The Darker Side

  “Like Rosemary and Andrea,” Alan agrees. “And look at how quick Andrea was to spill her guts.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a single pool he’s drawing from,” Callie points out. “He could find the kind of person he’s looking for in any number of places. Churches involved in heavy community outreach, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, choose your poison. He’d infiltrate as a fellow addict or alcoholic or whatever, gain the confidence of his peers, and lend a sympathetic ear.”

  “Good point,” I say. “We need to look for that as a point of commonality in the victims.”

  “Let’s list out what we do know about him,” James says.

  I nod. “Sure. I’ll start: He’s high functioning and probably attractive. He’ll be confident around women. They’re not a threat to his self-image. They don’t make him angry, at least not overtly.”

  “He might be a virgin,” James murmurs.

  I raise my eyebrows. “How did you arrive at that?”

  “Think about it. He’s rational. His attitude with the victims is always calm. Any threat of violence against them is as a means to an end, not self-excitement. Of the victims whose bodies we’ve been allowed to find, there’s no evidence of sexual violation or unnecessary violence. His fantasies are cerebral. They revolve around religion and truth and thus, by extension, purity.” He shrugs. “The act of sex isn’t just absent, it’s nonexistent.”

  “Madonna and the whore,” Callie muses.

  “Come again?” I ask her.

  “Oh you know, that old saw. Men want to marry Madonnas, but they want to have sex with whores. A wife who likes sex is not a wife, blah de blah.”

  “Right—but where’s the connection here?”

  “He doesn’t have sex with these women. Why? Because he reveres them.”

  There’s a shutter click inside my head, like the rapid fire of a high-end camera. It is the feel of something shivering into place from out of nowhere.

  “Yes,” I say, staring off. “That feels right. But how can he revere them with the kinds of secrets they’re carrying around? How?”

  I walk over to the dry-erase board and stare at it hard, trying to force the thing that eludes me to show its face. My team is silent, waiting. They’ve seen this before.

  “Well?” Alan finally asks.

  I exhale in frustration. “I can’t get my hands around it yet.”

  “Then move along, go to something else,” Alan prods. “It’ll come.”

  I know he’s right. Try to remember where you left your keys and you’ll never find them.

  “What’s the next plan of attack, oh Great One?” Callie asks.

  “Missing persons,” I say. “If he’s stayed off our radar for this long, he’s been hiding the bodies, making sure they wouldn’t be found and that we wouldn’t know about him until he was good and ready.” I turn and look at the rows of names. Name after name, so many. Too many. “I’m guessing we’re about to break a hundred plus unsolved missing-persons cases in the worst way possible. We need to find out who these people are.”

  “Fast,” Alan agrees.

  Death’s promise isn’t on the horizon anymore. It’s standing next to us. Every now and then it checks its watch and grins.

  26

  “PARDON MY FRENCH, AGENT BARRETT, BUT IT SEEMS TO ME like we’re now in the middle of a grade-A, eight-cylinder cluster fuck.”

  “That’s a fair assessment, sir.”

  I’d answered my cell phone to find the Director of the FBI at the other end. I’d wondered for a moment how he got my number, but only for a moment. He is the Director of the FBI, after all.

  “It’s bad, sir, and it’s only going to get worse.”

  “I guess you missed out on the executive reassurance seminar.”

  “I prefer the truth.”

  “Fine,” he retorts. “Dazzle me with some truth.”

  “The truth, sir, is that this is huge and messy and I don’t envy you the media side of things. But it’s also true that this frenzy exists because he came out into the open. He’s provided us with a list of his victims’ names through the video clips. He’s got a unique MO. If we don’t catch him with what he’s given us, we should all be fired.”

  “Don’t give me any ideas.” He sighs. “You’re saying by cursing us with his publicity, he’s blessed us with the way to catch him.”

  “Yep. And a very pithy way to put it too, sir.”

  “Leave the smart mouth to Agent Thorne, she does it better.”

  “Agreed and understood, sir.”

  “Tell me what you see, Smoky. Bottom lines.”

  I consider my answer for a moment. This conversation seems simple enough, but I am talking to Sam Rathbun. He’s not just the Director of the FBI, it’s rumored that he was a gifted interrogator once. Maybe he’s being sly, putting me at ease so I’ll give him enough verbal rope to hang me with later.

  I sigh to myself. I don’t have time for Machiavellian strategizing, and I’ve never been any good at it anyway. I understand evil men, not ruthless ones.

  “I see one hundred and forty-three dead women, sir. I see a lot of families that are going to get the worst news possible. I see that he’s made a fatal mistake by showing himself. We’ll catch him, and we need to do it before he kills again.”

  He takes a moment. Mulling things over, I guess.

  “Get back to work, Agent Barrett.”

  He hangs up before I can get the “yes, sir” out.

  I dial AD Jones right away. Politics may not be my strong suit, but even I know this rule: when the boss of bosses talks to you, you let your boss know about it, posthaste.

  “What?” he answers.

  “Is this a bad time, sir?”

  “Yes. But you wouldn’t have called without a good reason.”

  “I got a call from the Director.”

