“OK, so they both bought the same kind of shoes. BFD. You know how many pairs of those Nikes they sell every year?”
“The gun was the same too,” Kristine put in defensively, and immediately regretted it.
“The same caliber,” Rice shot back. “We don’t even know it was a six-shot or automatic, never mind the make or model.”
“And the shells, and the tape, and the handcuffs …”
Rice stared at her for a moment with his wary, reptilian eyes. Then he shook his head.
“I took a course, Kristine, statistical theory? They got some numbers-butt from UW in to explain the whole thing. One of the things he did, he gave us these lists of random numbers and got us to see if any of them had any significance in terms of our lives. And it was just amazing! One guy found his complete date of birth, another got almost all his phone number, someone else found his social security plus his daughter’s age. But none of it means a damn thing. They’re just strings of numbers churned out by a computer someplace.”
Rice tapped the memo which Kristine had sent him.
“It’s the same with this. Sure, you’ve found a few corresponding features in one other case among the hundreds of thousands reported all over the country every year. You know what? It would be amazing if you hadn’t. If we asked HITS to run a search for homicide victims with green eyes, a birthday in March, fallen arches and a grandparent living in Spokane, I bet it would come up with a few matches. That’s because computers are so smart they’re dumb enough to answer any question you ask them. What I’m saying, even if you came up with half a dozen matches a lot tighter than this, you’d still be well within the statistical norm. And since you’re pitching this KC job so hard, I take it you didn’t.”
Kristine Kjarstad looked away, conceding the point. Initially, she had been optimistic about the outcome of computer searches, both at state and federal level. In fact it had been the routine chore of filling out the mandatory HITS form on the Renton killings which had originally forced her to confront her growing doubts about the way the case was being handled.
All police and sheriffs’ departments in Washington State were required to submit information on murders, attempted murders and predatory sex offenses to the computerized Homicide Investigation and Tracking System run by the state attorney general’s office. The paperwork was supposed to take thirty minutes to complete, but in this particular case Kristine had spent over an hour puzzling out the most appropriate answers. The basic facts were easily transcribed from her full report: the date and time parameters, victim characteristics and background, method of operation, cause of death and forensic details. Things started to get tricky at the section headed INCIDENT CLASSIFICATION.
There were thirty-two choices, ranging from “Heat of anger” and “Drug-related” to “Psychopathic” and the chilling “Fun/amusement.” Confronting this list, Kristine quickly realized that she could check five or six completely different categories, each of them as plausible as the others. Was it “Domestic violence” or “Serial/possible serial”? “Hate” or “Cult (ritualistic)”? “Conspiracy” or “Mental/ insane”? She finally opted for “Unable to determine.”
But when she came to the next question-“Based on your experience and the results of the investigation of this case, do you believe this offender has killed before?”-she found herself, after a considerable struggle, marking “Yes.” It took even longer to complete the sentence “Evidence suggests the victim in this case is …” Here she hesitated still longer, before choosing response three, “a victim in a possible series.” And the pattern which had been lying dormant in her mind finally became clear when for “Victim-offender relationship” she passed over “Spouse,” “Family member (other,” “Friend,” “Acquaintance (business, drugs, etc)” and checked “Total stranger.”
Data submitted to HITS was not only entered into that system but also automatically generated a parallel report which was transmitted to the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, there to be matched against similar incidents reported from other states. Kristine Kjarstad had nourished high hopes that this process would provide her with evidence to support her tenuous and largely intuitive theory about the Renton case, but there had been no response, either from HITS or VICAP.
“The problem is, the system isn’t complete,” she had protested to her chief of detectives. “It isn’t mandatory for LEAs to submit data, and a lot of them don’t. New York, California, Texas-some of our biggest violence producers don’t even participate. We do, so anyone who looked at the VICAP stats would end up thinking that the Northwest is the murder capital of America, which is absurd. Plus any cases which are “solved,” quote unquote, get wiped from the Feds’ system! So if the original investigators in Peoria or wherever decide, rightly or wrongly, that it was just an attempted robbery gone ballistic or a family feud or a gang-related hit, whatever, it won’t show on the computer. And that must happen all the time. After all, we almost wrote this one off as a domestic.”
“Which I still think it was,” Dick Rice replied calmly. “OK, so we can’t make a case against the guy … What’s his name?”
“Wayne.”
“Right. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it. He confessed, for Christ’s sake! That makes sense to me. We buy into this idea of yours, what’ve we got? Some guys hit a house here in Renton, then hop on a plane to Kansas and start over. That’s not the way multiple killers operate. They work their territory, wherever it may be. Look at our Green River guy. He killed at least forty-one women, maybe fifty, and all between here and Tacoma. He didn’t waste his time racking up Frequent Flyer points.”
“Bundy moved around,” Kristine objected.
“Only because he was moving anyway. Utah, he went to law school. Florida, he was on the run after busting out of Aspen. As long as he was living here, this’s where he hit ’em up. Didn’t even bother to change his MO, just kept working the campus. Whereas you want us to believe that there are these guys flitting around the country like sales reps, shooting up houses at random from sea to shining sea. I’m sorry, Kristine. I appreciate your enthusiasm and dedication, but this just doesn’t fly.”
