"She sleeping," she said.
I held up the file I was carrying.
"That's okay. I have work. I just want to go sit with her for a while. How are you doing, Marisol?"
"Oh, I am fine."
"Eleanor went to the casino?"
"Yes, she go." "And how was Maddie tonight?"
"Maddie, she a good girl. She play."
Marisol always kept her reports to a minimum. I had tried speaking to her in Spanish before, thinking the reason she spoke so little was because of her English skills. But she said little more to me in her native language, preferring to keep her reports on my daughter's life and activities to a few words in any language.
"Okay, well, thank you," I said. "If you want to go to bed I'll just let myself out later. I'll make sure the door is locked."
I had no key to the house but the front door would lock after I closed it.
"Yes, is okay."
I nodded and headed down the hallway to the left. I entered Maddie's room and closed the door. There was a night-light plugged into the far wall and it cast a blue glow across the room. I made my way to the side of her bed and turned on the bed table light. I knew from experience that Maddie would not be disturbed by the light. The five-year-old's dreams were so deep she could seemingly sleep through anything, even a Lakers playoff game on the television or a 5.0 earthquake.
The light revealed a nest of tangled dark hair on the pillow. Her face was turned away from my view. I used my hand to sweep the ringlets back off her face and I leaned down and kissed her cheek. I turned my head sideways so my ear was closer to her. I checked for the sound of breathing and was rewarded. One little moment of unfounded fear fell away from me.
I walked over to the bureau and turned off the baby monitor, the other half of which I knew was in the TV room or Marisol's bedroom. There was no need for it now. I was there.
Maddie slept in a queen-size bed with a cover spread that had all manner of cats printed on it. With her little body taking up so little space in the bed, there was plenty of room for me to prop the second pillow against the headboard and climb on next to her. I slipped my hand under the covers and placed it gently on her back. I waited without moving until I could feel the slight rise and fall of her breathing. With the other hand I opened the Poet file and started to read.
At dinner I had gotten through most of the file. This included the suspect profile authored in part by Agent Rachel Walling as well as the investigative reports and crime scene photos that accumulated while the investigation was current and the bureau was tracking the killer dubbed the Poet across the country. That was eight years earlier, when the Poet killed eight homicide detectives, traveling from east to west, before his run came to an end in Los Angeles.
Now as my daughter slept next to me I began with the reports that came after FBI Special Agent Robert Backus had been identified as the suspect. After he had been shot by Rachel Walling and then disappeared.
The summary from the autopsy of a body found by a Department of Water and Power inspector in a storm water tunnel in Laurel Canyon was included here. The body was found almost three months after Backus was shot and had fallen through a window of a cantilevered home near the canyon and disappeared into the darkness and brush below. FBI credentials and a badge belonging to Robert Backus were found on the body. The deterio- rated clothing was also his-a suit hand-tailored for Backus in Italy when he'd been sent over to consult on an investigation of a serial killer in Milan.
However, scientific identification of the body was inconclusive. The remains were badly decomposed, leaving fingerprint analysis impossible. And parts of the body were even missing, initially presumed to have been taken by rats and other animals foraging in the tunnels. The entire lower mandible and upper bridge were missing, precluding a comparison to the dental records belonging to Robert Backus.
Cause of death could not be determined either, though a gunshot wound channel was found in the upper abdomen-the area Agent Walling reported seeing her bullet strike-and a rib was fractured, possibly by the force of a bullet. No bullet fragments were recovered, however, suggesting a through and through wound, and so no comparison to a bullet from Walling's weapon was possible.
No DNA comparison or identification was ever made. After the shooting-when it was thought that Backus might still be alive and on the run-agents descended on the fugitive's home and office. But they were in search of evidence to the crimes he had committed and clues as to why. They did not plan for the possibility that they might one day need to identify his putrefied remains. In a gaffe that would haunt the investigation and leave the bureau open later to charges of malfeasance and cover-up, no potential DNA receptors-hair and skin from the shower drain, saliva from the toothbrush, fingernail clippings from the waste cans, dandruff and hair from the back of the desk chair-were ever collected. And three months later, when the body was found in the storm water tunnel, it was too late. Those receptors were compromised or nonexistent. The building where Backus had owned a condo mysteriously burned to the ground three weeks after the bureau had finished with it. And Backus's office had been taken over and completely renovated and redecorated by an agent named Randal Alpert, who took his place in the Behavioral Sciences unit.
A search for a blood sample from Backus proved futile and once again embarrassing for the bureau. When Agent Walling shot Backus in the house in Los Angeles a small amount of blood had spattered the floor. A sample was collected but then inadvertently destroyed in the lab in Los Angeles when medical waste was disposed of.
A search for blood that Backus may have given during personal medical examinations or as donations to blood banks proved fruitless. Through his own cunning planning, luck, and bureaucratic malfeasance, Backus had disappeared without leaving anything of himself behind.