  “He called you personally?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I hear him muttering, cursing under his breath.

  “What did he want?”

  I relay the content of our conversation.

  “Okay. I know what’s going on there.” He sounds mollified. “He’s got someone asking him questions. Probably the President.”

  I thought I was fairly immune to the whole concept of people in powerful positions. They fart in private just like the rest of us, even if it is through silk. The President of the United States, I find, still gives me pause.

  “Not sure how I feel about that, sir.”

  “Feel nervous, it’s an appropriate response. Thanks for the heads-up.”

  Again, I’m hung up on before I can get my “yes, sir” out. Frustrating.

  I check my watch. It’s 7:00 P.M. The night is young. I still have a lot to do, but I want to check in with Bonnie before diving back into the maelstrom.

  “Hi, Smoky,” she says. Her voice is troubled.

  “Something wrong, babe?”

  Silence.

  “I watched some of those video clips.”

  I sag in my chair. Dear God.

  “Oh baby. Why?”

  “I—I—just what we talked about before. I want to do what you do. I saw the stuff on the news and I went and found a site that had them and watched some.”

  “How many did you see, honey?”

  I hear her swallow. “Just one at first. It was this girl. Her name was April. That guy made her talk about hurting her baby. I got sick. I’m such a dork,” she mumbles. “I was really upset with myself about getting sick, so then I went back and watched some more.”

  “How many more?”

  “Maybe thirty.”

  “Jesus, Bonnie!”

  “Don’t be mad, Momma-Smoky. Please don’t be mad.”

  Mad? That’s the last emotion I’m feeling. It hadn’t even occurred to me until she mentioned it, but in the midst of my concern, it’s an idea that gives me pause. Should I be mad at her?

  I realize that I’ve never really disciplined Bonnie. Not because I’ve been
lax with her, but because she’s never needed it. I think maybe, just maybe, she needs it now.

  “I’m not mad, Bonnie, but…” I think fast, looking for an appropriate punishment. “I’m going to restrict your computer privileges for a while. You should have asked me or Elaina about this before doing it, and I think you know that.”

  She sighs. “Yeah. I knew.”

  “And?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t let me.”

  The honesty of this makes me smile.

  “That’s generally a tip-off, babe.”

  Another sigh. “I know.”

  “Okay, so no Internet other than what you need for schoolwork for the next two weeks. Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  Okay, okay, enough of that, how is my baby?

  “How are you doing, sweetheart? Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know. I think the thing that bothered me the most was the things he said, that they made sense. That stuff about truth. A man like that, who does things like that, he shouldn’t make sense, you know?”

  “I do, babe.”

  “That’s what really stays in my mind. The women, the things they went through, the things they did, sure, those were bad, but the worst thing is agreeing with him on anything.”

  “If you do what I do, you’re going to run into that a lot. Actions—the things people do, like murder or rape—can be in black and white. But people themselves? All kinds of shades of gray there, babe. That’s why it’s actions that matter the most.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can have a guy say that he believes that being a good father is the most important quality that a man can have, who then goes home and beats his kids. Or, even more complicated—maybe that same guy counsels other people’s children, perhaps he’s a therapist. He’s done that for years, and maybe he’s even helped a lot of kids. But the only thing that matters, from the perspective of my job, is that he goes home and beats his own children.”

  She’s quiet, mulling this over.

  “I need to think about that some more.”

  And she will. Bonnie is like a waveless lake, placid and still. But there’s a lot happening underneath, where the sun can’t reach and the crayfish hide.

  “Will you talk to me about this some more? When you’re done thinking?”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise, Momma-Smoky. I feel better now. I’m sorry for doing something you wouldn’t want me to do.”

  I note the bending of phrase to her will. She’s not apologizing for the action itself, she’s apologizing for the fact that the action upset me. I let it pass.

  “Apology accepted. But remember—two weeks.”

  “I will.”

  “Now let me talk to Elaina. Too much.”

  “Way, way too much,” she replies.

  A moment passes and Elaina comes on the line.

  “Oh, Smoky.” She sounds so miserable, I want to reach through the phone and hug her.

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Elaina. We’ve been lucky up to now with Bonnie. I think we were due.”

  “I suppose you’re right, but still—I feel so guilty. She was on her laptop, using the wireless Internet connection. I haven’t been sleeping well, and I decided to take a nap and it really got away from me. I slept for a few hours. She watched the clips while I was sleeping. I’m so sorry, Smoky.”

  “Elaina, please. You’re her second mother. You’ve taken on her homeschooling, you keep her there when my hours get crazy—you do a lot. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “Appreciated, but how would you feel if you were in my position?”

  I’d feel like crap.

  “Point taken. You know, Bonnie’s not a baby. It’s not like we forgot to lock up the laundry detergent when she was a toddler and she ate it or something. She knew we wouldn’t approve of what she was doing, and she deliberately hid it from us.” I tell her about the two-week moratorium on Internet usage.

  “I’ll help enforce that, you can be sure.”

  “Somehow I don’t think it’ll be an issue. She didn’t raise a fuss about it. Not a peep.”

