The Narrows Read online

  "Cherie should not have told you about the prints and as far as the MO goes, there is nothing known about that for sure."

  "Just because she shouldn't have told me doesn't mean it isn't true. You're not going to be able to cover this up, Agent Alpert."

  Alpert laughed in frustration.

  "Who said anything about a cover-up? Look, all we're doing right now is controlling information. There is a right time for revealing data. That is all I am telling you. Your presence alone here will be revealing enough, okay? I just don't want you deciding what to reveal and who to reveal it to. That's my job. Understood?"

  Rachel nodded without conviction. She glanced at Dei as she did so.

  "Perfectly."

  "Good. Then, Cherie, take her away. Take her sightseeing." They left the RV and Dei led her toward the first small tent.

  "You certainly ingratiated yourself with him," she said to Rachel as they went.

  "It's funny. Some things just never change. I think it might be impossible for a bureaucracy to evolve, to learn anything from its mistakes. Anyway, never mind. What do we have here?"

  "So far we have eight bags and gas on another two. We just haven't gotten to them yet. Classic inverted pyramid."

  Rachel knew the shorthand. She had invented some of it. Dei was saying eight bodies had been recovered and readings from gas probes indicated there were another two bodies still interred and waiting for excavation. Tragic history created data from which models of similar behavior were formed. It had been seen before, a killer who returns with victims to the same burial spot follows a pattern, the newer burials radiating out from the original in an inverted pyramid or V pattern. So was the case here, with Backus either unintentionally or consciously following a pattern based on data he helped accumulate as an agent.

  "Let me ask you one thing," Rachel said. "He was talking to Brass Doran on the phone in there. She's got to know about the Backus connection, right?"

  "Yes, she knows. She found the prints on the package."

  Rachel nodded. At least .she had one confederate she could trust and who was in the know.

  They reached the tent and Dei pulled back the entry flap. Rachel went in first. Because the overhead venting flap was open it was not dark in the tent. It was only dim. Rachel's eyes adjusted immediately and she saw a large rectangular hole in the center of the tent. There was no fill pile. She assumed the dirt and rock and sand removed from the grave had been shipped to Quantico or the field office lab for sifting and analysis.

  "This first site is where the anomalies are," Dei said. "The others are straight burials. Very clean."

  "What are the anomalies?"

  "The reading on the GPS came back to this spot. Sitting here when they got here was a boat. It was-"

  "A boat? Here in the desert?"

  "You remember that preacher I told you started this place? He dug a canal for the spring water to fill. We figure the boat came from back then. It had been sitting here for decades. Anyway, we moved it, sank a probe and started digging. Anomaly number two is that the grave contained the first two victims. All the other graves are individual."

  "These first two, were they buried at the same time?"

  "Yes. One on top of the other. But one was wrapped in plastic and he had been dead a lot longer than the other. Seven months longer, we think."

  "So he sat on one body for a while. Wrapped it for safekeeping. And when he had the second he realized he had to do something and so he came out to the desert to bury them. He used the boat as a marker. As a sort of gravestone and for himself because he knew he'd be back with more."

  "Maybe. But why'd he need the boat if he had the GPS?"

  Rachel nodded and felt a little buzz of adrenaline start to tick in her blood. The brainstorming had always been the best part of the job.

  "The GPS came later. Recently. That was just for us."

  "Us?"

  "You. The bureau. Me."

  Rachel moved to the edge and looked down into the hole. It had not been deep, especially for two bodies. She stopped breathing through her mouth and took the fetid air in through her nose. She wanted to remember this.

  "IDs yet?"

  "Nothing official. No contact with kin yet. But we know who some of them were. Five of them at least. The first one was three years ago. The second seven months after that."

  "Have you built a cycle?"

  "Yes, we have it. About an eight percent reduction. We think the last two will bring us up to November."

  Meaning that the intervals between the killings were decreasing by eight percent from the initial seven-month period between killings one and two. Again, it was familiar. The decreasing interval was common in case history, a symptom of the killer's diminishing control of his urges at the same time his belief in his invincibility grows. You get away with the first one and the second comes easier and sooner. And so on.

  "I guess that makes him overdue," Rachel said.

  "Supposedly."

  "Supposedly?"

  "Come on, Rachel, it's Backus. He knows what we know. He's just playing with us. It's like Amsterdam. He's gone before we even recognize it is him. Same here. He's moved on. I mean, why send us the GPS if he hasn't? He's split already. He's not overdue and he's not coming back here. He's somewhere laughing at us, watching us follow our models and routines, knowing that we won't get any closer to him than we did the last time."

  Rachel nodded. She knew Dei was right but decided to be optimistic.

  "He's got to make a mistake somewhere. What about the GPS? Anything on that?"

  "We're working it, obviously. Brass is on that."

  "What else is there?"

  "There is you, Rachel."

  Rachel didn't say anything. Again Cherie Dei was right. Backus had something in play. His obscure but direct message to Rachel seemed to make this obvious. He wanted her here, wanted her to be part of the play. But what was it? What did the Poet want?

