Free Vail 02 - Crush by Alan Jacobson

had everyone’s attention. “Another way we can narrow the offender’s age range is to assume this offender is physically fit. He’s able to efficiently subdue his victim, without her making much, if any, noise. And then crush her windpipe. So, again, we’re looking at a younger person.”
    “Ray,” Brix said to Sergeant Lugo, “get with the Silver Ridge admin people and get their guest list. The people who go on those tours, whether it’s daytime or nighttime, pay a fair amount, so they’ll have used credit cards. Roxxi, make sure Ray has the search warrant he’ll need for that list. And their employee roster, past and present. Then narrow it down using Vail’s parameters.”
    They both nodded. Brix made a note of their assignments on the whiteboard. “And, as Incident Commander, I’m naming you lead investigator. That good with you?”
    Dixon looked up, appearing both surprised and pleased. “Yeah, I’m good with that.”
    Fuller leaned back in his seat, his mouth making contorting movements. Vail didn’t think he was particularly thrilled with Dixon’s assignment.
    Brix wrote it on the board.
    “Something else to keep in mind,” Vail said. She waited a beat for Brix to turn around. “It’s likely the offender knows the cave and has been there before.”
    “How can you make that assumption?” Fuller asked.
    “It’s a much higher risk for him to take a victim somewhere without knowing what—or who—he’s going to find there. It’s reasonable to assume, for now, that he had intel on the location, so that suggests some connection to the winery. If he knew anything about that place, he knew they conducted nighttime wine cave tours. He wanted that body found, he wanted maximum impact and shock when that tour came through. That suggests he was familiar with the winery. He’d either been there before or worked there in some capacity. So first order of business would be to look at the workers they have on staff.”
    Lugo spoke up. “That’s a minefield if we go down that road.”
    “How so?”

    “Migrant workers make up a significant percentage of the Napa Valley work force—they tend the vineyards, pick the grapes. A lot of them are illegal, and they move around. And they’re undocumented.”
    “That makes our job a bit harder,” Vail said. They mulled Lugo’s comment a moment before she continued. “There is one caveat I should point out.”
    “‘Caveat’? As in a ‘save my ass’ exception?” Fuller asked with a chuckle.
    “This isn’t about my ass and it’s not about me,” Vail said. “I’m just telling you there’s a potential exception to consider. Nothing is foolproof, especially behavioral analysis.” She stared down Fuller, then continued. “So as I was saying. There are some killers who engage in high-risk kills because it’s all about the thrills. So they partake in high-risk behavior—which goes against what I just said about him having prior knowledge, or intel, about the cave.”
    “That doesn’t make it any easier,” Brix said.
    Vail nodded in conciliation. “One thing that may help is that serial killers don’t wake up one day and start killing. They learn, through trial and error, what works and what doesn’t. What feeds their inner fantasies best. They experiment, learn how to stalk, how to kill. During this time, the killer is developing his interest in killing.”
    “How does this help us?” Dixon asked.
    “His early killing career will likely comprise failures, victims that fought back and required either more force or greater resourcefulness on his part to be successful. So his early murders will be unsolved crimes; we can look for unsolved murders in the region. But they’ll be tough to link to our UNSUB because his MO won’t look like it does now, because he wasn’t the same killer he eventually became. He may even move to another community, once he’s learned what he needs to learn to kill efficiently. We’d need to know particulars of