The Scarecrow (19 page)

“They were both strippers.”

“That’s part of it but a little broad. And, technically, one was a stripper and one was an exotic performer. There is a slight difference.”

“Whatever. They both showed their naked bodies off for a living. Is that the only connection you found?”

“Well, as you must have noticed, they were very similar in physical makeup. In fact, the difference in weight was only three pounds and the difference in height was half an inch. Facial structure and hair was also alike. A victim’s body type is a key component in terms of what makes them chosen. An opportunistic killer takes what comes along. But when you see two victims like this with exactly the same body type, it tells us this is a predator who is patient, who chooses.”

It looked like she had more to say but stopped. I waited but she didn’t continue.

“What?” I said. “You know more than you’re saying.”

She dropped the hesitation.

“When I was in Behavioral it was in the early days. The profilers often sat around and talked about the correlation between the predators we hunted and the predators in the wild. You’d be surprised how similar a serial killer can be to a leopard or a jackal. And the same could be said for victims. In fact, when it came to body types we often assigned victims animal types. These two women we would have called giraffes. They were tall and long-legged. Our predator has a taste for giraffes.”

I wanted to write some of this down to use later but I was afraid that any obvious recording of her interpretation of the files would cause her to shut down the exposition. So I tried not to even move.

“There’s something else,” she said. “At this point this is purely conjecture on my part. But both autopsies ascribe marks on each of the victims’ legs to ligature. I think that might be wrong.”

“Why?”

“Let me show you something.”

I finally moved. We were in seats that faced each other. I unbuckled and moved to the seat next to her. She went through the files and pulled several of the copies of photos from the crime scenes and the autopsies.

“Okay, you see the marks left above and below the knees here and here and here?”

“Yeah, like they were tied up.”

“Not quite.”

She used a clear polished fingernail to trace the markings on the victims as she explained.

“The marks are too symmetrical to be from traditional bindings. Plus, if these were ligature marks we would see them around the ankles. If you were going to tie someone up to control them or to prevent escape, you would tie their ankles. Yet we have no ligature marks in these areas. The wrists, yes, but not on the ankles.”

She was right. I just hadn’t seen it until she explained it.

“So what made those marks on the legs?”

“Well, I can’t say for sure, but when I was in Behavioral, we came upon new paraphilias on almost every case. We started categorizing them.”

“You’re talking about sexual perversions?”

“Well, we didn’t call them that.”

“Why, you had to be politically correct around serial killers?”

“It may be very nuanced, but there is a difference between being perverted and abnormal. We call the behaviors paraphilias.”

“Okay, and these marks, they’re part of a paraphilia?”

“They could be. I think they are marks left by straps.”

“Straps from what?”

“Leg braces.”

I almost laughed.

“You’ve got to be kidding. People get off on leg braces?”

Rachel nodded.

“It even has a name. It’s called abasiophilia. A psychosexual fascination with leg braces. Yes, people get off on it. There are even websites and chat rooms dedicated to it. They call them irons and calipers. Women who wear braces are sometimes called iron maidens.”

I was reminded by how thoroughly intoxicating Rachel’s skill as a profiler had been when we were chasing the Poet. She had been dead-on about the case in many ways. Damn near prescient. And I had been captivated by her ability to take small pieces of information and obscure details and then draw telling conclusions. She was doing it again and I was along for the ride.

“And you had a case with this?”

“Yes, we had a case in Louisiana. A man abducted a woman off a bus bench and held her for a week in a fishing shack out in a bayou. She managed to escape and make her way through the swamp. She was lucky because the four women he grabbed before her didn’t escape. We found their partial remains in the swamp.”

“And it was a basophilia case?”

“Abasiophilia,” she corrected. “Yes, the woman who escaped told us the subject made her wear leg braces that strapped around the legs and had side irons and joints running from her ankles to her hips and several leather straps.”

“This is so creepy,” I said. “Not that there is anything like a normal serial killer, but leg braces? Where does an addiction like this come from?”

