The Narrows (18 page)

In the steakhouse bar I ordered a New York strip and a baked potato. The waitress tried to talk me out of ordering the steak medium-well but I remained firm. In the places I had grown up I never got any food that was pink in the middle and I couldn’t start enjoying it now. After she took the order back to the kitchen I thought about an army kitchen I once wandered into at Fort Benning. There were complete sides of beef being boiled gray through and through in a dozen huge vats. A guy with a shovel was scooping oil off the surface of one of the vats and dumping it in a bucket. That kitchen was the worst thing I had ever smelled until I went into the tunnels a few months later and one time crawled into a place where the VC hid their dead from the army statistic takers.

I opened the Poet file and was settling into a thorough read when my phone buzzed. I answered without checking the ID screen.

“Hello?”

“Harry, it’s Rachel. You still want to get that coffee? I changed my mind.”

My guess was that she had hurried to the Embassy Suites so she could be there and not be caught in a lie.

“Um, I just ordered dinner on the other side of town.”

“Shit, I’m sorry. Well, that’ll teach me. You by yourself?”

“Yeah, I’ve got some stuff to work on here.”

“Well, I know what that’s like. I pretty much eat by myself every night.”

“Yeah, me too. If I eat.”

“Really? What about your kid?”

I was no longer comfortable or trusting while talking to her. I didn’t know what she was doing. And I didn’t feel like going over my sad marital or parental history.

“Uh, listen, I’m getting a look from somebody here. I think cell phones are against the rules.”

“Well, we don’t want to break the rules. I’ll see you tomorrow at eight then.”

“Okay, Eleanor. Good-bye.”

I was about to close the phone when I heard her voice.

“Harry?”

“What?”

“I’m not Eleanor.”

“What?”

“You just called me Eleanor.”

“Oh. That was a mistake. Sorry.”

“Do I remind you of her?”

“Maybe. Sort of. Not now, but from a while back.”

“Oh, well, I hope not from too far back.”

She was referring to Eleanor’s fall from grace in the bureau. A fall so bad that even a hardship posting in Minot was out of the question.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Rachel.”

“Good night, Harry.”

I closed the phone and thought about my mistake. It had shot up right out of the subconscious but now that it was out in the open it was obvious. I didn’t want to think about that. I wanted to retreat into the file in front of me. I knew I would be more comfortable studying the blood and madness of some other person and time.

27

A
T 8:30 I KNOCKED ON THE DOOR of Eleanor Wish’s house and the Salvadoran woman who lived there and took care of my daughter answered. Marisol had a kind but worn face. She was in her fifties but looked much older. Her story of surviving was devastating and whenever I thought about it I was left feeling lucky about my own story. Since day one, when I had unexpectedly shown up at this house and discovered I had a daughter, Marisol had treated me kindly. She had never viewed me as a threat and was always completely cordial and respectful of my position as both father and outsider. She stepped back and let me in.

“She sleeping,” she said.

I held up the file I was carrying.

“That’s okay. I have work. I just want to go sit with her for a while. How are you doing, Marisol?”

“Oh, I am fine.”

“Eleanor went to the casino?”

“Yes, she go.”

“And how was Maddie tonight?”

“Maddie, she a good girl. She play.”

Marisol always kept her reports to a minimum. I had tried speaking to her in Spanish before, thinking the reason she spoke so little was because of her English skills. But she said little more to me in her native language, preferring to keep her reports on my daughter’s life and activities to a few words in any language.

“Okay, well, thank you,” I said. “If you want to go to bed I’ll just let myself out later. I’ll make sure the door is locked.”

I had no key to the house but the front door would lock after I closed it.

“Yes, is okay.”

I nodded and headed down the hallway to the left. I entered Maddie’s room and closed the door. There was a night-light plugged into the far wall and it cast a blue glow across the room. I made my way to the side of her bed and turned on the bed table light. I knew from experience that Maddie would not be disturbed by the light. The five-year-old’s dreams were so deep she could seemingly sleep through anything, even a Lakers playoff game on the television or a 5.0 earthquake.

The light revealed a nest of tangled dark hair on the pillow. Her face was turned away from my view. I used my hand to sweep the ringlets back off her face and I leaned down and kissed her cheek. I turned my head sideways so my ear was closer to her. I checked for the sound of breathing and was rewarded. One little moment of unfounded fear fell away from me.

I walked over to the bureau and turned off the baby monitor, the other half of which I knew was in the TV room or Marisol’s bedroom. There was no need for it now. I was there.

