She exits the store in her new persona, just another of the multitudes of waifs in this city, this neighborhood.
Ragged people sprawl on the sidewalks, panhandling and playing guitars and sometimes drawing elaborate murals on the concrete with rainbow chalks. Hippie ghosts flit at streetcorners, but meth has taken its toll; the homeless are rarely beatific, more usually ravaged and desperate.
The actual numbers of homeless have skyrocketed since the recession. She has seen it on her travels. It was getting better for a while, now it is far worse. And so many of them are kids. She looks at the ragged packs of young people and she knows it is not by accident that she has made her way here.
She stops on the corner of Haight and Asbury, looking up at a stopped clock atop one of the buildings, forever fixed at four-twenty.
She turns toward the next street… and sees a For Rent sign. The street address is 420.
She shoulders her bag and walks toward it.
The manager of 420 is a going-on-elderly Indian man with hazy eyes who has not the slightest interest in her; he is off on some distant plane of his own and will never be able to describe her even if he ever feels a desire to. He shows her the one-room plus kitchenette and bath in the crumbling Victorian, furnished with a bed, a bureau, a love seat, a folding table and one chair. She can see the stopped clock on the corner of Haight and Ashbury from the recessed window.
Even better, in the hall just outside the room there is a side fire escape down to the street, in good working order, and another staircase up to the roof. Three accessible exits.
She hands the manager cash and he hands her a room key. Done.
Alone in the room, she puts her few items in the battered bureau, then stands in the middle of the floor, luxuriating in the sense of history in the room. There is a windowseat in the rounded window, and she drifts to it and sits, looking out the curved glass of the windows at the perfect view of the street, so like a circus from this vantage.
Enormous sculpted plaster legs in fishnets and red high heels protrude from the upper windows of a sex toy shop. Outside a health food store bins of colorful organic fruits and vegetables line the sidewalk. Musicians play on street corners. Skate punks cruise past shopping hipsters.
She sits and rests and watches, like a cat in the windowsill. And when it is dark, she curls up there and sleeps.
Chapter Ten
As so often lately, Roarke woke and had to lie still a moment until he could remember where he was. The fog drifting in the pre-dawn outside his window was the clue. His own bed this time… alone, as he has been for too long, now. And no messages, which meant Cara still walked free.
He checked in with his surveillance, then after he’d showered and dressed, the back-up shift of agents who had replaced Epps and Jones at 1:00 a.m. tailed him to work along his usual route: walking the deserted sidewalks to the BART stop, riding the train to Civic Center, strding through the plaza, past sleeping homeless and pigeons to the Federal Building. There were no blitz attacks by crazed female serial killers and Roarke felt a little ridiculous. It seemed glaringly evident what they were doing, the most clumsy and predictable of stings.
Then again, no one was seriously expecting Cara to attack him. All they had to do was catch her following, or watching.
But privately Roarke was sure she wasn’t going to come near… unless there was something more to draw her. It was time for a new plan.
***
Dawn is a curious shade of gray; the fog drifting outside the windows above her is so thick it is nearly impossible to tell the time of day.
She re-dresses in faded jeans and a thick pullover with a high neck, and goes downstairs, silent steps on the worn carpet of the stairs, out into the mist. The shops are closed, metal gates pulled over windows, and there are huddled bundles of people sleeping in every third doorway, some alone, some in clusters; some sheltered by cardboard structures, some cocooned in sleeping bags, amorphous, sexless lumps. She passes a group of three outside a record store, one curled in fetal position around a skateboard, another with one shoeless foot sticking out of a blanket, an empty bag of chips between them. Further down the street someone has chained his bicycle to a parking meter and draped a tarp over it to make himself a tent. Pigeons strut at the curb beside him, feeding on what is left of his meal. The sheer number of camping homeless is startling, as is the apparent tolerance for their makeshift accommodations: a patrol car cruises by without even slowing to take notice.
She stops and watches the taillights disappear into the mist, and knows that something will happen today. She is not done after all.
***
In the division offices, Roarke’s team assembled in the conference room over scones and coffee in black cups emblazoned with the FBI seal, and Roarke listened to reports of — nothing. There had been no sign of Cara the night before. In a rebellious part of his mind he exulted in the idea that she would not fall for such an obvious set-up.
At the end of Jones’ report, Roarke stood. “I’m not going to sit around in my apartment day after day waiting for her to maybe show up. Nights, okay, stake me out.” He looked around the table at his agents. “My bet, though? She’s not going to show.”
There was an edge in Epps’ voice. “Got something else in mind?”
Roarke looked back across the table. “Yeah, I do. I’m going to look into the original Reaper case. I have some new potential information to start with—”
“What does that have to do with catching Cara Lindstrom?” Epps was saying, before Roarke had even finished.
Roarke kept his voice even. “You don’t think that would draw her? An investigation into the man who killed her family?”
Epps was silent.
“I see,” Singh said, and Roarke was encouraged by the thoughtful tone of her voice.
