The Straw Men

by Marshall, Michael

  The investigation lasted thirteen weeks. For the last eight of those, John and Nina were sleeping with each other. The affair ended soon after the apprehension of the suspect. Nina had done much of the initial encouragement. Then she stopped doing so, and it came to an end. Zandt never spoke of it to his wife, with whom he had a relationship that was in general cordial and successful, but that had been going through an arid patch. He wanted to lose neither her nor their daughter, and was largely relieved when the affair ended.

  He and Nina met occasionally for lunch over the next five years, while Zandt worked the usual slate of gang slayings, family feuds, and bullet-holed John Does found in alleyways gasping like landed fish and pronounced DOA to general apathy. Some he solved; some he didn't. So it goes. Nina worked a well-publicized double murder in Yellowstone, a series of disappearances upstate and one more in Oregon, all of which remained unsolved and ongoing. Out in the real world, beyond the curtain of death and misdemeanour that law enforcers live behind, business continued as usual. Bosnia imploded; the President got in trouble with his cigars; we discovered the joys of email and Frasier, of PlayStations and Sheryl Crow.

  Then, on December 12th 1999, a teenage girl disappeared in Los Angeles. Josie Ferris, age sixteen, had been celebrating a friend's birthday over a burger at the Hard Rock Cafe on Beverly Boulevard. At 9.45 p.m., having said goodbye on the pavement outside the restaurant, she walked alone down toward Ma Maison. She was intending to catch a cab from outside the hotel. Beverly Boulevard is not a back road or an alley. It is a wide and well-travelled street, and on this evening both the forecourt of the hotel and the foyer of the Beverly Center Mall opposite were busy. Nonetheless, somewhere along that three-hundred-yard stretch, she vanished.

  Josie's failure to return home was reported to the police by 12.50 a.m. On receiving what they considered to be a response of insufficient alacrity, her parents turned up in person to fill out the forms. Mr and Mrs Ferris were possessed of forceful demeanours, and the police were soon taking the incident more seriously, at least while the parents were within earshot. Sadly this made no difference. Their daughter was never seen alive again.

  Two days later a sweater was left outside their house. The name Josie had been stitched into the front, using what was subsequently demonstrated to be the girl's own hair. The sweater had been a sixteenth birthday present from the girl's best friend, who had sewn the letters 'FFE' onto the sleeve: Friends For Ever. They had been. Eternity had merely turned out to be short. There was no demand for money with the garment. The police started taking the situation very seriously indeed, regardless of who was around to overhear. A task force was set up, coordinated through the FBI's local SAC, Charles Monroe. The news of the garment's delivery was eventually released to the press, but not the way in which it had been altered. A month later, no headway of any kind had been made in tracing the missing teenager.

  In late January and early March of 2000, two other girls went missing. Elyse LeBlanc and Annette Mattison failed to return from the cinema and a friend's house respectively. Both resembled Josie Ferris in trivial ways—they were of a similar age (fifteen and sixteen) and wore their hair long. The LeBlancs and Mattisons were comfortably well-off, and their daughters were attractive and of above-average intelligence. This was not enough to suggest a firm link between the three disappearances, occurring as they did in widely spread parts of the city.

  The arrival of two more sweaters was, however. Again, they were delivered to the family homes, in broad daylight, and again they featured the girl's name embroidered on the front with their own hair. No further communication was received. The seriousness of the situation led the FBI to keep the second and third disappearances quiet. Most serial kidnappers sought to hide the fact of their abductions. The selection of girls whose absence would be spotted immediately, and the further highlighting of the event through the delivery of the parcels, suggested they were dealing with an unusual individual. One who wanted attention right now.

  They denied him it.

  A week after the disappearance of Annette Mattison, the clothed body of a young woman was found by picnickers in Griffith Park. Though bald, badly burned and deteriorated through the activities of local wildlife, the body was quickly identified through recent dental work and a distinctive piece of jewellery. It was Elyse LeBlanc. It was estimated that she had been dead for approximately half of the period since her abduction, though only recently moved to the location at which she was found. She was discovered to have suffered a number of minor head traumas prior to death, though none had led to her demise. Although the body was immediately forwarded to the federal-lab in Washington, no physical evidence of the killer was gained from her clothes or remains. A search of the remainder of the park by local police and the FBI evidence team from Sacramento failed to discover either Josie Ferris's or Annette Mattison's body in whole or in part.

  The press embargo was dropped. A call for witnesses garnered nothing more than the usual hoaxes, lunatics, and misinformation. Parents arranged for their teenage daughters to travel in groups.

  Josie's body turned up ten days later. It was found lying in bushes by the side of a road in Laurel Canyon, in a similar state to that of the LeBlanc girl. Unlike the previous victim, there was evidence of a period of gross sexual abuse.

