The Scarecrow (19 page)

“That doesn’t mean you can’t go first. It’s also larger than the FBI’s penchant for taking information but not giving anything
back in return.”

She shook off the barb.

“Fine, I’ll start. But first let me commend you, Jack. From what I have read about these cases, I would say there is absolutely
no doubt that they are connected by a single killer. The same man is responsible for both. But he escaped notice because in
each case an alternate suspect came to light quickly and the local authorities proceeded with blinders on. In each case, they
had their man from the beginning and didn’t look into other possibilities. Except of course in the Babbit case, their man
was a boy.”

I leaned forward, beaming with confidence after her compliment.

“And he never confessed like they put out to the press,” I said. “I have the transcript back at my office. Nine-hour interrogation
and the kid never confessed. He said he stole her car and her money, but the body was already in the trunk. He never said
he killed her.”

Rachel nodded.

“I assumed that. So what I was doing with the material you have here was profiling the two killings. Looking for a signature.”

“The signature’s obvious. He likes strangling women with plastic bags.”

“Technically they weren’t strangled. They were asphyxiated. Suffocated. There’s a difference.”

“Okay.”

“There is something very familiar about the use of the plastic bag and the cord around the neck, but I was actually looking
for something a little less obvious than the surface signature. I was also looking for connections or similarities between
the women. If we find what connects them we’ll find the killer.”

“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.”