“The organized offender,” he said, placing his hand on the chalk tray to counter the vertigo. He held his breath for a second, let it out, raised his hand—willing it not to shake—and started to write again. “The organized offender is intelligent, socially competent, holds down a job. He’s likely to be in a relationship. He could have a family, even. No one in his life would look at him and think he might have a second life as a predator.”

“Bundy,” Mendez said.

He took a slow, deep breath and turned back around slowly to face his audience.

“Bundy. Edmund Kemper up in Santa Cruz. John Wayne Gacy in the Chicago area. Robert Hansen from Alaska is a perfect example of an organized killer.”

“Never heard of him,” Farman said.

“The guy was a baker by trade,” Vince began. “He was a family man, a pillar of the community. He was also a sexual sadist. We think he killed around twenty-one women. His victims of choice were prostitutes. He would engage them for their services, then fly them in his own plane to his hunting cabin, rape them, torture them, then turn them loose in the wilderness, hunt them down like animals, and kill them.

“The Anchorage cops had an escaped victim at one point. The girl had a handcuff dangling from her wrist when she runs into a cop and tells him what happened. She tells how this guy had tied her up in his basement and tortured her, how she got away from him at the airport before he could get her into his plane.

“She identifies Hansen’s home as the place where she was raped and tortured. The cops take her to the airport and she identifies his plane. But when the cops go to question Hansen and tell him what the girl said, he’s outraged. He produces two business associates who say they had dinner with him the night he supposedly had the girl in the basement. It’s his word against the girl’s, and he’s so freakin’ normal, the cops believe him.

“Hansen wasn’t charged. He wasn’t even arrested. That happened in 1982. It was another year before they finally took him down.”

He had the undivided attention of all of them now.

“The organized killer plans his crimes. He chooses his victims. He’s more apt to draw out the attack, to restrain the victim, to torture the victim. He’s got the whole situation under control. That’s what it’s about for him: control. And when he’s done, he’ll transport the victim away from the death scene, then go home and wait to read about it in the papers, see the reports on the news.