I was reminded by how thoroughly intoxicating Rachel’s skill as a profiler had been when we were chasing the Poet. She had been dead-on about the case in many ways. Damn near prescient. And I had been captivated by her ability to take small pieces of information and obscure details and then draw telling conclusions. She was doing it again and I was along for the ride.
“And you had a case with this?”
“Yes, we had a case in Louisiana. A man abducted a woman off a bus bench and held her for a week in a fishing shack out in a bayou. She managed to escape and make her way through the swamp. She was lucky because the four women he grabbed before her didn’t escape. We found their partial remains in the swamp.”
“And it was a basophilia case?”
“Abasiophilia,” she corrected. “Yes, the woman who escaped told us the subject made her wear leg braces that strapped around the legs and had side irons and joints running from her ankles to her hips and several leather straps.”
“This is so creepy,” I said. “Not that there is anything like a normal serial killer, but leg braces? Where does an addiction like this come from?”
“It’s unknown. But most paraphilias are embedded in early childhood. A paraphilia is like a recipe for an individual’s sexual fulfillment. It’s what they need to get off. Why someone would need to wear leg braces or have their partner wear them is anybody’s guess, but it starts young. That is a given.”
“Do you think the guy from your case back then could be—”
“No, the man who committed those murders in Louisiana was put to death. I witnessed it. And right up to the end, he never spoke a word to us about any of it.”
“Well, I guess that gives him a perfect alibi for this.”
I smiled but she didn’t smile back. I moved on.
“These braces, are they hard to find?”
“They are bought and sold over the Internet every day. They can be expensive, with all kinds of gadgetry and straps. Next time you’re on Google, plug in abasiophilia and see what you get. We’re talking about the dark side of the Internet, Jack. It’s the great meeting house, where people of like interests come together. You may think your secret desires make you a freak, and then you get on the Internet and find community and acceptance.”
As she said it I realized there was a story in this. Something separate from the trunk murders case. Maybe even a book. I put the idea aside for later and went back to the case at hand.
“So what do you think the killer does? He makes them put on leg braces and then he rapes them? Does the suffocation mean anything?”
“Every detail means something, Jack. You just need to know how to read it. The scene he creates reflects his paraphilia. More than likely this is not about killing the women. It’s about creating a psychosexual scene that fulfills a fantasy. The women are killed afterward because he is simply finished with them and he can’t have the threat of them living to tell about him. My guess is that he may even apologize to them when he pulls the bag over their head.”
“They both were dancers. Do you think he made them dance or something?”
“Again, it’s all conjecture at this point, but that could be part of it, yes. But my guess is that it’s about body type. Giraffes. Dancers by trade have thin muscular legs. If that is what he wanted, then he would look at dancers.”
I thought about the hours the two women spent with their killer. The stretch of hours between abduction and time of death. What happened during those hours? No matter what the answer, it added up to a horrible and terrifying end.
“You said something before about the bag being familiar somehow. Do you remember how?”
Rachel thought for a moment before answering.
“No, there’s just something about it. Some familiarity. Probably from another case but I can’t place it yet.”
“Will you put all of this through VICAP?”
“As soon as I get the chance.”
The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was a computer data bank of the details of thousands of crimes. It could be used to find crimes of similar nature when the details of a new crime were entered.
“There’s something else that should be noted about the killer’s program,” Rachel said. “In both cases he left the bag and neck ligature in place on the victims but the limb constraints—whether braces or not—were removed.”
“Right. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know but it could mean a number of things. The women are obviously constrained in some way during their captivity. Whether it is through braces or otherwise, those are removed but the bag stays in place. This could be part of a statement, part of his signature. It might have a meaning we are not aware of yet.”
I nodded. I was impressed by her take.
“How long has it been since you worked in Behavioral Sciences?”
Rachel smiled but then I saw that what I had meant to be a compliment had made her wistful.
“A long time,” she said.
“Typical bureau politics and bullshit,” I said. “Take someone who is damn good at something and put them somewhere else.”
I needed to get her back on focus and away from the memory that her relationship with me had cost her the position she was best suited for.
“You think if we ever capture this guy we’ll be able to figure him out?”
“You never figure any of them out, Jack. You get hints, that’s all. The guy in Louisiana was raised in an orphanage in the fifties. There were a lot of kids in there who had contracted polio. A lot of them wore leg braces. Why that became the thing that got him off as an adult and led him down the road to serial murder is anybody’s guess. A lot of other boys were raised in that orphanage, and they didn’t become serial killers. Why one does is ultimately just guesswork.”
I turned and looked out the window. We were over the desert between L.A. and Vegas. There was only darkness out there.
“I guess it’s a sick world down there,” I said.
“It can be,” Rachel said.
We flew in silence for a few moments before I turned back to her.