“What’s this new information?” Epps demanded.
“When I talked to Randall Trent and Erin McNally, they both mentioned the same thing.”
“The rabbit,” Singh said, and the men turned to her. “It wasn’t in the police reports.”
Roarke nodded to her. Epps looked from Singh to Roarke. Roarke let Singh tell it.
“According to Trent and Erin, Cara’s mother found a disemboweled jackrabbit on the porch of the house about a week before the massacre.”
Roarke continued. “Gillian Lindstrom told her sister-in-law Joan Trent about the rabbit, but Trent and Erin aren’t sure that Joan ever told the cops.”
“They are correct,” Singh affirmed. “I’ve searched through every police report. There is not one mention of the rabbit.”
Roarke felt that rush again. It is a new clue, then. After all these years. He was already on his feet. “It stands to reason Joan could have forgotten the detail in the aftermath of the massacres. And that’s part of a signature that might get us closer to a potential suspect.”
He could feel the quickening interest of his team. They were alert, leaning forward at the table. He felt the same excitement building himself.
“The Reaper completely disappeared after the Lindstrom murders. No similar murders ever turned up. There was never a trail. So either he’s dead, or he got himself arrested for something else entirely. What I propose is that we take the original BSU profile of the Reaper, get Snyder to look at it and add or subtract details, and start combing the prison databases for someone of that description who was arrested and sent up in 1987 or 1988.”
Jones looked skeptical. “But chances are this guy is dead, right? Realistically.”
“But she doesn’t know that,” Epps said. “If it looks like we’re looking for him, she’ll follow.” He looked at Roarke. “Right?”
Roarke had to breathe through a spike of adrenaline. “I think.”
“Two birds with one stone,” Epps said. Roarke’s exact thought.
Jones frowned. “How do we make her think that’s what we’re doing?”
It was a good question, one that had kept Roarke up most of the night.
“Tactically we have to get this investigation out into the open. She’s not going to infiltrate the building. I need to be out and about, doing things that she can observe and put together what we’re doing. What we want her to think we’re doing.”
“Or just do a press release that that we’re reopening this investigation,” Jones said.
“No,” Roarke and Epps said simultaneously, and looked at each other.
“We can’t,” Roarke explained to Jones. “It would cause a panic. We don’t need the public thinking that the Reaper is out there and active again.” Jones was too young to have any idea what it had been like to live under that shadowy threat.
The agents sat back in their chairs and thought it over.
“Get Snyder to come and meet with you somewhere in public to hand off the profile,” Epps mused aloud.
Roarke considered it. It made sense. Cara had researched Roarke from their one encounter; he knew she was perfectly capable of figuring out who Snyder was. “But why would she think we were meeting about the Reaper? The logical assumption would be it’s about her. We need to do something Reaper-specific.”
All the agents were silent again, thinking.
Roarke spoke first. “Arcata. That’s the site of the first family massacre.” A trip there, to the police department and the house where the Granger family was slain, might convince Cara they were re-investigating the Reaper. “She followed me to San Diego – probably from Blythe, and I never saw her. We know she’s comfortable on the road. How long a drive is it to Arcata? Or Bishop, the site of the second massacre?”
Singh’s fingers were already flying on the keyboard of her tablet, searching. “Five hours to Arcata, six and a half to Bishop.”
Roarke moved, impatiently. It was easy to forget how big California was. Cara might well follow them, but that was a long trip for their purposes, one that might lead nowhere. He spoke reluctantly. “It’s a possibility, but a long trip for a long shot. There might be a better way. I’m going to get Snyder’s input.”
Epps stood as well. “Go out of the building to do it, then. Go have breakfast, let Jones tail you. We stick to the first plan until we figure this the hell out.”
Though he felt foolish and conspicuous doing it, Roarke left the building and walked through the fog, over to a taqueria on MacAllister that had a wicked breakfast burrito. He was uncomfortably aware of Jones on his tail.
Inside the warm, mural-painted hole in the wall he ordered his comida to go, and then walked back out toward the plaza, through denizens of Market Street doing their business: spare-changing, hugging each other to slip various substances into pockets. The green smell of pot wafted through the air.
On the plaza he found a bench in between the rows of bare mulberry trees and unwrapped his burrito. Homeless drifted in front of him like dream figures in the fog, some lost and silent, some talking very actively to themselves and whoever else would listen. There were multitudes of them on San Francisco’s streets, drawn by the excellent services the city provided its most downtrodden: soup kitchens, shelters, free clinics. Since the recession, the population seemed to have doubled.
Roarke fixed on one ragged man who had stopped still on the pavement and was gently rocking on his heels, apparently listening to some inner voice.
As the Reaper might be doing right now.
Roarke found himself thinking back to a question that had plagued him ever since a psych residency after college: What made some of those voices turn people self-destructive, while others made the afflicted one torture and kill?
He pulled out his phone to call Snyder.
Snyder picked up his phone immediately, and Roarke didn’t bother with pleasantries.
