by Ann Benson
“Probably not. It’s likely that they were selected. Your perp—if you have one guy doing all of this, as it looks on the surface—likes little blond white boys for some reason. What you need to know is why.”
I gestured with my hands as if to say, That’s why I’m here. . . .
He smiled. “A fixation of some kind, most likely. If you can’t get the real thing, you go for the nearest equivalent.”
“Didn’t really seem to work for Bundy,” I said. “He did it over and over again.”
“That’s because the equivalent—which can never be more than a substitute—rarely satisfies the original need that leads to the fixation in the first place. He experienced temporary release, but the original need for legitimacy remained. So he had to keep killing. That’s why you see the intervals shortening in cases like that. What happens over time is that the act, whatever it is—murder or rape or abduction—loses its potency and has to be repeated more frequently. Have you established a time line for these cases?”
Yeah, in my spare time. “No, not yet.”
“Well, that would be my next order of business, if I were you.”
“What should I be looking for?”
“Don’t look for anything. Keep an open mind and see what’s there, not what you want to be there. A killer’s pattern isn’t always as regular as we’d like. Of course, it’s helpful when it is.”
He was saying killer. I wasn’t even saying killer yet because we had no bodies, just holes in the ether where bodies used to be. I was vibing killer, though, and he was picking up on that. “Yeah,” I said. “Helpful.”
“Sorry. That’s the best I can tell you. Patterns vary, based on a number of factors.” He moved to one of his overstuffed bookcases and for a few quiet seconds he perused the vertical spines. I think he had some kind of homing device, because I could never have found anything in that mess. Saying “Ah, here we are” under his breath, he pulled out a book and handed it to me. “Not exactly bedtime reading, but this is a very good study on the psyche of serial killers. You’ll get a lot of information from it. Right now, though, to speed things along for you, I can tell you that the intervals generally shrink from where they start out. If the interval is initially a couple of weeks or a month, it will shorten to two weeks, then maybe ten days, et cetera. By the time they’re down to a few days, you usually catch them because they’re rushing and out of control, and they start to make mistakes.”
“I love it when they make those mistakes.”
“Yes,” he said. “Mistakes on the part of a killer can be quite welcome. But it doesn’t look like your perp is at that point yet. From what you’ve said, this grab was pretty seamless, as were the other two you have deep dirt on. I’ll be interested to see how the other cases shake down in terms of the intervals. When you do establish the pattern of his timing, you’ll have two pieces of information about this guy. You already know what his fixation is, and then you’ll know how desperate he is.”
I was beginning to wonder if he recalled our previous conversation, the one in which we talked about Nathan Leeds’s mother. “Doc,” I said, “if I have a serial abductor on my hands, I’m not sure it’s a guy.”
He stared at me. “Is there some reason to think this is a woman?”
“The Leeds case, remember? The mother who we thought might have Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome because she appeared to have abducted her own kid?”
“Oh, right . . .” he said absently. Somehow he’d made a leap to the next level of assumption and he’d forgotten to tell me. “Well, it’s extremely unlikely that this would be a woman.”
I was confused. “I’ve seen his mother up close. She really is a woman.”
“Look beyond that for a moment, Detective. These crimes are almost never committed by women, and you said yourself, as I recall, that you didn’t think she was ‘the type.’ Has your opinion on that changed?”
“No.”
He crumpled up the sandwich wrapper and soft-touched it into the wastebasket. “The statistics are overwhelmingly in favor of your abductor being male. It’s just not part of the basic female psyche to do this sort of thing.”
All of a sudden I felt like our roles were reversed. “We’re not talking about a normal psyche here.”
“That doesn’t really matter. Even the most aberrant female psyches rarely get to that place.”
“What about that woman in Florida—” I stammered without recall, then it came to me. “Wuornos. She killed a dozen guys that they know about.”
“I’m not deeply familiar with that case. But I do know she was atypical in many ways. And I do remember reading that there were cross-gender issues there.”
“There could be here too. This is California.”
“Land of the free,” he said with a jaded smile. He came around from behind the desk and sat on the front edge. He stared down professorially and said, “Look, Detective Dunbar, of course it’s technically possible for your perp to be a woman. It’s also technically possible, but not likely, that O.J. didn’t do it. I just don’t want to see you spinning your wheels, especially where we have an ongoing situation. I would strongly urge you to operate on the assumption that you have a male offender here.”
“But the abductor looked like a woman last time—”
He cut me off with a negative shake of his head. “Remember what I told you a few minutes ago, to see what’s really there, not what you want to see? What appears to be there is a woman, but it may only have been an illusion of a woman. If that’s the case, and I suspect it is, you now know three things about this guy: his fixation for little blond white boys, his timing when you establish it, and that he’s got a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing M.O. working. It’s possible that he makes himself look like something he’s not to gain the confidence and trust of his victims. Woman or man, he approaches his victims as a person they believe to be trustworthy. No wonder he’s gone undetected. Clever, very clever. I would like to stay very close to the working of this one, Detective Dunbar. It’s a very interesting case, to say the least.”