Maddie slept in a queen-size bed with a cover spread that had all manner of cats printed on it. With her little body taking up so little space in the bed, there was plenty of room for me to prop the second pillow against the headboard and climb on next to her. I slipped my hand under the covers and placed it gently on her back. I waited without moving until I could feel the slight rise and fall of her breathing. With the other hand I opened the Poet file and started to read.

At dinner I had gotten through most of the file. This included the suspect profile authored in part by Agent Rachel Walling as well as the investigative reports and crime scene photos that accumulated while the investigation was current and the bureau was tracking the killer dubbed the Poet across the country. That was eight years earlier, when the Poet killed eight homicide detectives, traveling from east to west, before his run came to an end in Los Angeles.

Now as my daughter slept next to me I began with the reports that came after FBI Special Agent Robert Backus had been identified as the suspect. After he had been shot by Rachel Walling and then disappeared.

The summary from the autopsy of a body found by a Department of Water and Power inspector in a storm water tunnel in Laurel Canyon was included here. The body was found almost three months after Backus was shot and had fallen through a window of a cantilevered home near the canyon and disappeared into the darkness and brush below. FBI credentials and a badge belonging to Robert Backus were found on the body. The deteriorated clothing was also his—a suit hand-tailored for Backus in Italy when he’d been sent over to consult on an investigation of a serial killer in Milan.

However, scientific identification of the body was inconclusive. The remains were badly decomposed, leaving fingerprint analysis impossible. And parts of the body were even missing, initially presumed to have been taken by rats and other animals foraging in the tunnels. The entire lower mandible and upper bridge were missing, precluding a comparison to the dental records belonging to Robert Backus.

Cause of death could not be determined either, though a gunshot wound channel was found in the upper abdomen—the area Agent Walling reported seeing her bullet strike—and a rib was fractured, possibly by the force of a bullet. No bullet fragments were recovered, however, suggesting a through and through wound, and so no comparison to a bullet from Walling’s weapon was possible.

No DNA comparison or identification was ever made. After the shooting—when it was thought that Backus might still be alive and on the run—agents descended on the fugitive’s home and office. But they were in search of evidence to the crimes he had committed and clues as to why. They did not plan for the possibility that they might one day need to identify his putrefied remains. In a gaffe that would haunt the investigation and leave the bureau open later to charges of malfeasance and cover-up, no potential DNA receptors—hair and skin from the shower drain, saliva from the toothbrush, fingernail clippings from the waste cans, dandruff and hair from the back of the desk chair—were ever collected. And three months later, when the body was found in the storm water tunnel, it was too late. Those receptors were compromised or nonexistent. The building where Backus had owned a condo mysteriously burned to the ground three weeks after the bureau had finished with it. And Backus’s office had been taken over and completely renovated and redecorated by an agent named Randal Alpert, who took his place in the Behavioral Sciences unit.

A search for a blood sample from Backus proved futile and once again embarrassing for the bureau. When Agent Walling shot Backus in the house in Los Angeles a small amount of blood had spattered the floor. A sample was collected but then inadvertently destroyed in the lab in Los Angeles when medical waste was disposed of.

A search for blood that Backus may have given during personal medical examinations or as donations to blood banks proved fruitless. Through his own cunning planning, luck, and bureaucratic malfeasance, Backus had disappeared without leaving anything of himself behind.

The search for Backus officially ended with the discovery of the body in the drainage tunnel. Even though scientific confirmation of identity was never made, the credentials, badge and Italian suit were enough for bureau command to act swiftly in announcing closure to a case that had held wide sway in the media and had severely undercut the bureau’s already tarnished image.

But meantime a quiet investigation continued into the psychological backgrounding of the killer agent. These were the reports I now read. Led by the Behavioral Sciences section—the very unit in which Backus worked—this investigation seemed more concerned with the question of why he did what he did than with the question of how he was able to do it under the noses of the top experts in the killing field. This investigative direction was probably a protective measure. They looked at the suspect, not the system. The file was replete with reports of investigations into Agent Backus’s early nurturing, adolescence and upbringing. Despite the number of crisply written observations, speculations and summaries, there was very little there. Just a few threads unraveled from the full fabric of personality. Backus remained an enigma, his pathology a secret. He was the case that the best and brightest ultimately couldn’t crack.

