And, for a brief moment, I felt a kind of pity for Caleb, a sorrow for the boy he once was and a hatred for the man that he became.
I saw shadows falling from trees, and a figure moving north, ever north, like the needle on a compass. Of course he would have headed north. North was as far away from Texas as he could get after avenging himself on the community that had seen fit to jail him for what he had done to his mother.
But there was more to it than that, it seemed. When my grandfather was a boy, the priest would read the gospels at the north side of the church because north had always been perceived as an area that had not yet seen God's light. It was the same reason why they buried the unbaptized, the suicides and the murderers on northern ground, outside the boundaries of the church walls.
Because north was unknown territory.
North lay the darklands.
The next morning, the bookstore was crowded with students and tourists. I ordered coffee and read a copy of Rolling Stone that someone had left on a chair until Rachel arrived, late as usual. She still wore her black coat, this time with blue denims and a sky-blue V-neck sweater. Beneath it, her blue-and-white striped Oxford shirt was buttoned to the neck. Her hair hung loose on her shoulders.
"Are you ever early?" I asked, as I ordered her a coffee and a muffin.
"I was up until 5 A.M. working on your damned file," she replied. "If I was charging you for my time, you couldn't afford me."
"Sorry," I said. "I can barely afford the coffee and muffin."
"You're breaking my heart," she said, but it seemed that her attitude had softened a little since the day before, although it could have been wishful thinking on my part.
"You ready for this?" she asked.
I nodded, but before she went on I told her what I had learned from the sheriff in Medina and how Caleb had taken his mother's name to escape his past.
She nodded to herself. "It fits," she said. "It all fits."
The coffee arrived and she added sugar, then unwrapped the muffin, tore it into bite-sized pieces and began to talk.
"Most of this is guesswork and supposition. Any decent law enforcement officer would laugh me out of his building, but since you're neither decent nor a law enforcement officer, you'll take what you can get. Plus, everything you've given me is also based on guesswork and supposition, with a little superstition and paranoia thrown in." She shook her head in bemusement, then grew serious as she opened her wire-bound notebook. Line upon line of closely written text lay before her, dotted here and there with yellow Post-its. "Most of what I'm going to tell you, I think you know already. All I can do is to clarify it for you, maybe put it into some kind of context.
"If this man does exist-at least, if the same man, Caleb Kyle, is responsible for all of these killings-then you're dealing with a textbook psychopathic sadist. Actually, you're dealing with worse than that, because I've never encountered anything like this in the literature, or in clinical work, certainly not all in one package. By the way, this file doesn't record any killing after 1965. Even allowing for the newspaper photograph, have you taken into account the possibility that he might be dead, or maybe imprisoned again for other crimes? Either could explain the sudden cessation of killing."
"He could be dead," I admitted, "in which case this is all a waste of time and we're dealing with something else entirely. But let's assume that he wasn't imprisoned. If the sheriff was right, and Caleb was as smart as she believed, then he wasn't going back to prison again. Plus my grandfather checked at the time-it's in the file-and I know that he consulted on a random basis in the intervening years, although he would have been looking for Caleb Kyle, not Caleb Brewster."
She shrugged. "Then you have two further possibilities: either he continued to kill, but his victims are all listed as missing persons if they've been missed at all or…"
"Or?"
Rachel tapped the top of her pen on her notebook, beside a word encircled in a red ring. "Or else he's been dormant. The possibility that some serial killers, if that's even what he is, enter periods of dormancy is one that's being considered by the FBI's Investigative Support Unit, the folks in the Criminal Profiling and Consultation Program. You know this, because I've told you about it before. It's a theory, but it might explain why some killings just cease without anyone ever being apprehended. For some reason, the killer reaches a point where the need to find a victim isn't so strong, and the killings stop."
"If he's been dormant until now, then something just woke him up," I said. I thought of the timber company surveyor, heading into the wilderness to pave the way for the forest's destruction, and what he might have encountered in that forest. I recalled too Mrs. Schneider's story, followed up by a piece in the newspaper, and Willeford's old-style investigation, where you knocked on doors and pinned up notices and put the word around until it filtered down to the person you were trying to reach; and the newspaper story about Billy Purdue's arrest at St. Martha's. If you put out honey, you shouldn't be surprised when the wasps come.
"It's tenuous, but those are the possibilities you have to consider," Rachel continued. "Okay, let's look at the original killings. First, although it may only be a minor point, the location where the bodies were found was important. This Caleb Kyle determined how soon they would be found, where they would be found and by whom. It was his way of controlling and participating in the search. The original killings may have been disorganized-we'll never know for sure, since we don't know where they were killed-but the display of the bodies was very organized. He wanted to be part of some element of the discovery. My guess is that he was watching your grandfather right up to the moment when he found the women.
"As for the killings themselves, then if what the Schneider woman told you is true, which depends in turn on the truth of what Emily Watts told her, Kyle was already killing during their relationship. The extent of decay on each of the five bodies differed: Judy Giffen and Ruth Dickinson were killed first, with a gap of almost one month between them. But Laurel Trulock, Louise Moore and Sarah Raines were killed in rapid succession: the ME's report indicated that Trulock and Moore could have been killed in the same twenty-four-hour period, with Raines killed no more than twenty-four hours later again.
"My guess is that each of these girls-or certainly the last three-were physically similar to Emily Watts. They were slim, delicate girls: more passive than Emily, maybe, who was strong when the need arose, but still of a type. You encountered revenge rapes when you were a policeman, didn't you?"
I nodded.
"A man argues with his wife, or his girlfriend, storms out of the house and takes out his anger on a complete stranger," continued Rachel. "In his mind, all women bear collective responsibility for the perceived faults of one woman, and therefore any woman can be disciplined and punished for the real or imagined slight or the overstepping of whatever boundaries the rapist has established in his mind as acceptable behavior for a woman.
"Well, Caleb Kyle is like those men, but this time it went much further. The ME found no evidence of actual sexual assault on the three later victims, but-and here we're into classic morbid fear of female sexuality territory-there was some damage to the sexual organs, presumably inflicted by the same instrument that was used to make stab wounds to the belly and to destroy the womb of each victim. In fact, what's interesting is that, in the cases of Giffen and Dickinson, he stabbed them after they had been dead for almost one month, probably after he killed the other three girls, or shortly before."
"He went back to them after he thought she had lost the baby."