Donny and I stepped over and bent down for a closer look.
On the tip of the girl’s ring finger sat a tiny red dot, in the same location as the pinprick on the previous victim.
“Well, well,” I said to Woodson. “Two pinpricks in a row? What are the chances of that? You may finally have found a common physical link between our victims that can connect them to a common activity or place.” Then added, “If we’re lucky, that is.”
“Hey, sometimes it’s the little things that matter,” Woodson said simply, looking up and smiling at me for what seemed the first time that night.
I nodded and looked from Woodson to Donny. “Let’s hope so in this case, guys. Let’s hope so.”
* * *
Although Woodson’s discovery of a second pinprick in a row was exciting, unfortunately, that red dot also turned out to be just about the only piece of physical evidence of merit from the crime scene. The CSIs vacuumed as a matter of course, but they were most likely just vacuuming up bags full of forensic disappointment. To no one’s surprise there was no skin remaining beneath the victim’s fingernails. Multiple linear slash wounds covered her body, all caused by the increasingly dull serrated edge of the now well-known knife, the tick-tick-tack signature that Terry had identified on the other victims. The apple held in her hand, as expected, contained a razor.
I looked around. Tyler was nowhere to be seen. Katie and the girls were now sitting with the younger FBI agents who’d driven up from New Orleans at my request, Greg Tucker and Dave Faraday. They were on call, and I’d given them a new assignment. Effective immediately, they would shadow my sister and nieces all day, every day, until the SWK investigation concluded. During school hours Greg would stake out the high school the girls attended, while Dave would cover the elementary school where Katie worked. They would accompany them home at night and stay inside the house, taking shifts during the evening to make sure Katie and the girls stayed safe.
It was an admittedly severe response, but I wasn’t taking any more chances. I’d deal with the inevitable questions from the Bureau later, but I was reasonably sure I possessed a piece of paper that would justify the delegation of these two agents to surveillance. I’d already dropped it into a chain-of-custody mailer and personally delivered it to Harmon and St. Clair to take back to the New Orleans office. Terry, our resident document examiner, would give the note from the SWK a thorough examination before sending it on to Quantico.
Just as our DNA algorithm had predicted—just like BTK and Zodiac—the SWK had finally communicated with authorities as well. And he’d done so via a letter addressed to me.
An hour later I stood with Katie and the girls in the foyer of their house, peering at the three frightened faces looking back at me. “Let’s wait down here while Faraday and Tucker check the place out.”
All three of them nodded silently in unison. I saw their collective fear, the familiar terror of potential victims reflected in their eyes. I wasn’t accustomed to seeing that kind of fear in the faces of my own family.
The seconds ticked by awkwardly. I tried to think of something, anything to say. “Hey, girls,” I finally said, putting on a mischievous smirk and gesturing upstairs with my thumb. “Faraday and Tucker, Faraday and Tucker, Faraday and Tucker. Try saying that over and over again as fast as you can ten times in a row.”
After a couple seconds both girls smiled, and a few seconds later they both laughed aloud as they realized the potential for a vulgar transposition between the two last names.
“Oh, don’t encourage them,” Katie said disapprovingly, which made them laugh even louder.
A few minutes later the boys had finished sweeping the house. “Okay, all clear, boss,” Tucker hollered down the stairs.
“You’re sure?” I called back up to the younger agent, almost unable to bring myself to trust him and let the girls back into their house.
“Yes, sir.”
I started up the stairs. “Okay, girls. Follow me upstairs, then we’ll get settled into your beds.”
“Uncle Lucas. I don’t want to go up there.”
I looked back at Grace. Thirteen, almost fourteen—just old enough to begin feeling like a young woman, but still young enough to react to certain frightening situations with a childlike fear. I walked back down the carpeted steps.
“Come on, Gracie. I know you’ve seen some pretty scary things tonight.” This time it was my chance to cast a disapproving stare Katie’s way, as I was still perturbed that she’d allowed the girls to get so close to the crime scene before an officer shooed them away. Now both Ally and Grace would forever have that dead girl’s body etched in their mind. Maybe their mother shouldn’t have been so busy talking with good old Uncle Tyler.