“I need a profile. Unofficially and yesterday.” There were advantages to having a killer so unique that he could make that request to one of the best profilers in the field and know he’d comply.
“For Cara Lindstrom?” Snyder didn’t sound angry, but puzzled. He’d already profiled Cara, or rather forced Roarke to do his own profile and then agreed with it. Once a teacher, always a teacher.
“For the Reaper,” Roarke told him.
“Ah,” Snyder said. “Interesting.”
“And don’t tell me to do it myself, this time.”
Snyder laughed, a rare sound. “Matthew, I know your relationship to this case. I know you’ve had a profile in your head for years, decades, probably.”
It was true. At nine years old, Roarke had dreamed a monster killing those families. As a Behavioral Analysis trainee, one of the first things he’d done was to profile the Reaper.
“Haven’t you?” Snyder prodded.
“Of course,” Roarke admitted grudgingly.
“So?”
“All right.” Roarke glanced around him at the oddly-populated square and hunched on the bench, lowering his voice. “The frenziedness of the attacks indicates a highly disorganized killer, almost certainly psychotic.” He paused for a moment, studying the examples right in front of him in the plaza. One of the transients was now crouched on the pavement, tracing an intricate invisible pattern on the asphalt with his finger.
“I would say a likely paranoid schizophrenic: he has a fantasy of violent murder based on a delusion. The closest prototype I know of is Richard Trenton Chase.” Chase had shot and killed six people in the Sacramento area within the span of a month in late 1977 and 1978. Despite the relatively low body count he was one of the most notorious of serial killers, dubbed “The Vampire Killer,” “The Vampire of Sacramento,” and “The Dracula Killer,” for his gruesome signature behavior of drinking his victims’ blood and cannibalizing their remains.
Roarke could feel Snyder nodding agreement at the end of the line. “Chase is the most likely model, I agree. What specifics of Chase’s background and signature are you thinking of?”
Roarke had spent several hours last night refreshing his memory on the details. “Most obviously, in childhood he exhibited signs of the Macdonald triad.” In law enforcement this syndrome was also known as the “sociopathy triad”: pyromania, bedwetting and cruelty to animals. Almost a given with a serial killer. “As a teenager he was already a chronic alcoholic and substance abuser, primarily marijuana and LSD. He began to demonstrate paranoid and psychotic symptoms in his early twenties that had a very specific theme: a threat to his heart or his blood. He often complained that his heart had stopped beating, or that someone had stolen his pulmonary artery. He was involuntarily committed to a mental institution at the age of twenty-five after being caught injecting rabbit’s blood into his veins. He believed he needed the blood to prevent his heart from shrinking.”
“In the institution he continued to kill birds and drink their blood, and confessed to fantasies of killing animals, but his condition improved with a treatment of antipsychotics, and in 1976 he was released to the custody of his mother, who according to him had abused him as a child. She decided he didn’t need the medication and ‘weaned’ him off it. He was caught the next year in a field, naked and covered with what was determined to be cow’s blood, but was never charged with any crime. His killing spree began shortly afterward.”
Roarke paused for breath and Snyder prompted him. “So extrapolating from Chase to the Reaper?”
Roarke looked out over the plaza and the ragged denizens of the street.
“Our killer would have been young – early to late twenties, with an unkempt appearance and most likely living with a parent or other relative or recently out of such a situation. He would have demonstrated psychotic symptoms, a history of substance abuse, and antisocial behavior. He’s sexually dysfunctional; the piquerism is his subsitute for the sex act.”
He concentrated harder as he got down to the finer details. “He has a delusion that is satisfied or quieted by the violent slaying of families, specifically. These weren’t random crimes, he chose these families, and a certain kind of family: Middle - to - upper-middle class, educated parents, several children of pre-teen to teen age, and l
iving in smallish communities rather than cities.”
He didn’t even attempt to guess at what that delusion might be. He knew at the heart of it there was nothing poetic or metaphorical about it. The core motivation for all serial killers was the same: they got sexual release from rape, torture, pain, and murder. There was no other “why.” Trying to wrap it up in some elaborate psychological package was less than useless.
Aloud he continued, “Also it’s notable that the massacres all occurred in California towns quite some distance from each other, four or five hundred miles away.”
“And fairly equidistant,” Snyder pointed out.
“That’s true. That could get us somewhere.” Roarke considered it. It was called geographical profiling, an investigative methodology that analyzed the locations of a series of crimes to determine where the perpetrator was most likely to reside. While geographical analysis had always figured into criminal investigation to some extent, the formalized method known as geographical profiling had not been developed until two years after the Lindstrom massacre and would not have been used in compiling a profile. Roarke felt a warm rush of significance as he realized that.
Snyder was thinking aloud. “A key principle in the geographical profiling model is that offenders will generally travel only limited distances to commit crimes. Put this together with the Reaper’s very disordered mind and it’s a conundrum, these distances. To have a hunting zone of the entire state of California, the Reaper must have traveled quite a lot, regularly, for some reason.”
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