The Informant Read Online Free PDF

were on the verge of becoming Candler County’s first significant snowfall in more than five years.
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    THE INFORMANT
    “Seventy-eight-year-old widow. Her husband was a state legislator who died when she was in her early forties. She never remarried, raised a two-year-old daughter by her lonesome and fifteen years ago was elected Hainesville’s first woman mayor. She retired a couple years back, but still went to every city council meeting. Lived alone, drove herself wherever she wanted to go and chewed the hell out of anyone who suggested she was getting too old to do it. LBJ was president the last time she’d missed a Sunday-morning service, and she couldn’t have been sick more than a few days in her life. That’s why it was so conspicuous when she wasn’t in the front pew singing yesterday morning.” He took his eyes from the road and looked at her directly. “That’s why it’s so important I catch the animal who killed her.”
    “And that’s why I’m here. To help.”
    “I know why you’re here,” he scoffed. “You think we’re a bunch of dumb rednecks who can’t handle a homicide because there ain’t been nobody killed in Hainesville since the bad guys wore blue and the good guys wore gray.
    Well, that ain’t the case, miss. We know our stuff here.”
    “I’m sure you do. But whether you’re good or bad cops has nothing to do with my being here.” She paused, trying to think of some way to explain her visit without insulting.
    “Have you ever heard of CASKU, Sheriff?”
    He furrowed his brow, searching, but he was plainly drawing a blank. “Heard of it, yeah. Stands for…for somethin’.”
    “It’s an acronym for the FBI’s Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit, based in Quantico. It’s fairly new, 32
    James Grippando
    created specifically to provide operational assistance to any local, state or federal law enforcement agency involved in the investigation of a child abduction or serial murder case. My job is to make sure you get the services you need—crime analysis, formulation of investigative strategies, technical and forensic resource coordination, use of the FBI Evidence Response Teams or FBI laboratory services. I also coordinate our analysis of the behavioral characteristics of unknown serial killers. It’s called
    ‘profiling.’”
    “Now that you’ve described it, I have heard of it. You’re the guys responsible for those god-awful forms.”
    “You must mean the VI-CAP form—Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. They are long, but the key to the profiling program is to make sure the information fed back to Quantico is as complete and accurate as possible, so it’s worth the effort. The whole program started with actual interviews of convicted killers like Manson, Richard Speck and Ted Bundy. Now it’s grown into a huge database that includes profiles of virtually every known serial killer in modern time. The idea was to figure out what makes these guys tick, what drives them, what they feel and don’t feel before, during and after the murders. The learning curve is ongoing, but special agents back at Quantico can now look at the evidence in a given case and construct a psychological profile of the killer. For the investigators in the field, a solid profile gives them somebody to look for.”
    “But if this is the sixth murder, like you say, there must already be a profile.”
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    THE INFORMANT
    “Not a good one. This is a particularly tough case. We figure the killer’s probably a man, but only because female serial killers are so rare. The classic victim’s female, between the age of fifteen and thirty. Here, we’ve got three men and—counting Mrs. Kincaid—three women, their ages ranging from thirty-one to seventy-eight. The classic serial killer is a sadistic sexual psychopath who strikes within his own ethnic group. In this case, none of the victims was sexually assaulted, three are white, two are black and one’s Hispanic. If that’s not confounding