by Jess Walter
“He’s getting angrier,” McDaniel said to Spivey. “He put money in her mouth as a sign of his anguish over oral sex—”
“He ran out of fucking rubber bands!” Blanton interrupted without looking up from a report he was writing. This was a ten-year argument they’d apparently dragged into this investigation and from the two or three times Caroline already had heard it, she surmised that the debate boiled down to whether or not a killer’s signature—his unique crime scene behavior—constituted only his obsessive, subconscious activity or also encompassed the more standard MO, the things he did to commit and cover up a crime. Like the others, this victim’s fingernails had been torn away with pliers and the fingers scrubbed. Both profilers acknowledged this was part fetish, part reasoned attempt to destroy evidence. Their argument seemed to be over the fine point of whether it was a ritual that also concealed what he’d done, or an act of concealment that became ritualized.
“Pedestrian, small-minded hick,” McDaniel muttered as the argument faded.
“Bed-wetting thumb-sucking Freudian,” Blanton said.
It seemed to Caroline a ridiculous argument because they agreed on the larger point: that this preparation stage was Ryan’s signature. Immediately after each murder he hid the bodies and continued to visit each corpse, baby-sitting it, fulfilling his emotional need for control while also preparing it for discovery by the police. In this stage, he scrubbed the bodies and planted forty dollars and most likely masturbated. Both men said this preparation of bodies was what kept them interested in the case even after it turned from a profiling job to a manhunt. Blanton talked about how Ryan incorporated aspects of five or six killers that he’d tracked over the years (the fingernails, for instance, were right out of a case he’d handled in Texas), while McDaniel talked about the rare chance to catch a monster who was evolving before their eyes.
But after watching them, Caroline believed that each man stayed to get under the skin of the other, to keep an eye on the competition and fight over publicity, to look for material for their next books. They circled each other like vultures and contributed little to the practical aspects of the investigation—the stakeouts and interviews—spending all their time on their insular, peculiar science. At one meeting, Caroline read over Blanton’s shoulder: “Due to a lack of early microbial activity and the postmortem displacement of the right clavicle, the remains were moved two weeks prior to their discovery.” Caroline was stumped by his mathematical surety.
A week after the fifth victim was found, dental records were compared to those of Rae-Lynn Pierce and determined not to be hers, but likely those of the missing Jane Doe they called “Risa,” who still existed only as a street name. While it bothered Caroline that they couldn’t even assign Risa a real name, Spivey and the profilers seemed far more comfortable with a body that had no connection to a living person.
With the frenzy of this new corpse, the focus shifted away from Caroline’s recent discovery of Lenny Ryan’s motive for killing Burn, and she felt herself pushed to the side by this humming and grinding machine, which the remains of poor Risa fed like fossil fuel. In the office, Caroline tended to her own small tasks, trying to forget the idea that had begun choking her thoughts the last few weeks, stopping her cold in traffic or walking to the copy machine:
What if Lenny Ryan wasn’t killing these women?
It wasn’t some sudden piece of exculpatory evidence that sparked doubt in Caroline; in fact, she found few answers of any kind in the evidence. If anything, the evidence reinforced the idea that they were going after the right man—the great wall of Spivey’s timeline surrounding a city of cold forensics, witness interview cards, and credit card receipts that covered every desk in the task force office.
Still, this doubt crept up, catching her off guard like a boom in the distance. If only there were a conclusive semen sample or eyewitness. Instead, the evidence served only to not eliminate Ryan. It was like building a house with all windows but no doors.
Of course, she knew thousands of suspects convicted on less evidence. By its nature, such an investigation involved lining up coincidences until you eliminated all other explanations and arrived at a premise. Spivey’s timeline provided the premise: the murders, which began about two weeks after Lenny Ryan left prison; his skulking around asking about hookers; the murders of Burn, Uncle Albert, and the pawnbroker; Caroline chasing Ryan into the alley where the fourth body was found; his fingerprints on the refrigerator there; his following Rae-Lynn the day she and Risa disappeared. Even the gloomy county prosecutor had begun talking about this as a death penalty case.