  By then the killer had a nickname. The media called him The Delivery Boy. This had been suggested unofficially by Special Agent Monroe, who believed that by minimizing him in this way, reducing his status by using the word 'boy', some kind of investigative advantage might be gained. That someone who had managed to snatch three bright and worldly young women from busy streets, murder them, and dump their bodies in public places, all without being seen or leaving a single piece of evidence, would be somehow thrown by this taunt.

  That he might get all offended, and just go right to pieces.

  •••

  Nina had disagreed. For this and other reasons she had been discussing the case with John Zandt, despite the fact that he was not involved in the official investigation. They'd worked together well on The Casting Agent case. She wanted to know what he thought.

  Zandt proffered his views, but without much enthusiasm. Nina worked these cases with an intensity and zeal that he found he could no longer match. His marriage was back on firm ground, and his daughter had grown, transforming from a child into a young person, consolidating their family. She had her mother's hair, a rich, almost auburn, dark brown—but her father's eyes, brown flecked with green. She played music too loud her room was a mess and she spent too long on the Net and smelled of cigarette smoke every now and then. There were arguments. But she went grocery shopping with her mother, even thought it was super-boring, because she knew Jennifer enjoyed having her along. She would mainly listen to her father when he talked, and stifle any yawn that came. Her parents didn't know she had smoked dope on several occasions, tried coke, and once stolen a pair of quite expensive earrings. If they had, they'd have grounded her ass to kingdom come but otherwise wouldn't have been too worried. All of this was within the acceptable range of errant behaviour in her place and time.

  As much as anything, Zandt had simply grown a little older, and wanted to spend no longer than necessary thinking about the dark things the world could bring into being. He got on with his job, and then he went home and got on with his life. After two earlier investigations into the deeds of multiple murderers, he'd lost interest in the workings of their minds. It was something you could only take so much of before you started feeling sick inside.

  Once you got behind the glamour of their celebrity, Zandt knew that serial killers were not the way they were portrayed in the movies: charming geniuses, slick with evil, charismatic crusaders of a bloody art. They were more like drunkards or the slightly mad. Impossible to talk to, or to get sense out of, sealed off from the world behind a viewpoint that could never be expressed or made accessible to those who lived outside it. They came in all shapes, sizes, and types. Some were mons
trous, others were fairly decent individuals—aside, that is, from the propensity to kill other people and ruin the lives of those who had loved them. Jeffrey Dahmer had initially made every effort not to yield to urges that he knew placed his desires well outside normal life. He failed, big-time. He did not ask for clemency when caught, did not play games with the police, did nothing except admit his guilt and express sorrow at what he had done. Within the confines of being a murderous sociopath, he behaved as well as he could. The fact remained that he had ended the lives of at least sixteen young men in circumstances almost too horrendous to believe.

  Other killers basked in their notoriety, bartered for publicity or privileges through manipulation of the media and police, toying with the grief of the people from whom they had amputated something irreplaceable. They revelled in what they had done, in their rich secrets. They devoured the newspaper coverage of their trials, profoundly content that they had finally achieved the attention they had always felt they deserved. This did not necessarily make them worse. It simply made them different. Ted Bundy. The Casting Agent. John Wayne Gacy. Philippe Gomez. The Yorkshire Ripper. Andrei Chikatilo. Some were better looking, some were more efficient; some intelligent, some border-line or even demonstrably subnormal. Some came across like regular guys; others you would have thought could have been spotted as wackos from across a busy street. None were special humans or touched with evil except in the most superficial sense. All were simply men with a craving to take the lives of other people, to augment their sexual experience with the torture and degradation of others. They were not demons. They were just men—and women, very occasionally—who did unacceptable things, as a factor of neurotic obsession. It was not a binary of good or evil, but a spectrum also inhabited by people who had to check their locks ten times at night, or who could not rest until the kitchen was tidy after each meal. Serial killers were not chilling in and of themselves. The chill was in the realization that it is possible to be human without feeling as other humans do. Zandt knew the factors that could produce a serial killer. A violent and domineering mother, an abusive or weak father. Early and conflictive sexual experience, especially with parents, siblings, or animals. Being a native of America, the former Soviet Union, or Germany, areas that produce multiple murderers out of all proportion to their populations. Exposure to dead bodies at a formative age. Head injuries, or juvenile heavy metal poisoning—the elements, not the music. A trigger event, something that caused the potential to be actualized. None were necessary or sufficient conditions, merely part of a syndrome that sometimes provided a soil dark enough to yield a sickly flower of urges: an anxious, neurotic and violent individual who could not live as others did. The shadow in our streets. The bogeyman.

  He'd seen enough of them. He didn't want to know any more. In his private thoughts, he always referred to The Casting Agent as just that: The Casting Agent. He went to some trouble not to think of him by his real name, but to assign to him the same cartoonish unreality that the killer had evidently believed his victims to possess. If he had been unable to credit the six young boys with the dignity of their individuality, then Zandt felt it was the least he could do to consign The Casting Agent to the same fate.

