After we left the mountain, I rode with Sheriff Dante Wallace to a hotel about eight miles outside of Asheville. Dark sheets of angry rain slanted against the windshield. I was lost in thought, staring at the water running off the windshield wiper blades when he asked, “So how do you do it?”
I turned and looked at him in the dim light. “Do what?”
“Chase these monsters all the time.”
I considered my words for a moment. “Well, I try to tell myself they’re just as human as I am. It helps some. Makes it more personal.”
Tension hardened the lines around his jaw. His voice took on an edge. “How is someone who rapes little babies or dissects his wife and eats her for supper just as human as I am?”
Actually, it was a good question, although I’d never heard it put quite like that. It’s hard not to think of these killers as monsters or aliens or subhumans; I struggle with it myself sometimes. “I try to think in terms of the similarities not the differences, Sheriff Wallace. Criminals interact with the world just like everyone does. They have patterns, follow routines, try to save time and money. They eat, drink, sleep, work, get into arguments, avoid the things they don’t like, and cover up the things they do wrong so they won’t get caught. Just like all of us. I know it sounds cold and unfeeling to say all that, but it helps me catch them. Understanding how people act helps me understand how killers act, and it helps me track them down.”
He drove in silence for a few moments letting my words sink in. At last he turned off the highway and let out a coarse cough. “Well,” he said tersely, “you’re the expert.”
A few minutes later he slowed to a stop in front of a Comfort Inn. “It ain’t the Hyatt,” he said. “But it should do ya for tonight.”
“Thanks for the ride, Sheriff.”
“You’re welcome…” He paused. I could tell he was trying to think of how to address me-Detective Bowers, Agent Bowers, Dr. Bowers
…
“Pat,” I said. “My friends call me Pat.”
“All right. See you tomorrow, Pat.”
“OK,” I said.
Then, I walked inside and tried not to think about what the killer had done to that girl on the mountain.
I dragged myself into my hotel room and closed the door. I could still see her face, her unblinking eyes. Over the years I’ve tried to forget the faces, but I can’t. So many young, promising faces. It seems like it’s always the most attractive ones who get killed. Beauty brings out the worst in us. You’d think it would be the other way around-that the twisted, the deformed, the misshapen would ignite rage and terror. But they only seem to arouse sympathy. No, it’s beauty that brings out the beast. For whatever reason, elegance and grace always seem to ignite the deepest rage and darkest lusts of the human animal.
I’ve been to hundreds of crime scenes over the last fifteen years. Probably thousands. I stopped counting a few years ago when I reached nine hundred. At first all the remembering bothered me. It always bothers people at first. Every cop and FBI agent I’ve ever met can remember their first crime scene.
There’s something about seeing your first dead body. It’s not like the movies or TV. And it’s not like at a funeral where everything has been cleaned up and sanitized. It’s dirty and sad and messy and you see the chest that doesn’t rise and the lips that don’t move and the eyes that don’t blink. Corpses are discolored, misshapen, bloated, and reek with the smell of death. There is nothing beautiful or glamorous about a corpse.
Everybody remembers seeing their first dead body.
But after a while the images kind of run together. You remember bits and pieces-a patch of blood here. A bullet hole there. A knife lying discarded on the grass. A torn piece of fabric clinging to a patch of mottled skin. And if you really work at it, you can start to make the connections. Oh yeah, that was the nine-year-old girl who was kidnapped from her home and found buried outside her dad’s fishing cabin in Montana… That bullet wound reminds me of the boy down in Arkansas who was showing his friend the shotgun in his dad’s office after school… Those pliers look like the ones that couple in Maine used to torture their victims…
The details blur together, but the faces remain etched in your mind. You don’t forget the faces.
I kicked off my shoes and took a quick shower. Then I flipped on the TV. Images I didn’t care about flickered past me. Plastic people flashing fake smiles at a pretend world. I channel surfed past a few home shopping shows, the day’s sports highlights, a rerun of 24, a series of mindless commercials trying to sell me stuff I didn’t need, and of course, the political smear ads for the upcoming presidential election.
The last channel I came to was a local news station doing a story on the disappearance of Mindy Travelca. They had footage of her dad standing in his front lawn. Based on the position of the sun in the sky, I guessed they’d filmed the interview sometime late in the morning. If it was Mindy we’d found, she was probably already dead at the time of the interview. “We’re just hoping and praying she’ll be OK,” the dad was telling the camera as bravely as he could, but his eyes betrayed him; they glistened with tears. A girl of about eight or nine ran up and jumped into his arms.
That must be Mindy’s little sister.
“We know she’s going to be OK,” the man continued. “Don’t we, sweetie?” The little girl nodded. “We love you, Mindy,” he said. “We’re here for you-”
I shut it off. I couldn’t take it.
They probably would have shown Mindy’s picture in a minute or two and I could have known for sure if she was the one we’d found. But I just couldn’t watch. Maybe I didn’t want to know.
I lay there on my back, listening to the cars rush by on the highway less than a hundred meters away, watching the curtains rustle softly as the heater beneath the window struggled to spit mildly warm air into my room.
Someone lost a daughter today.
I grabbed my cell phone and dialed my parents’ number. I heard it ring, and then a frail, familiar voice answered, “Hello?”
“Mom, it’s Pat. Is Tessa there?”
“Oh, Patrick. Yes. I’ll go and get her. Just a moment, dear.” In the background I could hear her calling Tessa’s name, and then I heard my stepdaughter yell back that she was busy!
I pictured her standing there yelling at my mother. A study in contrasts. Tessa with her shoulder-length, shadow-black hair. My mother with her arctic white curls. Most of the time Tessa liked to wear black long-sleeve T-shirts emblazoned with the skull-shaped logos of bands I’d never heard of. Torn jeans with retro tennis shoes usually rounded out her outfit. My mother always wore a dress. Always.
I waited helplessly as they argued until finally Tessa’s voice came on. “What do you want?” she said.
“Don’t talk to your grandmother like that, Tessa Bernice Ellis.”
“I’ll talk like I want to whoever I want. Besides, she’s not my grandmother. My grandparents are dead, remember?”
Ouch.
“I know and I’m sorry, but Martha is my mother, and I’m asking you to treat her with a little more respect.”
A pause with ice in it. “So what is it you want, Patrick?”
I didn’t really expect her to call me Dad, but I could do without the venom in her voice.
“I wanted to wish you a happy birthday.”
“My birthday was yesterday.”
Of course I knew that. Of course I did. And I should have called. There was no excuse. “I know, but I couldn’t call, I was at a conference and then-”
“That is so lame.” She was right, and we both knew it.
“Look, I’m sorry. Really, listen-”
“It doesn’t matter. I gotta go. I’ve got stuff to do. I gotta study. I have two tests tomorrow.” And then, before I could reply, “You’d know that if you were ever here.”
“Listen, Tessa-”
Click.
I stared at the phone. Oh, that went well.
Sighed.
Someone lost a daughter today.
Someone just like me.