Coming from a man who had served on both the Bundy and Green River task forces, Rice’s words had a certain authority, but Kristine Kjarstad still retained a blind, dogged faith in her idea. What really disturbed her was something that Fred Poison said when she called him to get his views on the file she had sent him in return for the one on the Kansas City murders. Poison hadn’t been any more impressed than Rice by the alleged similarities between the two cases, but his parting words had stuck firmly in Kristine’s mind.
“I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about this, Ms. Kjarstad. I certainly hope so. Because if someone is doing what you say, then it’s theirs to screw up.”
A plane roared overhead, banking into the approach path to Sea-Tac airport. Off to the west, another was moving in toward the city, its landing lights glowing brightly against the bank of cobalt cloud which dwarfed the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula. Above the clouds, another point of light, unmoving, pricked the gathering dusk: Venus.
Kristine thought of all the other planes which must be taking off and landing just then, all over the country. Someone had calculated that at any given moment one and a half million Americans were in the air. Add to that millions more in cars, buses and trains, and you had a continual flow and counterflow from city to city, state to state, coast to coast. It was as if the original impact of the Mayflower on Plymouth Rock had set up a shock wave across the whole continent, amplified by the later waves of immigrants.
For a time, all that energy had been channeled into the epic drive west. Now, thrown back on itself, it produced only this ceaseless turbulence, millions and millions of people perpetually on the move. And somewhere amongst them, perhaps, were two men equipped with.22-caliber revolvers, plastic handcuffs and rolls of duct tape. Sitting on her porch in the quiet evening, Kristine felt an immense weariness ru
n through her. Fred Poison was right. As long as they didn’t make a mistake themselves, such killers would be virtually immune to detection.
Because beneath the superficial restlessness which the European immigrants had brought lay the very different America of the native peoples: rooted, tribally based, rich in local traditions, fiercely independent. That culture had been destroyed, but its ghosts had come back to haunt the one that replaced it. Every town and city jealously defended its rights and privileges against the county authorities, which in turn resented any interference by the state, and all made common cause against the federal government. As a result, law enforcement was divided among thousands of different agencies, each operating independently of the others and responsible only to their own elected officials.
Most of the time this worked pretty well, since most crime is local too. But if someone took it into his head to exploit that gaping fissure between the two Americas, by committing random, motiveless crimes all over the country, he could just disappear right into it. He would be operating nationally, and there was no national police force.
People thought there was, of course. A diet of thrillers and movies had convinced them that whenever the local cops hit a case that was too big for them to handle they simply called in a glamorous FBI special agent played by Kyle McLachlan or Jodie Foster, who promptly sorted the whole thing out. In fact the Bureau had no power to investigate murder, for the simple reason that murder was not a federal offense. The Feds could only muscle in if they could demonstrate that the killings were linked to crimes which were, such as kidnapping or racketeering. Otherwise all they were empowered to do, and then only on request, was to send a representative from the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico to liaise with local police on a consultative basis. Responsibility for the investigation itself remained with the law enforcement agency having jurisdiction in the area where the murder occurred.
In theory, of course, such agencies were supposed to cooperate fully with each other, sharing information and pooling resources. Sometimes it worked out that way, other times it didn’t. But even discounting the usual rivalries, how could a pattern emerge if each part of the emerging puzzle was in the hands of a different player, each of them unaware that the others existed, and struggling to make sense of their own individual fragment?
A rustling in the branches above her brought Kristine’s thoughts back to the present. There was Thomas, clambering nimbly down the tree to finish with an athletic leap into the yard, rushing up to hug her and bug her, demanding food and attention. As they stepped inside the warm, well-lit, wood-sprung house, Kristine promised herself that tomorrow she would lock the file away and devote herself to other work. Maybe she should phone Paul Merlowitz. He still seemed interested in her enough to want to take her out to lunch. It might even be worthwhile mentioning the Wallis house to him. Lawyers knew loads of people. It would make all the difference if Thomas had someone to play with over the summer vacation.
10
Over the next few days, I explored my new home and fell in love.
The first part did not take long. The island turned out to be much smaller than I had imagined. Despite the rough terrain, I was able to walk from one end to the other in less than an hour. The rain of the previous evening had stopped, the sky had cleared and the sun shone brightly in a pale blue sky.
“That’s the way it is here in the islands,” Sam told me later. “If you don’t like the weather, just stick around for five minutes.”
“But I suppose the same thing applies if you do,” I replied.
He didn’t seem to get it.
The island was roughly pear-shaped, rising from the coastline of smooth, sloping rock slabs and small stony beaches where we had landed to a single jagged peak sticking out into the open waters of the strait to the west. It was difficult to estimate distance, given the twists and turns in the overgrown trail that ran the length of the island, but the whole thing was probably not much more than a mile long and about five hundred yards across at the widest point, the relatively flat and low-lying plateau where the trees had been cleared for the buildings.