“It’s unknown. But most paraphilias are embedded in early childhood. A paraphilia is like a recipe for an individual’s sexual fulfillment. It’s what they need to get off. Why someone would need to wear leg braces or have their partner wear them is anybody’s guess, but it starts young. That is a given.”

“Do you think the guy from your case back then could be—”

“No, the man who committed those murders in Louisiana was put to death. I witnessed it. And right up to the end, he never spoke a word to us about any of it.”

“Well, I guess that gives him a perfect alibi for this.”

I smiled but she didn’t smile back. I moved on.

“These braces, are they hard to find?”

“They are bought and sold over the Internet every day. They can be expensive, with all kinds of gadgetry and straps. Next time you’re on Google, plug in
abasiophilia
and see what you get. We’re talking about the dark side of the Internet, Jack. It’s the great meeting house, where people of like interests come together. You may think your secret desires make you a freak, and then you get on the Internet and find community and acceptance.”

As she said it I realized there was a story in this. Something separate from the trunk murders case. Maybe even a book. I put the idea aside for later and went back to the case at hand.

“So what do you think the killer does? He makes them put on leg braces and then he rapes them? Does the suffocation mean anything?”

“Every detail means something, Jack. You just need to know how to read it. The scene he creates reflects his paraphilia. More than likely this is not about killing the women. It’s about creating a psychosexual scene that fulfills a fantasy. The women are killed afterward because he is simply finished with them and he can’t have the threat of them living to tell about him. My guess is that he may even apologize to them when he pulls the bag over their head.”

“They both were dancers. Do you think he made them dance or something?”

“Again, it’s all conjecture at this point, but that could be part of it, yes. But my guess is that it’s about body type. Giraffes. Dancers by trade have thin muscular legs. If that is what he wanted, then he would look at dancers.”

I thought about the hours the two women spent with their killer. The stretch of hours between abduction and time of death. What happened during those hours? No matter what the answer, it added up to a horrible and terrifying end.

“You said something before about the bag being familiar somehow. Do you remember how?”

Rachel thought for a moment before answering.

“No, there’s just something about it. Some familiarity. Probably from another case but I can’t place it yet.”

“Will you put all of this through VICAP?”

“As soon as I get the chance.”

The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was a computer data bank of the details of thousands of crimes. It could be used to find crimes of similar nature when the details of a new crime were entered.

“There’s something else that should be noted about the killer’s program,” Rachel said. “In both cases he left the bag and neck ligature in place on the victims but the limb constraints—whether braces or not—were removed.”

“Right. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know but it could mean a number of things. The women are obviously constrained in some way during their captivity. Whether it is through braces or otherwise, those are removed but the bag stays in place. This could be part of a statement, part of his signature. It might have a meaning we are not aware of yet.”

I nodded. I was impressed by her take.

“How long has it been since you worked in Behavioral Sciences?”

Rachel smiled but then I saw that what I had meant to be a compliment had made her wistful.

“A long time,” she said.

“Typical bureau politics and bullshit,” I said. “Take someone who is damn good at something and put them somewhere else.”

I needed to get her back on focus and away from the memory that her relationship with me had cost her the position she was best suited for.

“You think if we ever capture this guy we’ll be able to figure him out?”

“You never figure any of them out, Jack. You get hints, that’s all. The guy in Louisiana was raised in an orphanage in the fifties. There were a lot of kids in there who had contracted polio. A lot of them wore leg braces. Why that became the thing that got him off as an adult and led him down the road to serial murder is anybody’s guess. A lot of other boys were raised in that orphanage, and they didn’t become serial killers. Why one does is ultimately just guesswork.”

I turned and looked out the window. We were over the desert between L.A. and Vegas. There was only darkness out there.

“I guess it’s a sick world down there,” I said.

“It can be,” Rachel said.

We flew in silence for a few moments before I turned back to her.