No, she knew her doubts were irrational. Dupree had even invented a name for what she felt—Yearbook Syndrome. Whenever they interviewed the relative of a suspect, invariably that person dragged out a yearbook, pointed to the picture of a shy, pimple-covered kid, and said emphatically, “See. He didn’t do it.”
That’s what I have, Caroline thought, a kind of Yearbook Syndrome by proxy. She had deluded herself into believing that she knew Lenny Ryan. She had stood face-to-face with him and she’d felt the distance between them close. So there it was. The inglorious return of her intuition, six years after Dupree made off with it, telling her that if Ryan had a solid motive for killing Burn, wouldn’t there be a motive for killing the hookers too, beyond the psychological backflips described by Blanton and McDaniel?
She never mentioned her doubts to Spivey or to the profilers, of course, who were more convinced than ever that Ryan was the killer. The fact that Ryan blamed Burn for Shelly Nordling’s death didn’t eliminate the idea that Ryan was acting out his twisted resentment against all prostitutes. If anything, the letter from Shelly’s old group home just reinforced their basic theory: Lenny Ryan was acting from a deep-seated obsession over what he felt was Shelly Nordling’s betrayal of him.
Whenever she spoke to one of the profilers, Caroline found herself convinced by their surety. Blanton persuaded her that she could never understand Ryan or his violent sexual fantasies. McDaniel convinced her that a monster wasn’t something you saw, but the sum of the things you didn’t see, the childhood failings and disappointments, the insecurities and rejections.
But when she was alone, at home or in traffic, Caroline remembered Lenny Ryan’s eyes. She had been surprised to find not a monster in those eyes, but herself, her fear, her temper, her frustrated attempts to find explanations, to make the world fit into a child’s box. And when she felt like this, the evidence and the ever-expanding work of the profilers seemed just a few degrees off, even purposefully misleading, like the illusion of an urn made up of two men’s profiles. While the rest of the task force worked to describe the urn, Caroline couldn’t stop seeing the two faces.
She looked up at Blanton and McDaniel, physical opposites angled across from each other at the big conference table: Blanton short, squat, and pale, like he’d come out of a can; McDaniel tall, tanned, and buff. Across the table sat Spivey and a slight woman who’d been introduced to Caroline as an assistant producer from Dateline. It was McDaniel’s idea that some national publicity might bring a tip on Ryan’s whereabouts or maybe even draw him out. Key to their plan was creating what McDaniel called the “super-antagonist model,” directing Ryan’s attention to one police officer, an “alpha cop” that Ryan would imagine as a worthy foe and would find himself irresistibly compelled to contact. Caroline had been that foe early on, both profilers agreed, but for whatever reason, Ryan was no longer engaged by her. So they needed Dateline to create a new opponent—actually, two, since neither Blanton nor McDaniel was willing to step aside.
“From the Bureau’s standpoint, this is a groundbreaking case,” McDaniel told the assistant producer, who was there to do leg-work before the rest of the crew arrived that afternoon. She was a slender, attractive woman in black pants, black shirt, and black shoes. A size zero, Caroline guessed. She worked the profilers, shaking her head and saying “Wow!” as they described their harrowing work. McDaniel especially ate it
up.
“The role of the FBI Investigative Support Unit has always been just that: to support local law enforcement,” he said. “But in this case, we’re going a step further, using profiling to anticipate Ryan’s next move, to actually catch him. And for me?” McDaniel stuck out that ledge of a jaw, and leaned forward until his face was just inches from the assistant producer’s. “I need to catch this guy. For me, it’s personal.”
“Wow!” The producer jotted some notes, “make sure you say that to the reporter when we’re on air tonight. Just like that.”
McDaniel tried to be nonchalant. “Who will the reporter be?”
The assistant producer tossed off a name.