The search for Backus officially ended with the discovery of the body in the drainage tunnel. Even though scientific confirmation of identity was never made, the credentials, badge and Italian suit were enough for bureau command to act swiftly in announcing closure to a case that had held wide sway in the media and had severely undercut the bureau's already tarnished image.
But meantime a quiet investigation continued into the psychological backgrounding of the killer agent. These were the reports I now read. Led by the Behavioral Sciences section-the very unit in which Backus worked- this investigation seemed more concerned with the ques- tion of why he did what he did than with the question of how he was able to do it under the noses of the top experts in the killing field. This investigative direction was probably a protective measure. They looked at the suspect, not the system. The file was replete with reports of investigations into Agent Backus's early nurturing, adolescence and upbringing. Despite the number of crisply written observations, speculations and summaries, there was very little there. Just a few threads unraveled from the full fabric of personality. Backus remained an enigma, his pathology a secret He was the case that the best and brightest ultimately couldn't crack.
I sorted through the threads. Backus was the son of a perfectionist father-a decorated FBI agent, no less- and a mother he never knew. The father was reported to have been physically brutal to the boy, possibly blaming him for the mother's abandonment of the family, and punished him severely for infractions that included bed-wetting and taunting of neighborhood pets. One report came from a seventh-grade classmate who reported that Robert Backus had once confided that when he was young his father punished him for bed-wetting by handcuffing him to a towel rack in the bathroom shower enclosure. Another former classmate reported that Backus once claimed that he slept each night with a pillow and a blanket in a bathtub because he feared the punishment that wetting the bed might bring. A childhood neighbor reported suspicions that it had been Backus who had killed a pet Dachshund by cutting the dog in half and leaving its parts in a vacant lot.
As an adult Backus exhibited obsessive-compulsive tendencies. He had fixations on cleanliness and order. Many testimonials in this
regard came from fellow agents in Behavioral Sciences. Backus was well known in the unit for delaying scheduled meetings for many minutes while he was in the restroom washing his hands. No one ever saw him eat anything for lunch in the cafeteria at Quantico but a simple grilled cheese isandwich. Every day, a grilled cheese sandwich. He also compulsively chewed gum and would take great pains to make sure he was never out of the Juicy Fruit brand he liked. One agent described his chewing as measured, meaning he believed that Backus may have counted the number of times he chewed each stick of gum, and when a specific number was reached he would then remove the gum and start over with a fresh stick.
There was a report on an interview with a former fiancee. She told the reporting agent that Backus required her to shower often and extensively, particularly before iand after they made love. She said that while house hunting before the nuptials he told her he would want to have his own bedroom and bathroom. She called off the marriage and ended the relationship when one time he called her a slob because she had kicked off her high heels in her own living room.
The reports were just glimpses of a damaged psyche. They weren't really clues to anything. Whatever Backus's strange habits were, they still didn't fully explain why he began killing people. Thousands of people suffer from mild to severe forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. They don't add killing to their list of personal tics. Thousands were abused as children. They do not then all become abusers.
McCaleb had acquired far fewer reports on the reappearance four years later of the Poet-Backus-in Amsterdam. All that was in the file was a nine-page summary report in which the facts of the killings and the forensic findings were recounted. I had skimmed this report before but now read it closely and found aspects of it tying in with the theory I was formulating about the town of Clear.
In Amsterdam the five known victims were men who were tourists traveling alone. This put them in the same profile as the victims known to be buried in Zzyzx, with the exception of one man who was in Las Vegas with his wife but away from her when she spent the day in their hotel's spa. In Amsterdam the men were last seen in the city's Rosse Buurt zone, where legalized prostitution is carried out in small rooms behind the neon-framed windows where women in provocative clothing offer themselves to passersby. In two of the incidents the Dutch investigators located prostitutes who reported being with the victims the night before their bodies were found floating in the nearby Amstel River.
Though the bodies were found in different locations in the river, the reports indicated that the point of entry into the water for all five victims was believed to have been the area around the Six House. This location was a property owned by an important family in Amsterdam history. I found this of interest, partly because Six House and Zzyzx sounded a bit alike to me. But also because of the question of whether the killer had chosen the Six House randomly or in some attempt to flaunt his crimes at authority by choosing a structure that symbolized it.
The Dutch detectives never got much further with the investigation. They never found the mechanism by which the killer got to the men, controlled them and killed them. Backus would have never even made a blip on their suspect radar if he hadn't wanted to be noticed. He sent the police the notes that asked for Rachel Walling and led to his identity. The notes, according to the summary report, contained information about the victims and crimes that seemingly only the killer would know. One note contained the passport of the last victim.
