even conducted a study on the seven emotions expressed through micro-expressions: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, contempt, surprise, and disgust. A professor named Ekman thought micro-expressions conveyed much more than the seven emotions and added several to the list, but the most important were guilt and shame.

  Micro-expressions did not express or cover lies. That was impossible. All they did was convey an emotion the subject was attempting to conceal.

  A certain percentage of the population, somewhere around three percent, are perfect liars. They show no physical manifestations when they lie and micro-facial expressions are useless on them. Sociopaths fit into this category as masters of manipulation and fraudulent behavior. They have an inability to feel any genuine emotion and it’s nearly impossible to detect a concealed emotion through their micro-expressions. But the rest of the population can’t help but have a slight tick or curl of the lip or a glance in another direction when they lie, attempting to hide their surprise or their guilt.