Chloe Wallace needs a new start. When she lands in Washington, D.C. she hopes for the best. Finding a new job, meeting new people, and living a normal life away from her abusive ex-husband.
She moves into the Capital Plaza Apartments, right across t...
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CW: c-ptsd, descriptions of abuse, discussions of real life murders (the Robert Pickton case).
Author's Note: Everything about Dr. Kim Rossmo, geographic profiling, his mentors, and the Pickton case is all true. (Source: I'm a criminologist. I hold a BA in criminology, a master's, and did two years of a PhD).
I grew up in Vancouver and had many professors from SFU who LOVE Dr. Rossmo (I do too), and I volunteered on the Downtown East Side where 49 women went missing between 1978 and 2001. Kim Rossmo's PhD thesis is called Geographic Profiling: Target Patterns of Serial Murderers. You can find it for free on Simon Fraser University's website. Much of the information in it is now outdated, specifically the offender "types" he uses, but it's really interesting to see how geographic profiling has evolved over the years.
Dr. Kim Rossmo was the first police officer to receive a doctorate. He's a fucking badass and all of that bullying absolutely happened to him in the VPD. They were called "the old boys club" and they actively pushed him out because he was better at their jobs than they were. The VPD is full of the laziest and most spiteful motherfuckers imaginable. As far as many people in Vancouver are concerned, the blood of 49 sex workers is on their hands for not listening to activists and people like Kim Rossmo.
If the VPD has no haters, I'm dead.
chloe.
He's spread a massive map out on the wall and scrawled all over it. I can barely read his handwriting, and the entire thing is covered in circles and page flags.
I munch on my pizza, watching him work. He's shirtless, in nothing but a pair of pajama pants, slippers, and his oversized watch that hangs loose on his lean forearm.
He's got a case file in one hand as he stares at the map, muttering to himself.
"What are you doing?" I ask, picking a piece of pepperoni off my pizza and popping it into my mouth.
"I'm creating a geographic profile. Garcia says I can do this with a computer, but there's something about having the map physically in front of you that just... works better for my brain."
"What's that?" I ask. "Geographic profiling?"
"It's a profiling technique that originated out of Canada— specifically Simon Fraser University's criminology department in 1989. Much of it is rooted in the work of Paul and Patricia Brantingham and Dr. Kim Rossmo who was on the task force to hunt Robert Pickton." He smiles.
"The pig farm killer?"
Spencer nods.
"I actually read some of Dr. Rossmo's work when I was a kid."
"How old were you?"
"About 12."
"You read academic—" I stop myself and smile. "Never mind. Of course you did. Because you're brilliant."