  In the meantime he worked the usual drug-, love-, and profit-related murders. He drank with colleagues, listened to Nina talk about her attempts to connect Josie Ferris, Elyse LeBlanc, and Annette Mattison's disappearances. He had dinner with his wife, drove his daughter places, went to the gym.

  On May 15th 2000, Karen Zandt left school at the end of the day. She didn't come home.

  At first her parents assumed the best. Then the worst. A sweater was delivered three endless weeks later.

  Zandt called Nina. She arrived very quickly with two colleagues. The parcel was unwrapped. This time there was no name embroidered on the sweater inside, and it was not Karen's sweater. Hers had been peach in colour; this was black.

  There was a note tucked into it, laser-printed in Courier on a paper stock used in offices and homes across the country.

  Mr Zandt,

  A 'delivery'. You'll have to wait for the rest.

  I have seen thy affliction and the work of thine hands, and rebuked thee.

  The Upright Man

  •••

  A month after that, the body of Annette Mattison was found in a canyon in the Hollywood Hills. Same condition as Elyse LeBlanc, same lack of forensic evidence. No other girls were abducted, at least none whose disappearance was subsequently marked by the delivery of a garment. No other bodies were ever found.

  •••

  After two hours the Promenade was nearly deserted. Barnes and Noble and Starbucks were shut. People shuffled past the bench periodically, winos on their way to the Palisades for the night, pulling neat little trolleys with their belongings. They saw a man who sat with his hands lying open by his sides, eyes staring straight down the street. No one pulled over to ask for money. They steered clear.

  Eventually Zandt stood up and dropped his empty cup in the trash. He realized that he could have gone into the bookstore and established what points within it could have given The Upright Man a vantage from which to watch for Sarah Becker. Though there was no physical evidence for this, Zandt believed he staked out his victims carefully before striking. A few didn't, most did. It could have been that Karen had been a special case; The Upright Man making a point. Zandt didn't think so. The girls were too similar, the disappearances too immaculately wrought.

  Barnes and Noble could wait, possibly for ever. He had allowed Nina to convince him to come back. He had wanted to believe that this time it would be different, that he would be able to do more than run around the city, chasing his tail, shouting in the night, never finding the man who had taken his daughter from him. Who had taken Zandt's life in the palm of his hidden, rabid hand, and crushed it to death. Tonight he didn't believe it any more.

  He walked back to The Fountain, picking up a few groceries on the way. The lobby of the apartment building was empty, with nobody behind the desk. There was no Muzak, and little reason to believe that there was anyone apart from him inside. The elevator ascended slowly and fitfully, letting him know that its was a difficult task.

  While he waited for water to boil he stood and watched the television, as CNN did its best to reduce the world's complexity to bullet points a businessman could parrot over lunch. After a few minutes it cut back to a breaking story. A middle-aged man had walked down the high street of a small town in England, late in the morning. He'd had a rifle, with which he'd killed eight adults and wounded fourteen others.

  Nobody knew why.

  Chapter 9

  I was sitting in the passenger seat of my car with the door open. It was just after eight in the morning. I had a latte in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. My eyes were wide and dry and I was already regretting the cigarette. I used to smoke. I smoked a lot, for a long time. Then I gave it up. But during the night, which I had spent driving slowly and aimlessly down unlit roads as if trying to find the exit from an endless system of tunnels, I'd come to believe that smoking was the only thing that was going to help. Once you've smoked for a while, there are situations where you're always going to feel something's missing if you don't have a tube of burning leaves in your hand. Without a cigarette you feel friendless and clueless and alone.

  I was parked on the main street of Red Lodge, a small town maybe a hundred and twenty miles southeast of Dyersburg. I was sitting in the car because the shop where I'd bought the coffee—a spick-and-span little place where the staff wore aprons and dimply little smiles—was adamant in its resistance to the tobacco arts. The quality of coffee a place sells these days is in inverse proportion to the likelihood of them letting you have a cigarette while you're drinking it. The latte was extremely good: they had smokers' heads stuffed and hung on the wall. I'd bad-temperedly taken my coffee to go, and watched through the windshield as Red Lodge gradually came to life. People walked to and fro, opened up little stores sell
ing stuff you buy to prove you've been on vacation. Some guys arrived with pots of paint and started making a house on the other side of the street look more lovely. A few tourists appeared, bundled up in ski wear to the point where they were almost spherical.

  I got halfway through a second cigarette, winced, and threw it outside on the ground. It wasn't helping. It was just something to feel guilty about. Plus I gather it's bad for you. Knowing that my willpower is about as weak as the light from the farthest star on a cloudy night, I grabbed the pack off the dash and tossed it toward a trashcan, which was nailed to a nearby pole and emblazoned with wholesome civic slogans. The pack went in without even touching the rim. No one was there to see it. They never are. It must be weird, being a professional basketball player. People are there to see it when you get them in.