“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 living 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.”
Roarke picked up the thought, with building excitement. “So we should concentrate on professions like truck driving that would take him to these particular locations, give him a familiarity with them. A truck route with regular stops in all three towns.”
“And that would have allowed his path to cross with all three of the families.”
A possibility… though as he thought it through, Roarke wasn’t sure he believed that someone as disordered as the Reaper would be to hold down even a truck-driving job.
As if hearing his thought, Snyder spoke. “Remember that the Reaper had a significant cooling off period. These weren’t sprees. He went for six months at least between killings. That speaks to some level of control.”
It made sense, although Roarke didn’t like to think it. A psychotic killer with that degree of control… a nightmare combination.
“And usually you don’t see a killer traveling this kind of distance until he’s built up a history of successful kills. As confidence increases, the hunting zone will expand.”
Roarke spoke aloud. “On the other hand, if the killer is psychotic, or thinks he has some special power or protection, that could also instill confidence, yes?”
“Quite right,” Snyder agreed. “Another thing interests me here. This specific M.O., the massacres of entire families, is very unusual. Generally a family massacre involves an adult, most often the father, killing his own family and then himself.”
Roarke considered this, and sensed the glimmering of an idea. “We were thinking in our group meeting that we could road trip to Arcata, hoping she would follow us and extrapolate from our stops that we were re-opening the Reaper case. But what if we found something closer to home?”
“
Found
something?” Snyder asked with a hint of wariness.
Roarke felt a superstitious chill even speaking it aloud. “Another massacre to investigate. Something recent. A family murder/suicide like you’re talking about.”
From the silence on Snyder’s end, he knew his old mentor was feeling the same unease.
“I see,” Snyder said slowly. “A family massacre that you would investigate as a new Reaper killing. Yes, I think so. I think that might exactly do the trick.”
Chapter Eleven
The Haight Street eateries begin to open about the same time that she realizes she is hungry. She finds herself drawn to an Asian fusion restaurant, painted olive green with an enormous pink lotus flower design, and a whole wall of glass looking out on the street.
Inside the scents are delicate and layered, but the food she cares nothing about. It is the window that draws her.
She lets the tiny Asian hostess lead her to a perfect table beside the wall, and she sits and loses herself for some time, watching the parade of humanity through the glass, waiting for whatever the window has to offer.
It is not long. Striding up the street, wobbing on too-high heels, comes a girl with blazing eyes, a feral intensity, a brash sexual confidence. Dark hair, huge gray eyes like rain. A beauty, despite the meth sores on her face and neck. And no more than sixteen, she is sure of it.
Despite the November chill, the girl is dressed in a miniskirt and boots, and an open-collar sweater that falls off her thin and shapely shoulders, exposing an elaborate fairy tale of a tattoo on her back: a girl dancing in flames, trees and vines blooming with fiery flowers, a whole mythology inked into her flesh. The art scrolls up onto her neck, disappearing under her hair, a dangerous and illegal process requiring weeks, months, of pain.
She is high, horribly high, moving back and forth across the street and talking loudly to every man and boy who passes, bumming cigarettes, spare-changing.
Behind the window, Cara can see the mixed lust and revulsion on their faces.
She is jostled from her thoughts as the birdlike Asian woman serves her, and she uses chopsticks on a delicate concoction of glazed sugar peas and shrimp and watches the girl outside the window, waiting.
It doesn’t take long, either, until the pimp shows up, pale flesh over bone, with pirate boots and long shaggy black hair, a steampunk panderer. He puts an arm around the girl, pulls her out of the street and levers her down to sit on the curb with him, speaking into her hair and stroking her back. The drugs burn through his eyes and skin and Cara sees the entire scenario: the seduction and the beatings, the promises of a house together after “just a few more months” of tricks, the five other girls he is telling the same thing to while making hundreds of thousands a year off their bodies, turning them out, these girls, to be used by pedophiles night after night.
The pimp stands and takes the burning girl by the hand, tugging, coaxing her up; then ordering, slapping her, pointing a finger. No more words. She will comply.
He swaggers off down the street, leaving her.
As Cara watches, the girl suddenly looks straight at her through the window, sees her gaze, her attention, as if the glass isn’t there at all. And in a manic flurry, she strides toward the restaurant, straight in through the door.
The tiny manager at the counter is already running toward the girl to ward her away, but the girl strides straight to Cara’s table and snatches a shrimp off her plate with her fingers.
“Do you mind?” she says, locking eyes with Cara with ultimate defiance and pops the shrimp into her mouth, sucking the sauce from it then swallowing, as if she is giving head.
The manager is now shouting into a cell phone, certainly to the police, and the other patrons recoil, horrified, but Cara says quietly,“It’s all right,” and looks only at the girl.
The blazing girl turns on her heel and strides out as abruptly as she entered.
Cara watches from behind the wide plate glass window as the girl goes back out on the street, and collapses bonelessly onto the curb, her head between her knees.
As the hostess hovers, apologizing, Cara asks for the check and a takeout box.
Outisde on the street, she walks up behind the girl, who is motionless, slumped over on the curb, passed out, asleep, or possibly dead. But as Cara steps behind her, the girl jerks her head up and looks at her.
Cara looks down at her, then stoops and sets the box of food on the curb beside her.
They lock eyes, and Cara sees herself as if in a mirror.
Then she turns and walks down the street.
It does not take her long to find him again; those boots and that long black dreadlocked hair stand out even among the denizens of this strip. The pimp walks slowly ahead of her on the sidewalk, intent in conversation with a man of forty or so in jeans and denim jacket and cowboy boots, whose personal hygiene leaves much to be desired. She can feel the stench of him from six yards behind. The man nods greedily and reaches into his pocket as he walks, then slips something into the pimp’s pocket beside him. The pimp puts a friendly arm over his shoulder, steers him into an alleyway.
She moves closer, sees their shadows darting obscenely on the bricks of the building.
The pimp comes out of the alley on his own a few moments later, strolling loose- hipped down the street.
She watches him get halfway down the block, then moves quickly into the alley. The narrow passageway is empty, but there are Dumpsters near the end.
She walks deliberately toward the trash bins.
On the other side of a bin, the man in cowboy boots stands against the wall. A young girl is on her knees in front of him, unbuckling the enormous buckle on his leather belt.
The girl freezes as she hears the step behind her. The man looks up, startled.
“I’ve got this,” Cara says aloud to the girl, and when the girl hesitates, she jerks her head to the side, dismissing her.
The girl scrambles to her feet and scurries obediently away, down the alley toward the street.
The john is staring at her open-mouthed, trying to process what has just gone on. “The fuck is this—” he starts, but she is stepping forward, her hands reaching for his belt, skillful fingers pulling the tongue loose from the buckle, unzipping his pants. Already his face has gone mindless and slack in anticipation. She works his pants down, encasing his knees…
He never sees it coming as she brings her hands up and slams both her fists against the sides of his neck. He staggers in pain, hobbled by his own trousers. She catches him by the hair and smashes his face into the brick wall, once, twice… she feels the warm blood on her hands, hears the crunch as his nose breaks and his mouth crushes to pulp. There is one muffled gag of pain, but the third slam knocks him out.