  “Hmmm.” I’m happy to hear some amusement leak into Elaina’s voice. “Maybe that should worry us more than anything else.”

  “Good point. Now stop beating yourself up. I love you.”

  She sighs in agreement. “I love you too. Give my husband a kiss for me. Bonnie wants to talk to you again.”

  “Put her on.”

  “I forgot to tell you something,” Bonnie says, a little breathless.

  “What’s that?”

  “That man? The one who calls himself the Preacher?”

  “Yes?”

  “Catch him and put him in jail forever. I want him to die there.”

  It’s not a request, it’s a pronouncement. Bonnie saw what he’s done, and whatever else she’s wrangling with about it, the blacks and the grays, the moral maybes, one certainty has arrived: his freedom is unacceptable.

  “I will, sweetheart.”

  “Good.”

  She hangs up without another word. I stare at the phone for a moment, bemused and disturbed. Bonnie has always been both a simplicity and a complexity in my life. The simplicity is my love for her. It’s unfettered, it’s depthless, it’s pure. The complexity is Bonnie herself. She’s got the brightness of a child, but she’s also layered like an adult, full of private places I’m not sure I’ll ever get to see. She’s learned how to keep her own secrets and, perhaps more significant, how to be comfortable about it. Sometimes this bothers me, most times it doesn’t. It just is.

  Now she’s about to turn into a teen, like a werewolf under a full moon, and with that, it seems, comes the ability to sneak and the willingness to lie. This by itself wouldn’t bother me; it’s the way of things. The problem is Bonnie hasn’t chosen to sneak or lie about smoking or kissing or driving too fast; she applied her stealth to viewing the last, terrible moments of all those poor women.

  There’s nothing, I reflect, quite like motherhood to make you feel more helpless or inept.

  I head out of my office. The maelstrom awaits.

  “THIS KIND OF CASE REALLY exposes all the holes in our missing persons system,” Alan grouses. “Did you know that NCIC contains about a hundred thousand missing persons cases, but AFIS has less than one hundred of those on file?”

  NCIC is the National Crime Information Center. AFIS is the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. The other two major databases that figure into what we do are CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System for missing persons, and VICAP.

  “You only got about fifteen percent of unidentified human remains that have been entered into NCIC. CODIS has been around since 1990, and it’s growing, but it’s still just a drop in the ocean.”

  CODIS was a stroke of brilliance. If someone goes missing and has not turned up within thirty days, a DNA reference sample is obtained. This can be either a direct sample from something belonging to the missing person (hair, saliva from a toothbrush) or a comparison sample from a blood relation. The DNA gets analyzed and the profile is loaded into the database. If a body turns up, it can often be identified via CODIS. There have also been cases of a child missing for years being located alive because of CODIS.

  The problem with all of these databases comes down to cooperation, time, and money. They’re all voluntary. If the local departments don’t fill out the forms or collect the DNA, it doesn’t end up in the right database. Even when the information is provided, someone has to enter it.

  It’s a flawed and incomplete system, but it’s better than nothing for sure. We’ve broken cases using these various databases. They might be limping, but they’re still assets.

  “What have we found?”

  “We have name matches on forty so far. Computer crimes is assisting on this flat out. They’re extracting still images of the victims’ faces from the clips, which we’ll then shoot to the respective local law-enforcement ag
encies. They’ll take the photo and name to the families and get positive IDs. My guess is we’ll be looking at ten out of ten on that. Too big a coincidence that the name from one of these videos would match up with a missing persons case.”

  “I agree. By the way, your wife says to give you a kiss.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Keep on it. We’re going to go till about eleven.”

  “Joy.”

  I head over to James, who is just hanging up the phone.

  “The tips Jezebel is fielding to us are paying off,” he says. “We’ve had almost eighty people come forward to identify victims on the clips.”

  “Wow.”

  Some might wonder why so many so fast. I don’t. In many ways, the missing are far far worse than the dead. The missing are a maybe: Maybe they are still alive. Maybe they are not. The missing prevent closure, disallow true grief. That maybe ensures that the families are always looking, forever grasping at straws of hope.

  I brought the news to a mother, once, that a daughter who’d gone missing three years earlier had been found dead. She wept, of course, but it’s what she said that cut me the deepest.

  “It’s been so hard not knowing,” she’d stammered through her tears. “One time—oh God—one time I remember being weak, and just wanting it to end, even if that meant she was dead.”

  I had watched her eyes widen as she truly saw what it was that she’d just said, that she’d wished, however briefly, for her daughter’s death. The impact of this realization on her is something I’ll never forget.

  Keening is a kind of vocal lament that is traditional in Scotland and Ireland. In older days, before it was outlawed by the Catholic Church, it was done as a part of the wake. A woman or women would be hired to list the genealogy of the deceased, to praise them, and to emphasize the pain of the survivors. She (or they) would do this vocally, often wailing, and using physical movements such as clapping or rocking back and forth. It was a verbal expiation, designed to do justice to the fact of the loss of life. I thought of this then, because that’s what I watched this woman do. She keened.

  I think of it now, all those families. Keening. Eighty, just an incredible number, impossible to really get your mind around in terms of the human impact.