“Ah,” said McDaniel. “Mmm-hmm. It’s just…people have said I look like Stone Phillips. I thought it’d be interesting to see the two of us side-by-side.”
No one said anything, but Blanton turned and made eye contact with Caroline.
“Yeah, well, Stone doesn’t leave the studio much,” the assistant producer said.
“There’s the resemblance,” said Blanton. “Neither does he.”
From her desk across the room, Caroline watched McDaniel glare at Blanton. With serial killers fading in popularity, with Spokane in the middle of nowhere, and with only eight victims—five of them hookers—getting the attention of anyone beyond America’s Most Wanted was going to be tough, and so McDaniel had convinced Spivey to play up the role of the profilers, the idea that the top experts in the country were working together for the first time in a decade to catch a killer. Just as McDaniel had predicted, the angle elevated the story to network newsmagazine fodder. Tonight they were taking Blanton and McDaniel to the dump site along the river, where they would film the two super-sleuths digging in dirt and staring wistfully out at the river, spouting horseshit to draw Lenny Ryan out: For me, it’s personal.
“What about you, Mr. Blanton?” the assistant producer asked. “How has this case affected you personally?”
“Well, I’m no longer working as a prostitute. So that’s good.”
McDaniel cleared his throat and stepped in. “It’s impossible to not take this case personally. Even before we identified Ryan, when we were dealing with an UNSUB—”
The assistant producer interrupted. “Unsub?”
“Sorry,” McDaniel said, reaching for her arm. “Bureau talk. Even when we were dealing with an unknown subject, it was apparent his communication with the police, his taunting, was a key part of his fantasy. The killer’s focus started with these women, but now it sits squarely on the shoulders of Mr. Blanton and me.”
Again, Blanton looked uncomfortable and sought out Caroline’s eyes. But she spun away in her chair and picked up the phone to make her weekly calls to Rae-Lynn’s family and friends. That list of phone contacts had reached twenty, but no one had heard from her. Blanton and McDaniel said she was likely dead and that her disappearance and the death of Risa marked a new period for Lenny Ryan in which he took longer with the bodies, perhaps out of disappointment over Caroline’s reaction to what they called “his gift”—the dead woman in the refrigerator. When no one answered the phone call, Caroline hung up the phone and glanced up at the conference table.
“What about the danger that Ryan poses?” the producer was asking. “If he has moved out of the area, are women elsewhere in danger? The woman leaving the gym? The mother going to the store? Me? Am I in danger?”
Blanton looked over at McDaniel. “Oh, you’re definitely in danger.”
Again, McDaniel jumped in. “Is there a danger? I would say yes.” He nodded, raised his eyebrows to the producer, and spoke more quietly. “Yes.”
Caroline couldn’t help wondering what Dupree would make of this, of this film crew dragging the profilers down to the riverbank. She hadn’t seen Dupree in three weeks, since the night he dropped his bombshell about Glenn Ritter, but she heard he’d requested early retirement. She called him once, but hung up when she got his voice mail and couldn’t imagine what to say. And then the new body surfaced and time just got away from her.
McDaniel was holding his index finger to his lip as he thought about a question the assistant producer had asked. He nodded slightly, as if he were about to admit wetting his bed. “For me? This job makes it hard to meet someone. Every relationship goes back to trust for me. A case like this makes it hard to…to trust.”
There was an awkward silence at the conference table in the center of the room, and then Spivey cleared his throat. All morning he’d been practicing the line McDaniel had given him and he offered it stiffly. “From my standpoint, it’s been a real education. If anyone can catch this killer, it’s these guys.”
There was another awkwardness, and Caroline was saved by the ring of her phone. She grabbed it as if it were a life preserver. “Mabry.”
“Where have you been? I’ve been leaving messages at your house.”
It was Joel. “I got them,” she said. “I’ve been really busy.”
“I need to see you.”