To me the connection between Amsterdam's Rosse Buurt and Clear, Nevada, was obvious. Both were places where sex was legally exchanged for money. But more important, they were places where I assumed men might go without telling others, where they might even take measures to avoid leaving a trail. In some ways this made them perfect targets for a killer and perfect victims. It added an extra degree of safety to the killer.
I finished my survey of McCaleb's file on the Poet and started through it once more, hoping that I had missed something, maybe just one detail that would bring the whole picture into focus. Sometimes it happens that way. A missed or misunderstood detail becomes the key to the whole puzzle.
But I didn't find that detail on the second go-round and soon the reports just seemed repetitive and tedious. I grew tired and somehow I ended up thinking about that kid handcuffed in the shower. I kept picturing that scene and I felt bad for the kid and angry for the father who did it and the mother who never cared to know about it.
Did this mean I felt sympathy for a killer? I didn't think so. Backus had taken his own tortures and turned them into something else and then turned it on the world. I had an understanding of that process and I felt sympathy for the boy he had been. But I felt nothing for Backus the man but a cold resolve to hunt him down and make him pay for what he did.
CHAPTER 28
THE PLACE SMELLED HORRIBLE but Backus knew he could live with it. It was the flies that repulsed him the most. They were everywhere, dead and alive. Carrying germs and disease and dirt. As he huddled under the blanket, his knees drawn up, he could hear them buzzing in the darkness, flying blind, hitting the screens and the walls, making little sounds. They were out there, everywhere. He realized he should have known that they would come, that they were part of the plan.
He tried to block out their sounds. He tried to think and concentrate on the plan. It was his last day here. Time to move. Time to show them. He wished he could stay to watch, to bear witness to the event. But he knew that there was much work to do.
He stopped breathing. He could feel them now. The flies had found him and were crawling on the blanket, looking for a way in, a way to get to him. He had given them Me but now they wanted to get to him and eat him. His laugh broke sharply from beneath the blanket and the flies that had alighted on it scattered. He realized he was no different from the flies. He, too, had turned against the giver of life. He laughed again and he felt something go down his throat.
"Aaaggh!"
He retched. He coughed. He tried to get it out. A fly. A fly had gone down his throat Backus jumped up and almost tripped as he climbed out. He ran to the door and out into the night. He shoved his finger down his throat until everything came up and came out. He dropped to his knees, gagged and spit it all out. He then pulled the flashlight from his pocket and studied his effluent with the beam. He saw the fly in the greenish yellow bile. It was still alive, its wings and legs mired in the swamp of human discharge.
Backus stood up. He stepped on the fly and then nodded to himself. He wiped the bottom of his shoe on the red dirt. He looked up at the silhouette of the rock outcropping that rose a hundred feet above him. It was blocking the moon at this hour. But that was all right. That just made the stars all the brighter.
CHAPTER 29
I put the thick file aside and studied my daughter's face. I wondered what she could be dreaming about. She had experienced so little in her life, what inspired her dreams? I was sure there were only good things waiting for her in that secret world and I wished it would always stay that way.
I grew tired myself and soon closed my eyes to rest for a few minutes. And soon I, too, dreamed. But in my dream there were shadow figures and angry voices, there were sudden and sharp movements in the darkness. I didn't know where I was or where I was going. And then I was grabbed by unseen hands and pulled up out of it, back to the light.
"Harry, what are you doing?"
I opened my eyes and Eleanor was pulling the collar of my jacket.
"Hey ... Eleanor... what is it?"
For some reason I tried to smile at her but I was still too disoriented to know why. "What are you doing? Look at this all over the floor."
I was beginning to register that she was angry. I pulled myself forward and looked over the edge of the bed. The Poet file had slid off the bed and spilled on the floor. The crime scene photos were spread everywhere. Prominently displayed were three photos of a Denver Police detective who had been shot by Backus in a car. The back of bis head was obliterated, blood and brain matter all over
the seat. There were other photos of bodies floating in canals, photos of another detective whose head was taken off with a shotgun.
"Oh, shit!"
"You can't do this!" Eleanor said loudly. "What if she woke up and saw this? She'd have nightmares the rest of her life."
"She's going to wake up if you don't keep your voice down, Eleanor. I'm sorry, okay? I didn't mean to fall asleep."
I slid off the bed and knelt on the floor, quickly gathering the file together. As I did so I checked my watch and saw it was almost five a.m. I had slept for hours. No wonder I was so groggy.
Seeing the time also told me that Eleanor was home late. She usually didn't play this long. It probably meant she'd had a bad night and had tried to chase her losses, a bad gambling strategy. I quickly gathered the photos and reports and slid them back into the file, then I stood up.
"Sorry," I said again.
"Goddamnit, it's not what I need to come home and find."
I didn't say anything. I knew it was a no-win situation for me. I turned and looked back at the bed. Maddie was still sleeping, with her brown ringlets across her face again. If she could sleep through anything, then I hoped she could sleep right through the roaring silence of her parents' anger toward each other.