“Are there any other connections between them?”

“I made a list of similarities as well as a list of dissimilar aspects of the cases. I want to study everything further, but for now the leg braces are the most significant to me. After that, you have the physical pattern of the women and the means of death. But there’s got to be a connection somewhere. A link between these two women.”

“We find it and we find him.”

“That’s right. And now it’s your turn, Jack. What did you put together?”

I nodded and quickly composed my thoughts.

“Well, there was something that wasn’t in the stuff Angela had found on the Internet. She only told me about it because there wasn’t anything to print out. She said that she found the Las Vegas stories and some of the old L.A. stories when she did an online search with the phrase
trunk murder,
okay?”

“Okay.”

“Well, she told me that she also got a hit on a website called trunk murder dot com, but that when she went to it, there was nothing there. She clicked a button to enter and there was a sign that said it was under construction. So I was thinking, because you said this guy’s skill set included being able to do things on the Internet, that maybe—”

“Of course! It could have been an IP trap. He would be alert for anybody fishing around on the Internet for intel on trunk murders. He could then trace the IP back and find out who was looking. That would have led him to Angela and then to you.”

The jet started its descent, again at an angle that was much steeper than anything I had experienced on a commercial flight. I realized I was digging my fingernails into the armrest again.

“And he probably got a big thrill when he saw your name,” Rachel said.

I looked at her.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your pedigree, Jack. You were the reporter who chased down the Poet. You wrote the book on it. Mr. Big Bestseller. You were on
Larry King
. These serial guys pay attention to all of that. They read these books. No, actually, they study these books.”

“That’s great to know. Maybe I can sign a copy of the book to him.”

“I’ll make a bet with you. When we get this guy, we’ll find a copy of your book in his possessions somewhere.”

“I hope not.”

“And I’ll make you another bet. Before we get this guy, he will make direct contact with you. He’ll call or e-mail or get to you in some way.”

“Why? Why would he risk it?”

“Because once it’s clear to him that he’s in the open—that we know about him—he will reach out for attention. They always do. They always make that mistake.”

“No bets, Rachel.”

The idea that I had or would somehow feed the warped psychology of this guy or anyone else wasn’t what I wanted to be thinking about.

“I guess I don’t blame you,” Rachel said, picking up on my discomfort.

“But I appreciate that you said ‘when we get this guy’ instead of ‘if we get this guy.’ ”

She nodded.

“Oh, don’t worry, Jack. We’re going to get this guy.”

I turned and looked back out the window. I could see the carpet of lights as we crossed from the desert into civilization again. Civilization as we know it. There were a billion lights out there on the horizon and I knew that all of them put together weren’t enough to light the darkness in the hearts of some men.

W
e landed at Van Nuys Airport and got into the car Rachel had left there earlier. She checked in by phone to see if there was anything new on Angela Cook and was told there wasn’t. She hung up and looked over at me.

“Where’s your car? At LAX?”

“No, I took a cab. It’s at home. In the garage.”

I don’t think any line so basic could have sounded so ominous.
In the garage.
I gave Rachel my address and we headed off.

It was almost midnight and traffic on the freeway was light. We took the 101 across the bottom of the San Fernando Valley and then down through the Cahuenga Pass. Rachel exited on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and headed west.

My house was on Curson a block south of Sunset. It was a nice neighborhood full of mostly small houses built for middle-class families that had long since been priced out of the neighborhood. I had a two-bedroom Craftsman with a separate single-car garage in the back. The backyard was so small, even a Chihuahua would have felt cramped. I had bought the place twelve years earlier with money from the sale of my book on the Poet. I split every check I got from the deal with my brother’s widow to help her raise and educate their daughter. It had been a while since I had seen a royalty check and even longer since I had seen my niece, but I had the house and the kid’s education to show for that time in my life. When I had gotten divorced, my wife made no claim on the house, since I had already owned it, and now I had only three years of mortgage payments before it was mine free and clear.