“Are there any other connections between them?”
“I made a list of similarities as well as a list of dissimilar aspects of the cases. I want to study everything further, but for now the leg braces are the most significant to me. After that, you have the physical pattern of the women and the means of death. But there’s got to be a connection somewhere. A link between these two women.”
“We find it and we find him.”
“That’s right. And now it’s your turn, Jack. What did you put together?”
I nodded and quickly composed my thoughts.
“Well, there was something that wasn’t in the stuff Angela had found on the Internet. She only told me about it because there wasn’t anything to print out. She said that she found the Las Vegas stories and some of the old L.A. stories when she did an online search with the phrase trunk murder, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Well, she told me that she also got a hit on a website called trunk murder dot com, but that when she went to it, there was nothing there. She clicked a button to enter and there was a sign that said it was under construction. So I was thinking, because you said this guy’s skill set included being able to do things on the Internet, that maybe—”
“Of course! It could have been an IP trap. He would be alert for anybody fishing around on the Internet for intel on trunk murders. He could then trace the IP back and find out who was looking. That would have led him to Angela and then to you.”
The jet started its descent, again at an angle that was much steeper than anything I had experienced on a commercial flight. I realized I was digging my fingernails into the armrest again.
“And he probably got a big thrill when he saw your name,” Rachel said.
I looked at her.
“What are you talking about?”
“Your pedigree, Jack. You were the reporter who chased do
wn the Poet. You wrote the book on it. Mr. Big Bestseller. You were on Larry King. These serial guys pay attention to all of that. They read these books. No, actually, they study these books.”
“That’s great to know. Maybe I can sign a copy of the book to him.”
“I’ll make a bet with you. When we get this guy, we’ll find a copy of your book in his possessions somewhere.”
“I hope not.”
“And I’ll make you another bet. Before we get this guy, he will make direct contact with you. He’ll call or e-mail or get to you in some way.”
“Why? Why would he risk it?”
“Because once it’s clear to him that he’s in the open—that we know about him—he will reach out for attention. They always do. They always make that mistake.”
“No bets, Rachel.”
The idea that I had or would somehow feed the warped psychology of this guy or anyone else wasn’t what I wanted to be thinking about.
“I guess I don’t blame you,” Rachel said, picking up on my discomfort.
“But I appreciate that you said ‘when we get this guy’ instead of ‘if we get this guy.’ ”
She nodded.
“Oh, don’t worry, Jack. We’re going to get this guy.”
I turned and looked back out the window. I could see the carpet of lights as we crossed from the desert into civilization again. Civilization as we know it. There were a billion lights out there on the horizon and I knew that all of them put together weren’t enough to light the darkness in the hearts of some men.
We landed at Van Nuys Airport and got into the car Rachel had left there earlier. She checked in by phone to see if there was anything new on Angela Cook and was told there wasn’t. She hung up and looked over at me.
“Where’s your car? At LAX?”
“No, I took a cab. It’s at home. In the garage.”
I don’t think any line so basic could have sounded so ominous. In the garage. I gave Rachel my address and we headed off.
It was almost midnight and traffic on the freeway was light. We took the 101 across the bottom of the San Fernando Valley and then down through the Cahuenga Pass. Rachel exited on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and headed west.
My house was on Curson a block south of Sunset. It was a nice neighborhood full of mostly small houses built for middle-class families that had long since been priced out of the neighborhood. I had a two-bedroom Craftsman with a separate single-car garage in the back. The backyard was so small, even a Chihuahua would have felt cramped. I had bought the place twelve years earlier with money from the sale of my book on the Poet. I split every check I got from the deal with my brother’s widow to help her raise and educate their daughter. It had been a while since I had seen a royalty check and even longer since I had seen my niece, but I had the house and the kid’s education to show for that time in my life. When I had gotten divorced, my wife made no claim on the house, since I had already owned it, and now I had only three years of mortgage payments before it was mine free and clear.
Rachel pulled in and drove down the driveway to the rear of the property. She parked but left the car’s lights on. They shone brightly on the closed garage door. We got out and approached slowly, like bomb techs moving toward a man in a dynamite vest.
“I never lock it,” I said. “I never keep anything in it worth stealing except for the car itself.”
“Then, do you lock the car?”
“No. Most of the time I forget.”
“What about this time?”
“I think I forgot.”
It was a pull-up garage door. I reached down and raised it and we stepped in. An automatic light went on above and we stared at the trunk of my BMW. I already had the key ready. I pushed the button and we heard the fump of the trunk lock releasing.
Rachel stepped forward without hesitation and raised the trunk lid.
Except for a bag of clothes I’d been meaning to drop at the Salvation Army, the trunk was empty.
Rachel had been holding her breath. I heard her slowly releasing it.