He had copyright and royalties written all over his face, along with national recognition. It was clinical and theoretical to him, and I could see that he was enjoying the academic exercise. But I was the one who was going to have to find this shape-shifter, who would look completely different from one incident to the next.
I went right to the files to pull out all the photos of the victims and scan them, so while I was doing that I ordered them chronologically by date of disappearance in a photo viewer. Not only would I be able to show Fred the similarities of appearance, but I would be able to establish a timing pattern as well. Killing two birds with one stone.
But by the time I’d finished, one of the birds had risen from the dead, flapped its wings, and was throwing stones back at me. The gaps between the disappearances were big and irregular—not a couple of weeks or a month as Doc had intimated, but multiple months with unpredictable gaps, the shortest of which was eight weeks. There was no discernible pattern.
See what’s really there, not what you want to see. Easy for Errol Erkinnen to say.
I grabbed Spence and Escobar by the arms and dragged them both to my desk. “Take a look at this for me,” I said, almost pleading.
“What are we looking for?” Spence asked.
“Nothing. Just tell me what you see.”
“I see a lot of dates. You must be looking for a pattern here.”
“Well, duh.”
“I hate to say it, Lany, but I don’t see one here.”
To my expression of dismay, Escobar said, “It could just mean that there are unreported abductions in between the ones we know about. Or that your guy is operating out of another geographical location. Maybe he’s bicoastal or something like that.”
I asked myself how I’d gotten from a mother with Munchausen-by-proxy to a bicoastal serial abductor overnight. A very good question, one for which I didn’t have an answer.
Fred was walking th
rough the squad room. He’d wanted to wait until tomorrow, but I had them now. I almost lunged at him as he passed by my cubicle.
“I got those pics,” I called out over the sound of voices and the ringing of phones.
He was the very image of annoyance, but he gave in; I must have looked like I was going to cry. “Come on, then,” he said.
I picked up my picture board and followed him to his office. I set it up on his desk as he looked disgustedly through a stack of small papers, each of which mandated a return phone call. He regarded the board for a few moments, his eyes going critically from one to the next. “I can see your point,” he said. “Looks like a multiple birth.”
“So?”
A brief, noncommittal silence passed. “So I’ll take it under consideration,” he said finally.
“Fred, I could really use some help.”
He was quiet again for a few moments, thinking hard. “If this is one guy, he just grabbed a kid, so we’re at the beginning of one of his gaps and we’ve got some time before the next one. Be patient and keep investigating.”
“I’ll be sure to tell the next parent that that’s what I’m doing.”
“That’s it. This meeting is over.”
I slithered out, looking for someone to sink my fangs into. A few minutes later, Fred showed up at my desk.
“Look, I can do this: I’ll free you up so you can concentrate on it. Give all your other cases to me and I’ll pass them around.”
I had trouble hiding my disappointment. “I was hoping for a little more than that.”
“Not yet, Dunbar. You’re gonna have to have something more compelling than this for me to show the folks upstairs before I can give you extra help. But I won’t let anyone give you anything new.”
For the time being, it would have to do.
I decided, as soon as Fred gave me his dictum, that since my kids were going to an exhibit with their father that evening and staying at his house for the next two nights, I would spend all of Saturday and Sunday morning going through the new cases, maybe even contacting some of the folks whose children had disappeared. But before I left the office, I called the elderly Mrs. Paulsen to ask her the question about medication.
“I need to ask you a rather personal question,” I began.
“Well, I’ll do my best to answer.”
“If we catch the person who abducted Nathan Leeds, we’re going to have to build a case. Part of that case would be your testimony. Any decent trial lawyer will try to undermine your credibility. I need to know, before we go any further, if you are taking any medications that might affect your memory.”
“Oh, goodness. That’s not personal. I thought you were going to ask me something about my sex life.”
Please, God, let me grow old like this. “Well, no. Nothing like that.”
“Detective, I don’t even take aspirin.”
“You’re not on any blood-pressure or glaucoma medication, or anything for diabetes?” I asked, running through the typical problems that elderly people are likely to have.
“I’m healthy as that old horse they keep talking about.”
“How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Now you’re getting personal.” She laughed a little. “Eighty-four down and sixteen to go.”
“It’s always a good thing to have goals, I guess.”
“It is indeed, Detective. Keeps you going.”
A goal had been dropped into my lap, one that would certainly “keep me going”; the only question was how long.
“Thanks very much, Mrs. Paulsen. Someone from the prosecutor’s office will be calling you when the time comes.”
That was my last task of the official day. It’s my habit on Friday to straighten up my desk a bit so that it’s not in total disarray when I get in on Monday. I was planning to be there on Saturday, but habits are hard to break, so I put things in order, even though I’d be messing them up again. I guess messing up is a relative thing—to me, it means a pencil out of place or a pad out of square to the corner. When all else fails, I clean.