  Like Rachel had mentored Dei, Backus had mentored Rachel. He was a good teacher. In retrospect, better than she or anyone could have imagined. She was mentored by both agent and killer, hunter and prey, a unique combination in the annals of crime and punishment. Rachel always remembered a throwaway line Backus had spoken one night when they were walking up the stairs from the basement at Quantico, leaving the unit behind for the day.

  "In the long run I think it is all bullshit. We can't predict how these people act. We can only react. And at the end of the day, that means we're largely useless. We make good headlines and Hollywood makes good movies about us, but that's about it."

  Rachel was a rookie in the unit at the time. She was full of ideals and plans and faith. She spent the next thirty minutes trying to talk Backus out of such a belief. Now she was embarrassed by the memory of the effort and the things she had said to a man she would later realize was a killer.

  "Can I go into the other tents now?" Rachel asked.

  "Sure," Dei said. "Whatever you want."

  CHAPTER 12

  IT was late and the batteries on the boat were beginning to run low. The lights in the forward berth were steadily dimming. Or at least it seemed so to me. Maybe it was my eyes that were dimming. I had spent seven hours reading through files pulled out of the boxes on the top bunk. I had filled my notebook to the last page and then flipped it over and started back to front.

  The afternoon interview had been uneventful if not unhelpful. Terry McCaleb's last charter was a man named Otto Woodall who lived in a luxury condo behind the fabled Avalon Casino building. I talked to him for an hour, getting much the same story I had already gotten from Buddy Lockridge. Woodall, who was sixty-six years old, confirmed all aspects of the trip that were of interest to me. He said he did leave the boat during their dockage in Mexico and spent time with women he knew there. He was unembarrassed and unashamed. His wife was over on the mainland shopping for the day and he apparently didn't mind opening up. He told me he was retired from his job but not from life. He said h
e still had a man's needs. I let that line of questioning go at that point and focused on the last moments of McCaleb's life.

  Woodall's observations and recollections mirrored Buddy's in all important details. Woodall also confirmed that on at least two specific instances during the trip he saw McCaleb take his meds, downing the pills and liquids with orange juice each time.

  I took notes but knew they wouldn't be needed. After an hour I thanked Woodall for his time and left him to his view of the Santa Monica Bay and the bloom of smog that rose beyond it on the mainland.

  Buddy Lockridge was waiting for me out front in a golf cart I had rented. He was still brooding over my last-minute decision to interview Woodall without him. He'd accused me of using him to get the interview with Woodall. He was right about that but his complaints and concerns weren't even on my radar.

  We drove silently back to the pier and I turned in the cart. I told Buddy he could head home because I was going to be busy reading files the rest of the day and into the night. He meekly offered to help but I told him he already had helped enough. I watched him walk off toward the ferry docks with his head down. I still wasn't sure about Buddy Lockridge. I knew I had some thinking to do about him.

  Not wanting to fool around with the Zodiac I took a water taxi back to The Following Sea. I conducted a quick search of the master stateroom-finding nothing of note-and moved into the forward cabin.

  I noticed that Terry had a compact disc player in the converted office. His small collection of music was mostly blues and 1970s rock and roll. I plugged in a more recent Lucinda Williams CD called World Without Tears and liked it so much I ended up letting it play over and over during the next six hours. The woman had long journeys in her voice and I liked that. By the time the power started faltering on the boat and I turned the music off I had unconsciously memorized the lyrics to at least three songs I could sing to my daughter the next time I put her to bed.

  Back in McCaleb's converted office, the first thing I did was go back to his computer and open the folder marked profiles.

  It gave me a listing of six different files, all titled by dates in the previous two years. One by one I called them up in chronological order and found each to be a forensic suspect profile of a murder case. Written in the unadorned and clinical language of the professional, each profile drew conclusions about a killer based on specific crime scene details. It was clear from these details that McCaleb had done more than simply read newspaper articles. It was obvious he had full access to the crime scenes-either in person or more likely by photos and tapes and investigators' notes. It was very clear to me that these were not practice runs worked up by a profiler who missed the job and wanted to keep in tune. These were the work of an invited guest. The cases were all from the jurisdictions of small police departments in the west. My guess was that McCaleb had heard of each case through news reports or other means and simply volunteered his help to the police department struggling with the case. Offer accepted, he was ,probably sent the crime scene information and he then set to work analyzing and drawing up the profile. I wondered if his notoriety helped or hindered him when he offered his talents. How many times was he turned down to be accepted these six times?

  When accepted, he probably worked each case from Jhe desk where I was sitting, without ever leaving the boat. Or thinking his wife knew in detail what he was doing.

  But I could tell each profile had taken a good amount ,of his time and attention. I was beginning to understand more and more what Graciela had said had become a problem in their marriage. Terry couldn't draw a line. He couldn't let it go. This profile work was a testament not only to his dedication to his mission as an investigator but also to his blind spot as a husband and father.

