Daniel Mrse

Daniel Mrse, also known as The Capital Murderer, is the main antagonist of the 2013 Patricia Cornwell novel Dust. Mrse is a traveling circus performer and the son of Dominic Lombardi, a financial tycoon with the power to abet his son. Mrse is a serial killer with distinct signatures and gained his moniker from compulsively targeting high-pranking officials in business and government, leaving their corpses in DC.

Biography
Daniel Mrse is the son of accounting tycoon Dominic Lombardi, with high connections even in the US national government. Mrse also has murderous tendencies from sources unknown, demonstrated in the murder of the mother of his friend Martin Lagos. The woman being a White House curator, she was killed by Mrse in a way that was poorly disguised as a suicide, but Lombardi strenuously bribed and blackmailed FBI official Ed Granby to bury her murder and not charge Mrse for the crimes. Mrse eventually found a job in a traveling circus but never stopped at Lagos' mother, continuing on to be a serial killer and favoring DC as his major hunting ground. In 2013, Mrse killed major officials and businesspeople, favoring women and striking in clusters of threes in April and November around Thanksgiving. Each woman killed would be the models for handmade plaster masks Mrse kept as trophies. Lombardi would maintain connections with Granby and pathologist Dr. Geist to tamper the investigations.

At the start of the book, Mrse kills MIT grad student Gail Shipton, posing her in the same fashion on the grounds of the elite tech university. Kay Scarpetta is called by Sergeant Pete Marino to act as medical examiner on the case, Scarpetta's partner and FBI Agent Benton Wesley realizing it's another one of the "Capital Murders", just not in DC like usual. Haley Swanson, Shipton's transsexual partner, is offered condolences, and Wesley voices disgruntlement of Granby not releasing info on the murders "to avoid replication of th[e] [...] style". What's even more of a shock is the revelation Shipton was suing Lombardi for 100 million, Lombardi already having six other suits but always skirting them with bribery and being put on probation.

The cloth is revealed to be low-stretch and synthetic, and Shipton has no marks even from self-defense, but she does have burst capillaries in her eyes, indicating suffocation. Iridescent glitter is found on her corpse from the plaster mask taken of her, and the panty she wore that was all she was found wearing doesn't fit her properly. That being because she was wearing the panty of the previous woman killed. Wesley figures the killer has gall and is showy, demonstrated in leaving at the crime scene a tool box holding a bolt cutter Mrse used to break the university's gates open. Lagos is considered a suspect when his DNA is on the pair of panties, but along with suspicion he's really dead, Scarpetta believes he's being framed since it doesn't fit DNA transfer and saving panties to place on the next female victim already scrambles the evidence.

A new trio of Capital Murders happens at Double-S, with someone wearing Haley Swanson's hoodie fleeing the scene. But shocking, Mrse this time killed Lombardi, his secretary, and Swanson, all nearly in the same fashion. Mrse's name comes up when searching for Lagos, and Scarpetta finds the staged murder of Lagos' mother. With evidence piling up against Mrse and finding a call between Geist and Granby, Scarpetta finds out the cover-up bribed by Lombardi in an email found from hacking the system holding the crucial evidence, officially clinching Mrse as the killer. Mrse is found at the circus in Florida, and the FBI immediately raid his vanity car. They find the clay plasters and the schedule of the circus' travels that matches the timelines of the murders. Mrse, with this evidence, is most likely incarcerated with no chance of parole.

Modus Operandi
Mrse targeted prominent business and government officials, as well as anybody else even remotely linked to the case of his murders, preferring women most of all. His primary signature was killing people in clusters of threes, Gail Shipton and the mother of Martin Lagos being exceptions. All of the victims of Mrse's pattern murders were killed by asphyxiation, the victims dead in threes always being left near rail tracks, until the last wave, when they were all left at the Double-S firm where the three victims were connected. Each victim would be laid at the scene wrapped in a white sheet, each woman having a plaster impression of their faces sculpted by Mrse himself taken as a trophy, which would leave fluorescent glitter on their persons as it would be one of the materials used. Another signature was for each woman killed, she would be dressed in the panties of the woman killed before her as all she would be wearing. Mrse eventually escalated in his crimes to people closer to him to cover his tracks, going as far as killing his own father in hopes it would bury the traces to him. Each of the victims were murdered in a window of opportunity presented with the traveling circus Mrse worked at being stationed in the city where the next wave took place. Mrse would also take clothes from the victims to be disguised as them on security camera footage. When he killed Lagos' mother, he murdered her in away that poorly masked it as a suicide, leaving her corpse in her home bathtub. Lagos' own death is never specified or even confirmed but suspected to have happened at Mrse's hand in the same fashion.

Victims

 * 1996: Ms. Lagos (first name unknown; killed and posed in her bathtub to stage the scene as a "suicide")
 * 2013:
 * April:
 * Three unidentified victims
 * November:
 * Three unidentified victims
 * Gail Shipton
 * Martin Lagos (presumably)
 * The Double-S office murders:
 * Dominick Lombardi (Mrse's father)
 * Lombardi's unidentified secretary
 * Haley Swanson (Shipton's transgender partner; stole Swanson's hoodie and wore it on security camera footage)