I sorted through the threads. Backus was the son of a perfectionist father—a decorated FBI agent, no less—and a mother he never knew. The father was reported to have been physically brutal to the boy, possibly blaming him for the mother’s abandonment of the family, and punished him severely for infractions that included bed-wetting and taunting of neighborhood pets. One report came from a seventh-grade classmate who reported that Robert Backus had once confided that when he was young his father punished him for bed-wetting by handcuffing him to a towel rack in the bathroom shower enclosure. Another former classmate reported that Backus once claimed that he slept each night with a pillow and a blanket in a bathtub because he feared the punishment that wetting the bed might bring. A childhood neighbor reported suspicions that it had been Backus who had killed a pet Dachshund by cutting the dog in half and leaving its parts in a vacant lot.

As an adult Backus exhibited obsessive-compulsive tendencies. He had fixations on cleanliness and order. Many testimonials in this regard came from fellow agents in Behavioral Sciences. Backus was well known in the unit for delaying scheduled meetings for many minutes while he was in the restroom washing his hands. No one ever saw him eat anything for lunch in the cafeteria at Quantico but a simple grilled cheese sandwich. Every day, a grilled cheese sandwich. He also compulsively chewed gum and would take great pains to make sure he was never out of the Juicy Fruit brand he liked. One agent described his chewing as measured, meaning he believed that Backus may have counted the number of times he chewed each stick of gum, and when a specific number was reached he would then remove the gum and start over with a fresh stick.

There was a report on an interview with a former fianc?. She told the reporting agent that Backus required her to shower often and extensively, particularly before and after they made love. She said that while house hunting before the nuptials he told her he would want to have his own bedroom and bathroom. She called off the marriage and ended the relationship when one time he called her a slob because she had kicked off her high heels in her own living room.

The reports were just glimpses of a damaged psyche. They weren’t really clues to anything. Whatever Backus’s strange habits were, they still didn’t fully explain why he began killing people. Thousands of people suffer from mild to severe forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. They don’t add killing to their list of personal tics. Thousands were abused as children. They do not then all become abusers.

McCaleb had acquired far fewer reports on the reappearance four years later of the Poet—Backus—in Amsterdam. All that was in the file was a nine-page summary report in which the facts of the killings and the forensic findings were recounted. I had skimmed this report before but now read it closely and found aspects of it tying in with the theory I was formulating about the town of Clear.

In Amsterdam the five known victims were men who were tourists traveling alone. This put them in the same profile as the victims known to be buried in Zzyzx, with the exception of one man who was in Las Vegas with his wife but away from her when she spent the day in their hotel’s spa. In Amsterdam the men were last seen in the city’s Rosse Buurt zone, where legalized prostitution is carried out in small rooms behind the neon-framed windows where women in provocative clothing offer themselves to passersby. In two of the incidents the Dutch investigators located prostitutes who reported being with the victims the night before their bodies were found floating in the nearby Amstel River.

Though the bodies were found in different locations in the river, the reports indicated that the point of entry into the water for all five victims was believed to have been the area around the Six House. This location was a property owned by an important family in Amsterdam history. I found this of interest, partly because Six House and Zzyzx sounded a bit alike to me. But also because of the question of whether the killer had chosen the Six House randomly or in some attempt to flaunt his crimes at authority by choosing a structure that symbolized it.

The Dutch detectives never got much further with the investigation. They never found the mechanism by which the killer got to the men, controlled them and killed them. Backus would have never even made a blip on their suspect radar if he hadn’t wanted to be noticed. He sent the police the notes that asked for Rachel Walling and led to his identity. The notes, according to the summary report, contained information about the victims and crimes that seemingly only the killer would know. One note contained the passport of the last victim.

To me the connection between Amsterdam’s Rosse Buurt and Clear, Nevada, was obvious. Both were places where sex was legally exchanged for money. But more important, they were places where I assumed men might go without telling others, where they might even take measures to avoid leaving a trail. In some ways this made them perfect targets for a killer and perfect victims. It added an extra degree of safety to the killer.

I finished my survey of McCaleb’s file on the Poet and started through it once more, hoping that I had missed something, maybe just one detail that would bring the whole picture into focus. Sometimes it happens that way. A missed or misunderstood detail becomes the key to the whole puzzle.

But I didn’t find that detail on the second go-round and soon the reports just seemed repetitive and tedious. I grew tired and somehow I ended up thinking about that kid handcuffed in the shower. I kept picturing that scene and I felt bad for the kid and angry for the father who did it and the mother who never cared to know about it.

Did this mean I felt sympathy for a killer? I didn’t think so. Backus had taken his own tortures and turned them into something else and then turned it on the world. I had an understanding of that process and I felt sympathy for the boy he had been. But I felt nothing for Backus the man but a cold resolve to hunt him down and make him pay for what he did.