I refocused and smiled down at Grace again, pushing the chaotic train of thought out of my mind. “But this is what I do for a living. I chase these bad guys and stop them. So we’re going to catch this guy and stop him, too.” I fixed her with my most confident gaze, one that had won over the families of countless victims, one that had reassured whole cities watching press conferences as we pursued a killer in their midst. “I promise, honey.”
Gracie kept looking at me for a second, then looked away. She, for one, didn’t believe a word Uncle Lucas had just said, and there was nothing in the world I could do or say to change it.
* * *
Eventually I convinced the three of them to walk through the house with me. A strange silence accompanied us as we peered into closets, opened cabinets, withdrew shower curtains, and bolted down windows. Afterwards neither of the girls was ready to sleep in her own bedroom, so we all went back downstairs. Tucker and Faraday had already taken up their positions: Faraday sat in a chair at a computer desk in the corner of the den, and Tucker was stationed outside in the car, watching the only entrance to the house. Thankfully, Katie lived on a corner lot nestled against a steep natural hill, beyond which lay miles of swampy marsh. The only way to get to her house was from the front.
Downstairs, Katie and I pulled out the foldout couch in the living room, and the girls clambered under the covers. We tucked them in, and Katie kissed them on their foreheads. I switched on the TV with the remote and handed it to Ally.
“Your mom and I are going to be in the kitchen. You need anything, just call. Okay?”
“Okay, Uncle Lucas.”
In the kitchen Katie brought over two cups of coffee and sat across from me at the small circular wooden table in the breakfast nook. Outside, the wind picked up and rain began to pelt against the bay windows surrounding us.
Katie took a long, drawn-out sip of the steaming coffee, grimaced momentarily as it scorched her tongue, then leaned back. “Thanks for staying here tonight, big brother.”
“Don’t mention it, little sis. Are you going to be okay?” I gestured into the living room where Faraday now sat on the recliner. “With these guys around?”
“Yeah. We’ll be all right. We’ll adjust.”
“Kate. I’m so sorry this is happening.”
“You don’t have to apologize, Lucas. We’re tough. We’ve made it this far together, the girls and I. We’ll make it through this, too.”
“I know.”
Katie stayed silent for a while, and the sounds of an old
Saturday Night Live
rerun echoed into the kitchen from the living room. “Don’t Fear the Reaper” played for a moment, then the TV switched off … exhaustion had finally caught up with the girls.
“Why is this guy so fixated with you?” Katie finally asked.
Her question caught me by surprise. “I—I don’t know, Kate. I wish I did.”
“What do you know about him? Does he know you personally? Or do you think he just knows you because of what you do? Maybe he’s read your books?”
I nodded, even though I wasn’t so sure. “I think that’s more likely. This guy doesn’t know me personally. It’s some insecure little fucker, some little shmuck who realizes he’s gone too far and figures he might as well play it out. And what better way to play out the ending than to confront the FBI? That’s all I probably am to him. A symbol of law enforcement. Nothing more.”
Katie smiled and took another sip. “You know, Lucas. You used to be able to get away with that shit when I was younger.”
“Kate, I honestly—”
“Save it, Lucas. For some reason I know you believe this is personal, too. I don’t know why, and I don’t even care.” She cut her eyes into the living room. “Just find him, Lucas. Find him and stop him. Before he has a chance to come near the girls, ever again.”
I followed her gaze. Ally and Grace had fallen asleep peacefully under the covers of the pullout couch. Ally’s slender arm rested along the top of the pillow over Grace’s head.
“I will, Katie. I swear it.”
* * *
Eventually Katie went into the living room, too, and lay down beside the girls on the pullout sofa. I helped her into bed. She nestled beside Grace, got comfortable, then rolled over and stared up at me in the dark, the light from the street lamp outside spilling through the blinds, across her face. The effect made her look like our mother more than ever before.
“Everything’s going to be fine, Kate,” I whispered down to her. “I promise.”