The traffic was lighter than what I was accustomed to at my usual departure time. So often going home at the height of rush hour, I’ve been tempted to put the flashing blue light on the dashboard and just power my way through. Never did it, though. There’s this thing I have about abusing my position. Other cops do it; I’ve seen it myself once or twice on the freeway. But not me—not enough testosterone, I guess.
Dinner was leftover chili. I missed the kids, though they were probably pretty happy, because Kevin was less strict with them and had a far better collection of video games. I worried about that sometimes, that they wouldn’t do their homework and they would succumb to the influences of popular culture, which I’ve been fighting off since the day they were born. With some success—Frannie is a bookworm, and Julia the creative type; they always find productive things to do. But Evan could just get lost in the PlayStation, and he was a lot more vulnerable to societal pressures. He was the one I worried about most. He was my first child, and I’m certain that I made a lot of mistakes raising him.
But this weekend they could turn their brains to mush for all I cared. Their father would take good care of them—they would come back to me on Sunday night well-fed and properly loved. And that was all that mattered.
After a quick shower and a glass of red wine, I got into bed, Erkinnen’s book in hand.
Serial Killers: The Ultimate Reference
Once I had the pillows just where I wanted them, I cracked the book open and perused the table of contents. The case studies were of killers who were uncomfortably familiar to me. I suspect that was probably what at least a couple of them wanted, that blazing fame and immortality. There was a section on historical killers; some I’d heard of, some not. Jack the Ripper—who hasn’t heard of him; Vlad Tepes, the legendary impaler, on whom the character of Count Dracula was based; Elizabeth Bathory, the countess who thought the blood of a virgin would keep her skin from wrinkling and regularly bathed in it. Gilles de Rais, a name I didn’t know, who came down through history to us as Bluebeard, according to the subtitle of the chapter.
I had always thought Bluebeard was a pirate. I guess that was Blackbeard.
There was a chapter that gave an overview of methods, another that gave detailed descriptions of the conditions that shaped men with violent tendencies into the worst kinds of monsters. I thought about that one for a moment and realized that I would probably find something in that chapter that I did to my own kids, and then I would have one more thing to feel guilty about as a parent. Not a good idea when they were off with their father. But I couldn’t seem to resist it.
A lot of what the book put forth was just common sense. Take all of the qualities we consider weird or perverted and roll them all into one person. Ninety percent of them were bed wetters, and most of those reported a serious conflict with the parent or caretaker over that issue. More than eighty percent were abused as children. Most were shy by nature or, more accurately, socially withdrawn. The author theorized that physical and sexual abuse, usually by the dominant male in their lives, was at the core of that. A few of the killers studied reported that their mothers or grandmothers had fondled them or forced them to have sex.
Sick fucking bitches.
And Erkinnen was right—the strongest predictor of a human being becoming a serial killer, at least according to this author, was simply being born with a Y chromosome. Sure, there was a lot more to it than that, or the whole world would be in trouble—they were fire starters and drug users and alcoholics and sexual addicts. But maleness was the overwhelmingly common factor.
They killed small animals as young boys and teenagers and shunned the company of others in social situations. They were loners who avoided all unnecessary contact. They were trouble in school, poor learners despite their solid intelligence. They were sociopaths who could not feel remorse and psychopaths who were beyond control.
But most of all,
they were fantasizers. They thought about what they were going to do before they got up the balls to actually do it. Some reported elaborate internal preparations for their crimes. . . .
I put my finger in the page and closed the book for a moment. Elaborate internal preparations. My guy must have done that—it looked like he went at least two months between grabs, so he had to be doing something in that time. But what about the physical preparation? That would have to play a big role in this case, if Doc was right.
I slipped a hairpin onto the top of the page to mark my place and set the book down. It wasn’t exactly bedtime reading, and now I’d polluted myself with something I was going to think about and think about until it made more sense to me. And probably dream about that night.
My last thought before unconsciousness was that I would soon be buying Doc another lunch.
A discernible sense of lightness came over me on Saturday morning as I looked at the neat stack of current case folders I would hand Fred on Monday. One of the open cases, an assault, would probably never get to court—there were credible eyewitnesses and solid physical evidence, and if the perp had half a brain or an even mediocre lawyer he’d plead to a lesser charge and save us all the headache of having to nail his ass to the wall. Either way he would get out too soon and just do it again as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Some days I wonder why I bother to show up here at all.
Who am I trying to kid—sitting right here on my desk is the reason, or reasons if you want to get semantic: Nathan Leeds, Larry Wilder, and Jared McKenzie, and the other ten who look just like them. The lightness I felt just a few minutes before dissipated and was replaced by a heavy sense of foreboding.
Of course, these thirteen cases were all individual and legally separate, but I knew in my heart they were connected, even if Fred was in denial. Slightly askew in the stack of files was that lovely little monkey wrench, the Garamond case. One ragged corner stuck out accusingly. I shoved it back in place and lined up all the edges.