  The six profiles came from cases in Scottsdale, Arizona; Henderson, Nevada; and the four California cities of La Jolla, Laguna Beach, Salinas and San Mateo. Two were child murders and the other four were sex slayings involving three women and one male victim. McCaleb drew no links between them. It was clear they were simply separate cases that had drawn his attention in the last two years. There was no indication in any of the files that Terry's work had been helpful or if any of the cases had been cleared. I wrote down the basics from each in my notebook with the idea that I would follow up with the departments to check the status of each investigation. It was a long shot but it was still possible that one of these profiles could have triggered McCaleb's death. It wasn't a priority but I would need to check it out. Finished with the computer for the time being, I directed my attention to the file boxes stored on the top bunk. One by one I pulled them down until there was no room on the floor of the forward room. I found that they contained a mix of files from both solved and unsolved cases. I spent the first hour just sorting them and pulling out the open-unsolveds, thinking that it was more likely than not that if Terry's death was related to a case, then it was one with a suspect still at large. There was no reason for him to be working or reworking a closed case.

  The reading was fascinating. Many of the files were on cases I was familiar with or had even had a part in. They were not files that had gathered dust. I got the distinct impression that the open cases were in endless rotation. From time to time McCaleb pulled them out and rethought the investigations, the suspects, the crime scenes, the possibilities. He made calls to investigators and lab people and even witnesses. All of this was clear because McCaleb's practice was to use the inside front flap of the file to write notes on the moves he made, meticulously dating these entries as well.

  From these dates I could tell that McCaleb had been working many cases at once. And it was clear he still had a pipeline into the FBI and the Behavioral Sciences unit at Quantico. I spent a whole hour reading the fat file he had accumulated on the Poet, one of the more notorious if not embarrassing serial killer cases in the FBI annals. The Poet was a killer later revealed to be the FBI agent who had been heading the squad essentially hunting for himself. It was a scandal that had rocked the bureau and its vaunted Behavioral Sciences Section eight years before. The agent, Robert Backus, chose homicide detectives as his victims. He staged the killing scenes as suicides, leaving behind suicide notes containing verses from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. He killed eight men across the country in a period of three years before a reporter discovered the false suicides and the manhunt began. Backus was revealed and shot by another agent in Los Angeles. At the time he was supposedly targeting a detective from the homicide table in the LAPD's Hollywood Division. That was my table. The target, Ed Thomas, was my colleague and that was my connection. I remember taking a very high personal interest in the Poet.

  Now I was reading the inside story. Officially the case was closed by the bureau. But the unofficial word had always been that Backus had gotten away. After being shot Backus initially escaped into the storm-water tunnel system that ranged beneath Los Angeles. Six weeks later a body was found with a bullet hole in the right place but decomposition made a physical identification and fingerprint comparison impossible. Foraging animals-it was reported-had made off with parts of the body, including the lower mandible and the only teeth that could have been used for identification through dental records. Backus had also conveniently disappeared without leaving DNA exemplars behind. So they had the body with the bullet hole but nothing to compare it to. Or so they said. The bureau quickly announced that Backus was presumed dead and the file was closed, if only to bring a speedy end to the agency's humiliation at the hands of one of its own.

  But the records McCaleb had accumulated since then confirmed that the folklore was true. Backus was still alive and out there. Somewhere. Four years earlier he had surfaced in Holland. According to confidential FBI bulletins provided by bureau sources to McCaleb, a killer took the lives of five men over a two-year period in Amsterdam. All the victims were foreign visitors who had disappeared after venturing into the city's red-light district. Each man was found strangled and floating in the Amstel River. What connected the killings to Backus wer
e notes sent to local authorities in which the writer took credit for the killings and asked that the FBI be called into the case. The writer, according to the confidential reports, asked specifically for Agent Rachel Walling, the agent who had shot Robert Backus four years earlier. The police in Holland invited the FBI to take an unofficial look at the case. The sender had signed each letter as simply "The Poet." FBI handwriting analysis of the letter indicated-not conclusively-that the writer was not a killer trying to ride the notorious coattails of Robert Backus, but Backus himself.

  Of course, by the time the bureau, local authorities and even Rachel Walling mobilized in Amsterdam, the killer was long gone. And Robert Backus had not been heard from again-at least as far as Terry McCaleb's sources knew.

  I replaced the thick file in one of the boxes and moved on. I soon learned that McCaleb was not just working old cases. In fact, anything that caught his attention was subject to his focus and skills. There were dozens of files that contained only a single newspaper story and some notes jotted on the file flap. Some cases were high profile, others obscure. He put together a file of newspaper clips on the Laci Peterson case, the disap- pearance of a pregnant woman from Central California on Christmas Eve two years before. The case had garnered long-term media and public attention, particularly after her dismembered body was found in the bay where her husband had earlier told investigators he had been fishing when she disappeared. An entry on the file flap dated before the woman's body was found said, "Definitely Dead-in the water." Another note dated before her husband's arrest said, "There's another woman."