Katie closed her eyes, yawned, and put her arm around Grace, pulling her head into her shoulder. “I believe you, Lucas. Good night.”
I kissed all three of them on the forehead before sitting in a recliner and staring at them for what seemed like hours, before finally succumbing to sleep.
The next morning I woke up in a recliner, not a bed, and didn’t recognize my surroundings. My legs throbbed from a lack of circulation the night before, but I sat bolt upright in a panic nevertheless as the tingling peaked and finally subsided.
When I saw Faraday typing on his laptop in Katie’s kitchen, everything came back in a rush.
Katie and the girls still slumbered under quilts on the sofa bed. I tiptoed into the kitchen and proceeded to recap responsibilities with Faraday. They were to call me twice a day and give me a brief report. At no time could Katie, Grace, or Ally leave their sight. The FBI would alert the Picayune High School principal’s office and Katie’s elementary school about the surveillances.
I peeked in on the girls one last time. An unprecedented urgency swelled inside me as I regarded their sleeping faces. Then I forced myself to walk out the front door and back into the world of the SWK, as a strange concoction of anger, fear, and resolve percolated inside my veins.
* * *
I drove straight from Katie’s house into New Orleans and encountered almost no traffic at that time on a Saturday morning. Once at the field office, I sat down and spread five manila folders across my desk. As I slowly opened each, photographs of the five victims stared up at me in turn. Each of the various crime scene photographers had taken photos of the women from a short distance away, at eye level. Each girl sat with legs propped up, forearms resting on knees. Sexual, but fully clothed. The significance continued to elude me.
I walked to my office bookshelf and withdrew a textbook that I hadn’t read for a long, long time.
* * *
Three hours later I closed my own book,
The Killing Mind,
and reviewed the main points I’d noted in the chapter entitled “Tableau Killers.” Namely, how tableau killers represented the most difficult type of serial killer to catch, while being the most intelligent and usually the most deranged of all. Characterized by heightened boldness and a desire to leave a mythical mark on history, the Snow White Killer seemed to be shaping up into a perfect example of this type of killer.
Alone in the silence of my office for a few hours, I also had time to think back through the SWK’s signature. The razored apple, the enigmatic message on the victims’ foreheads, the sexual posturing of the bodies. All were bread crumbs leading straight to the dark source of a serial killer’s motive.
The message continued to confound us: “a tan cat can’t attack.” Shelly’s group over in Jackson still hadn’t come up with anything related to such a statement in the comprehensive literary searches she’d run so far. No luck anywhere with cryptology, either.
My mind turned to the apple and the razor. In my estimation this most likely reflected the Halloween urban legend, just a way for SWK to say to the world, “I’m the guy your mother warned you about.” But tableau killers usually used more intricate symbolism, so it was possible that the Snow White Killer was saying more than just “I told you so” with his razored apples.
I decided if I was going to get anywhere with an interpretation that might help us catch this killer, I needed to deconstruct the signature and consider each symbol separately.
First, there was the razor. Razor, a sharp instrument for cutting, an inspiration of terror, a symbol of pain, a path to suicide.
Then there were the apples. The forbidden fruit, the womb, a symbol of renewal.
I tried to link them together. Were these victims a forbidden fruit that caused him terror? Possibly. Were they women’s wombs with a symbolic razor inside them? Perhaps an unwanted child? Possibly again, but none of the victims had been pregnant.
The general direction felt right to me, a worldview where women are seen as fruit, carrying around hidden razors as some sort of indicator of death. But it only felt lukewarm at best.
I moved on to the posturing, the third main element of the signature. The women were postured sexually, propped on their backs, legs open suggestively, but with clothes on. An atypical signature, to be sure.
The reclothing phenomenon specific to this case suggested to me that the postures weren’t meant to be sexual. As I stared at some of the full-body shots from the crime scenes, taken head-on, it struck me. These women, propped up on their haunches, legs spread open and doubled up.
They weren’t arranged in a sexually inviting pose. They seemed more as if they were frozen in the act of childbirth.
A voice in my head started saying,
Warmer
…
Warmer
…
Warmer.