Mark sighed as he took the files out of the room. This wasn't a class that he was preparing. Lives were at stake, innocent lives, But he couldn't take this personally. He knew what would happen if he got too invested in this thing. He was just going to treat this like it was a class. It allowed him to use his mind at it's sharpest, and yet not becoming emotionally involved. Like this was a drill, an exercise. He knew how slim the chances were of him remaining aloof in this case, like walking on the edge of a very sharp knife, but he had to hold. He had to keep himself together, or he would lose himself to... well, himself, and the path back to sanity was long and arduous.

He found his office, somehow and set everything down on his desk. He gingerly placed the badge and gun inside one of the desk's drawers and sat down with a sigh. He spied a mug of coffee on his table. It was from before his last class, and while he usually would have avoided cold coffee, he leaned forward, grabbing the half full mug and, after a sniff, chugged it down quickly. He placed a call asking for more coffee, hot this time, to be delivered to his office before he got himself working, churning through the pile of evidence. Reading through details of cases that were so old they were from before the time that Lecter had been arrested. Interesting. It seemed like this man was something of a pupil of the man, but not of Hannibal Lecter. He was an admirer of The Chesapeake Ripper's work. That was interesting. There had been a surge of copycats after Lecter's arrest, and a sick sort of following had developed and subsequently crushed by the FBI. They hadn't been as careful or as artistic as Lecter was. His coffee arrived, and he mechanically poured himself a mug and sipped at it, and scowled. He didn't like his coffee black. He poured some sugar and cream into it and proceeded to ignore it for a while.

This guy was something else. He had already determined, from his purely female selection of victims as well as the rough treatment that some of them had taken, that the perp was male. Women killed women all the time, but they didn't like to do it over and over again, and they certainly didn't abuse them sexually. There was always the option that there were multiple perps, but he doubted it in this case. One person, or one group of persons, had carried this out. If it was a group, they were looking for people that stayed together all the time, rarely involving anybody new. A minuscule cult, perhaps?

Mark discarded that idea. If there were more than one person, there would have been multiple signatures on the work of art, signifying multiple artists. No, this had been carried out by one man. Without help, or if there was help, the help would have been quickly disposed of to keep his secret from getting out. He wasn't displaying his work for the world, even if that was an unavoidable after-effect. He was creating his own sick form of art because it pleased him, because it made him feel good. He left a signature. He didn't want anybody to copy his work, so he made each work unique in it's own fashion, but with one thing being the same, even if it was performed by different brushes, as it were.

He looked up, taking an automatic sip from his coffee as Josh stepped in," New York?" He asked absently, still deeply engrossed in his thought process," Why would I want to go there?" The question was put forth innocently enough, although with enough roughness to maybe, just maybe have Josh leave him alone. Where was he? Right. His manner of execution. It was rarely the same.