“Yeah,” I said. “I thought for sure…”
She slammed the trunk closed angrily.
“What, you’re upset that she’s not in there?” I asked.
“No, Jack, I’m upset because I’m being manipulated. He had me thinking in a certain way and that was my mistake. It won’t happen again. Come on, let’s check the house to be sure.”
Rachel went back and turned her lights off and then we went through the back door and into the kitchen. The house smelled musty but it always did when it was closed up. It didn’t help that there were overly ripe bananas in the fruit bowl on the counter. I led the way through, turning lights on as we went. The place looked unchanged from the way I had left it. Reasonably neat but with too many stacks of newspapers on tables and the floor next to the living room couch.
“Nice place,” Rachel said.
We checked the guest room, which I used as an office, and found nothing unusual. While Rachel moved on to the master bedroom I swung behind the desk and booted up my desktop computer. I had Internet access but still couldn’t get into my Times e-mail account. My password was rejected. I angrily shut down the computer and left the office, catching up to Rachel in my bedroom. The bed had been left unmade because I wasn’t expecting visitors. It was stuffy and I went to open a window while Rachel checked the closet.
“Why don’t you have this on a wall somewhere, Jack?” she asked.
I turned. She had discovered the framed print of the full-page ad that had run for my book in the New York Times. It had been in the closet for two years.
“It used to be in the office, but after ten years with nothing else to follow, it sort of started mocking me. So I put it in there.”
She nodded and stepped into the bathroom. I held my breath, not knowing what kind of sanitary condition it was in. I heard the shower curtain being slid open, then Rachel stepped back out into the bedroom.
“You ought to clean your bathtub, Jack. Who are all the women?”
“What?”
She pointed to the bureau, where there was a row of framed photos on little easels. I pointed as I went down the line.
“Niece, sister-in-law, mother, ex-wife.”
Rachel raised her eyebrows.
“ Ex-wife? You were able to get over me, then.”
She smiled and I smiled back.
“It didn’t last long. She was a reporter. When I first came to the Times we shared the cop beat. One thing led to another and we got married. Then it sort of went away. It had been a mistake. She works in the Washington bureau now and we’re still friends.”
I wanted to say more but something made me resist. Rachel turned and headed back to the hallway. I followed her into the living room. We stood there, looking at each other.
“What now?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. I’ll have to think on it. I should probably let you get some sleep. Are you going to be all right here?”
“Sure, why not? Besides, I’ve got a gun.”
“You have a gun? Jack, what are you doing with a gun?”
“How come the people with guns always question why citizens have guns? I got it after the Poet, you know?”
She nodded. She understood.
“Well, then, if you’re okay, I’ll leave you here with your gun and call you in the morning. Maybe one of us will have a new idea about Angela by then.”
I nodded and knew that, Angela aside, it was one of those moments. I could reach out for what I wanted or I could let it go like I had a long time before.
“What if I don’t want you to leave?” I asked.
She looked at me without speaking.
“What if I’ve never gotten over you?” I asked.
Her eyes dropped to the floor.
“Jack… ten years is a lifetime. We’re different people now.”
“Are we?”
She looked back at me and we held each other’s eyes for a long moment. I
then stepped in close, put my hand on the back of her neck and pulled her into a long, hard kiss that she did not fight or push away from.
Her phone dropped out of her hand and clunked to the floor. We grabbed at each other in some sort of emotional desperation. There was nothing gentle about it. It was about wanting, craving. Nothing loving, yet it was all about love and the reckless willingness to cross the line for the sake of intimacy with another human being.
“Let’s go back to the bedroom,” I whispered against her cheek.
She smiled into my next kiss, then we somehow managed to get to my bedroom without taking our hands off one another. We urgently pulled our clothes off and made love on the bed. It was over before I could think about what we were doing and what it might mean. We then lay side by side on our backs, the knuckles of my left hand gently caressing her breast. Both of us breathing in long, deep strides.
“Uh-oh,” she finally said.
I smiled.
“You are so fired,” I said.
And she smiled, too.
“What about you? The Times has to have some kind of rule about sleeping with the enemy, doesn’t it?”
“What are you talking about, ‘the enemy’? Besides, they laid me off last week. I’ve got one more week there and then I’m history.”
She suddenly was up on her side and looking down at me with concerned eyes.
“What?”
“Yeah, I’m a victim of the Internet. I got downsized and they gave me two weeks to train Angela and clear out.”
“Oh, my God, that’s awful. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. It just didn’t come up.”
“Why you?”
“Because I have a big salary and Angela doesn’t.”
“That’s so stupid.”
“You don’t have to convince me. But that’s how the newspaper business is run these days. It’s the same everywhere.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, probably sit in that office and write the novel I’ve been talking about for fifteen years. I think the bigger question is what are we going to do now, Rachel?”