The rest was densely wooded with a mixture of evergreen and broadleaf trees: alders and sycamores, hemlocks and vine maples, cedar, fir, spruce, dogwood, and arbutus with its heavy, fleshy leaves and its trunk patched orange where the bark had stripped away. The undergrowth was lush with sword ferns and horsetails, every trunk and fallen branch verdant with moss, shafts of sunlight making distinctions between infinite subtly different shades of green.
I made my way along the overgrown trail which ran up the spine of the island toward the westerly peak. The vestiges of other, narrower paths could be seen at intervals to either side. Like all reminders of how provisional any of our projects are-uprooted railways, old lengths of highway superseded by the interstate, cracking concrete runways among flourishing acres of wheat-they were both melancholy and fascinating. I wanted to know who had made them and where they led, to what enchanted cove or sunstruck glade where time stood still. Once or twice I set out to follow them, but soon gave up, defeated by outbursts of sharp brambles, barricades of fallen trees and eruptions of ferns.
The trail curled up to the top of the peak and stopped abruptly, overlooking a cliff which fell maybe fifty feet in a sheer drop to the water below. The view was stupendous. To the south, a long line of brooding mountains massed against the sky suffused with the tender Pacific light. To the west, a snow-covered volcanic cone rose high above a range of foothills. A thick layer of fog spilled out from the invisible coastline, funneling down valleys and spreading out across the water in a shallow layer.
Nearer at hand, the surrounding islands were tucked one behind the other so that no open water was visible, their tone fading from clear green to hazy blue with distance. The shoreline consisted of a band of bare rock chewed by the waves, after which the vegetation began. Huge tree trunks bleached to a silver gray lay piled like garbage at the tideline. Depending on its depth and exposure to the wind, the water itself varied in color from a bright reflective glitter through a cloudy green to cold, steely blue. Where the turbulent currents met, huge circular patches, eerily smooth, basked on the surface like monstrous jellyfish. Above my head, sea gulls hung like toys on a string in the stiff breeze scooping up and over the headland.
It felt wonderful to be all alone in the midst of such beauty. I was pleasantly rested after my sleep, and the doubts I’d had the previous night about coming had faded like a bad dream. This was exactly what I needed to help me forget what had happened and to give me the courage and the energy to start again. I sat there for a long time, beguiling myself with pebbles and twigs like a child, feeling the vast ambient peace of the place seeping into my pores, unkinking all my tension, stilling my jangled nerves.
Inevitably, the return to the compound was something of a downer. The peak experience I’d just had was an impossible act to follow, but the sight of the crudely logged clearing and its slumlike jumble of shacks and shanties, dominated by a rusted metal water tank, was enough to destroy my mood of elation entirely.
The clearing itself consisted of two areas. There was an inner zone, about fifty feet square, where the trees and other vegetation had been dug out and the ground leveled, leaving a more or less flat table of packed dirt flecked here and there with patches of grass and clumps of horsetail. Around this stretched a desolate wasteland of rocks and scrub extending about a hundred feet up the hillside. Most of the trees here had been felled, presumably for firewood, but no attempt had been made to remove the roots or level the soil. As a result, all the buildings were crammed into the first area.
I had not paid much attention to them when I left that morning, but returning with my eyes attuned to the beauties of the landscape, I was appalled to see what an eyesore they were. The hall itself, clearly the oldest structure, was also the least offensive, its weathered timbers blending into the natural environment. There were two smaller outbuildings in the same style, one of which
housed the equipment for generating the electricity supply, the other collapsing under the assault of a mound of brambles.
The rest were all more recent. Judging by the way they were jammed in at all angles, some just a few feet apart, they had been put up as needed, with no attempt at advance planning. It looked as if Sam’s little commune must have expanded pretty rapidly, particularly in the last few years. The earliest ones were mere shacks, mostly of timber which looked as though it had been scavenged from previous structures dating back to the same era as the hall. They had corrugated iron roofs and incongruous modern doors, or in some cases just a length of gaudy plastic sheeting-one was clearly a shower curtain-nailed to the frame.
Finally there were six cabins of identical design and construction, probably built from kits. These were mounted on a poured concrete foundation and sported aluminum siding, double-glazed windows and felt roofs. Some of the men were at work on a half-built one. Among them was Andy, the ex-baseball coach I had met the previous night. He and another guy I didn’t know were throwing up the Sheetrock on an inside wall, and Andy waved in a friendly way as I passed.
I waved back with some relief. The blank stares and sullen faces which had greeted me when I appeared at breakfast had almost been enough to send me scurrying back to my room. I hadn’t recognized any of the people seated around the long dining table. They were younger than the group Sam had introduced me to the night before, mostly in their twenties, and their taciturn, guarded manner couldn’t have been more different from the exaggerated welcome I received then. Sam himself was nowhere to be seen, and I felt like an unwanted older intruder.
The food consisted of plastic-wrapped slices of spongy white bread, a huge jar of peanut butter and a selection of sugary cereals. There was also a percolator of industrial-strength coffee. Since Rick had forgotten to buy fresh milk the day before, the only kind available was a concoction resembling runny wallpaper paste which had been made up from powder.
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