When I tell
people I'm a criminal profiler, respectful silence falls
on the conversation. I know what they're thinking: Sherlock
Holmes, challenging cases, complex scientific methods.
That image is about as close to
the truth as prostitution is to a glam way of spending
your evenings with cocktails and distinguished gentlemen.
Speaking of
prostitution, there’s been another killing. That’s why
they called me in. I was shuffling my usual load of
dusty files, with trails as cold as winter sand, when
the boss stuck his head into my cubicle.
“F--- all that,
Cupcake,” he said. “We have a live one here.”
An ironic choice of words, given
the state the victim was in.
It’s difficult to be a woman in
this job. “You won’t have the stomach,” they’d said
when I applied. What they’d meant was, I wouldn’t have
the imagination. Getting into the mind of a serial killer
(and I’m not being sexist here when I say they’re all
male) is difficult enough for any so-called normal person,
but for a woman to try to get inside such a man’s head…
that’s next to impossible. |
Up till now, the only head I’d
needed to get into was my boss’s when I wanted a raise
- which I managed; and my ex boyfriend’s - which I did
not. Profiling the home invaders, the restaurant arsonists
and the small-scale extortionists didn’t require a lot
of imagination. I would study the crime scenes (mostly
from photographs) and the statistics (mostly from tedious
reports), I would pore over the evidence and produce
profiles good enough for positive id.
Up till now.
“That’s the
third one this year and it follows the pattern,” I heard
moments later in the emergency meeting. “A prostitute
on her night off, a back street, a strike to the head
hard enough to stun, followed by strangulation. In each
case, autopsy revealed a first class dinner eaten a
few hours beforehand. As to sexual activity -”
|