“Can’t,” she said, “I’m invisible.” She smiled because it was so stupid, something Dupree would throw off. In front of her, they were standing at the conference table now, the producer making plans to meet Spivey and the two profilers later at the dump site. The phone at her ear, Caroline watched McDaniel work the skinny, young producer, his pelvis thrust forward, hands on his hips.
“I understand why you’re mad,” Joel said.
“I’m not mad,” she answered, and that seemed true enough.
“Disappointed, then. I understand. I’ve been disappointed with myself.”
“Joel, this really isn’t the time…”
“I was immature. I made a mistake. I was afraid.” The words tumbled from the phone. “Can’t I see you?”
“I’m very busy, Joel.”
“There’s someone else, isn’t there?”
“No,” she said, “there’s no one else.” And saying that made her think about Lenny Ryan again, that if he wasn’t the killer, there had to be someone else, someone strong, someone obsessed with women, someone still out there.
“Meet me somewhere,” Joel said. “I have something for you.”
The producer walked to the door and McDaniel walked with her, his hand resting in the small of her back as he leaned down to tell her something.
Caroline caught Blanton’s eye and he made a little drinking motion with his right hand. She shook her head and Blanton rolled his eyes. They’d gone for drinks a few times after work and Caroline had begun to worry that she enjoyed his company. Last night, he’d confessed that even though he hated McDaniel’s Dateline idea, his agent would kill him if he passed up a network appearance. As long as there were serial murders, Blanton could consult on TV shows and movies and write the occasional book and make a living while stabbing away at his own dark psychology.
There’s no one else. The killer would be familiar with Spokane, would know how to prepare a body, and, according to Blanton, reflected the unique behaviors of several other serial killers.
“Caroline?” Joel continued. “One drink? Okay?”
She looked across the room at Spivey, his tie knotted so firmly that his shirt collar bunched up beneath it. The killer would be someone physically strong, knowledgeable of prostitutes and police. Taxi driver. Cop. Bartender. “Okay,” she said. “One drink.”
“Great.” Joel sounded relieved.
At the door, McDaniel had pulled his hands out of his pockets and was patting the producer on the shoulder, his hand lingering for a quick squeeze. The producer walked out the door and McDaniel turned to glare at Blanton.
“I’ll come get you,” Joel said. “Say six?”
“That’s fine,” she said.
“Caroline, are you sure there’s nobody else?”
Spivey and the two profilers drifted back to work. It was chilling to imagine, starting over, as Blanton said, building this guy from the ground up.
“No. There’s no one else,” she said.
&
nbsp; 45
The calf had fallen into what Angela called a coulee, what Lenny’s dad had called a draw. Those were the kinds of differences he found between Washington and California, little gaps within the names of things that shook Lenny’s confidence that he would ever completely fit here. Either way—coulee or draw—Lenny stood at the edge of it, panting from hard work in the late-morning sun. He looked down into a steep gully perhaps twenty feet long and as wide as it was deep, maybe six feet, its sides caved inward like parentheses. It was a sinkhole or small pond in the spring, opening like a sigh in the soft ground, but now its banks were dry and dusty and had apparently flaked off beneath the poor calf’s hooves as it tried to escape. Lying on its side in a bed of loose dirt, the dead calf was buzzed by flies that lit on its nose and its mouth and its open eyes.
Lenny dropped his wire cutters, took off his gloves, and crouched at the side of the gully, trying to determine where this calf had come from. A few feet away the cattle trail ran from the creek through this field, and Lenny could see no hoofprints where the calf might have veered off the trail. It was one of the things he’d noticed about cattle the last couple of months; their trails were as thin as bicycle trails, and no matter how many were in the herd or how widely they spread to graze, when they were on the move to the creek or to the salt blocks it was in a single-file line with not a whit of variation. If the lead animal walked in a loop, each animal that followed made the exact same loop.
But for some reason this calf had ventured away from the cattle trail—no more than four feet, but far enough. It didn’t make sense. Lenny could see where the lip of the ditch had given way and the calf had gone tumbling in.
