‘Got away,’ he muttered.
‘He looked like he knew what he was doing. You okay?’
‘Yeah, except I nearly got lost on the way back.’
‘It’s a lost pond,’ I said. My hands were shaking. ‘Jesus.’
‘They dealt the play,’ he said. ‘We weren’t looking for this.’
‘I know,’ I said, overcome with the bizarreness of being back in a childhood environment, this time with a gun. ‘But what difference does that make? Someone will always be shooting somebody.’
Bobby squatted down next to the denim man’s body and felt through his pockets until he found a wallet. He flipped through it in front of me. There was no driver’s licence, no stamps, no receipts, no photos – none of the standard wallet detritus. Nothing except for about forty dollars.
‘Did you look at the other dead guy?’
‘Only for long enough to make sure he wasn’t going to start shooting again,’ I said. ‘He was wearing a vest, but I’m still impressed at how long he kept going. That guy showed real dedication to his task. Which was nothing to do with us. They could have taken us out easily. They were after Lazy Ed. We were just in the way.’
Bobby nodded. ‘There was no identification on him either,’ I said. ‘At all. I turned back the collar of his sweater, and looked in the back of his pants. No labels. They’d been cut out.’
‘It’s The Straw Men,’ he said. ‘They’re taking them out one by one.’
‘But why? And how did they find us?’
He shrugged. ‘The Fed chick did. Maybe they did it the same way. It’s their Web page: they’d have immediate notification of any access, without waiting for some hacker to intercept it. Or they could have been on the case before we were, Ward. There’s evidence that some sort of cleanup is in operation.’
He looked up at me, looking tired and pissed off with our failure. ‘Either way they got the job done. There’s nothing left for us here except trouble, and we already got enough of that.’
Without another word we started walking.
Nina had assumed Zandt would explain to her what was on his mind, but from the moment the other two guys had left, he’d clammed up. When he’d turned up at LAX in the cab, though he hadn’t been particularly friendly, he had at least seemed to be present. As soon as they’d established that the men at the Holiday Inn in Hunter’s Rock – whatever they might have been up to, and she still had questions about that – were nothing to do with The Upright Man, it was like he’d retreated again. She felt stupid about hauling them upstate, but making a mistake was better than doing nothing. She was very aware of the passage of time, aware of it as acutely as if someone was pulling her skin off her face. In her it bred a desire to talk, to try to do or say something, anything, almost as if they could vocalize a solution into existence. In Zandt it seemed to have the opposite effect. It would not be long, she believed, before he became utterly mute.
The plane was mostly empty and yet he hadn’t even sat next to her. He was across the row, studying some old files he’d taken from the house. She called the office in Brentwood, and established that nothing had changed there, while not making it clear that she wasn’t exactly just around the corner.
Then she turned back to the window, and stared down at the land passing below as they flew over it back to LA, wondering if they were passing over the very place, the hidden house or cabin, whatever The Upright Man called his own. The knowledge that they might be, that Sarah Becker might be under her somewhere, was impossible to bear. Instead she yanked the in-flight magazine out of the pouch and tried very hard to read it.
Zandt was barely aware he was on a plane, and he wasn’t even thinking about Sarah Becker. Instead he was considering four disappearances, spread over the country in a three-year period. There was little to tie them together except that copies of the case files were now on his lap. But if there was some kind of brokering service, the usual rules of serial investigation might no longer apply. If you had a series of disappearances or bodies within a tightly confined geographical area, it was a fair assumption you could limit the search for evidence or corollary events to within that same space. Most killers had their hunting grounds, a few square miles in which they were confident. Some would limit their field of activity to a few blocks, even a couple of streets – especially if preying on sections of society that didn’t inspire committed interest from the authorities. Zandt remembered watching footage of the demolishing of the house that had held Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment, the place where young black and Asian men had been dismembered, worshipped, and eaten, in one order or another. Families of the victims watched the event, most mutely, some merely sobbing – but a few demanding an explanation from anyone who would listen, trying to elicit some reason to accept the fact that their children had been taken from them and murdered without anyone seeming to care very much.
Disappearances on opposite sides of the country were seldom judged against each other, even after the FBI became involved, especially if they took place within a similar time frame. You didn’t snatch someone from San Francisco on Tuesday night and then grab another in Miami in the small hours of Thursday morning.
Not, at least, if the same man was involved. Zandt had been looking for disappearances that shared characteristics with those connected with The Upright Man, and that also had taken place in the same years. He was not expecting to find other instances of little keepsakes with a girl’s names embroidered on each of them. The Upright Man was clever enough to seek to imply that the LA cases were unconnected with any in other parts of the country.
This was the realization that had been nagging at him when the cab had arrived to take him to LAX: that the sweaters were showy. That they might have little or nothing to do with the killer’s pathology, and instead be a way of fencing off a small group of cases by making them appear unrelated to anything else. That The Upright Man might have judged that the police were as likely to be impressed by such a touch as were the audiences for films where chrysalises were left in corpses’ throats, or TV series where each week a man caught killers who wore their innermost psychoses on their sleeve. You got a sweater with a name on it, it’s one of ours. You haven’t, then it isn’t, and we’re not interested in hearing about it. Our guy’s got a pathology. That’s what we’re looking for. It’s one of the few tools we’ve got, we’re sticking by it and can’t you see how busy we are already?
Zandt believed it was all too possible that The Upright Man might not have a pathology at all, that he might not be susceptible to profiling. He could be out there doing it, taking victims culled from anywhere in the country. Maybe even anywhere in the world. Just because he wanted to.
The subjects did not constitute a clearly distinguishable group. We covet beauty because beauty makes people recognizable, makes them look famous. Zandt did not consider the long hair to be a reliable indicator either. If he was right in thinking that the sweaters were a false trail, then the length of the girl’s hair might simply be a means to an end. There were only two distinguishing features. The first was age. Many young children disappear, and a number of old men and women are battered in their homes. Both unwittingly put themselves in the path of statistics by virtue of their physical weakness. Of the remainder, the majority of women who disappear are in their late teens or early twenties: sufficiently young (and not too old) to have independent lives; women who can be found walking home late at night, who might live alone, who have the youthful confidence to come to the aid of an affable man with his arm in a sling and his face just in shadow in the corner of a parking lot late at night. Women of all ages disappear, but the big spike in the graph came in this range. The Upright Man’s known victims, however, along with the missing girls in the files on his lap, had been in their middle teens. Girls who were old enough to present a physical challenge to their abductor, but too young to often be found in the most vulnerable environments.