"Exactly. He was punishing them because Emily Watts's body had betrayed him by losing his child: many women being punished for the faults of one. My guess would be that he had punished other women before, perhaps for different reasons."
She fed herself a piece of muffin and sipped her coffee. "Now, when we go back to the ME's report, we find evidence that each of the girls was tortured before death. There were fingernails missing, toes and fingers broken, teeth removed, cigarette burns, bruising inflicted by what may have been a coat hanger. That might be significant, but not for now. In the case of the last three victims, the torture inflicted is significantly more extreme. These girls suffered a lot before they died, Bird." Rachel looked at me solemnly, and I could see the pain in her eyes, pain for them and the memory of her own pain.
"According to the victim profiles collated by your grandfather, these young women were gentle, from good homes, maybe a little asocial. Most of them were shy, sexually inexperienced. Judy Giffen appeared to have had some sexual experience. My guess is they probably pleaded with him before they died, thinking they could save themselves. But that was what he wanted: he wanted them to cry and to scream. There may be a connection there between aggression and fulfillment. He experienced a sexual excitement from their pleas, but he also hated them for pleading, and so they died."
Her eyes were bright now, her excitement at trying to worm her way into this man's consciousness obvious in the movement of her hands, the speed with which she spoke, her intellectual pleasure in making startling, unexpected connections, yet balanced by her abhorrence of the acts she was discussing. "God," said Rachel, "I can almost see his PET scan: temporal lobe abnormalities associated with sexual deviancy; distortion in the frontal lobe leading to violence; low activity between the limbic system and the frontal lobes, indicating a virtual absence of guilt or conscience." She shook her head, as if she was marveling at the behavior of a particularly nasty bug. "He's not asocial, though. These girls may have been shy, but they weren't stupid. He would have to be skilled enough to gain their trust, so the intelligence fits.
"As for Kyle's social background, if what he told Emily Watts is true, he was abused physically and possibly sexually in childhood by a mother figure who told him that she loved him during or after the abuse, and then punished him afterward. He had little nurture or protection and was probably taught self-sufficiency the hard way. When he was old enough, he turned on his abuser and killed her, before moving on to others. With Emily Watts, something different happened. She was herself a victim of abuse, then she became pregnant. My guess is that he would have killed her anyway, as soon as she had the child. From what she said, he wanted the child."
She took a sip of coffee and I used it as an opportunity to interrupt.
"What about Rita Ferris and Cheryl Lansing? Could he have been responsible for their deaths?"
"It's possible," said Rachel. She regarded me quietly, waiting for me to find a connection.
"I'm missing something," I said at last. "That's why you look like the cat that got the cream."
"You're forgetting the mutilation of the mouths. The damage inflicted on the wombs of those girls in 1965 was meant to convey a message. The mutilations were a signifier. We've seen damage to victims used in that way before, Bird." The smile went away, and I nodded: the Traveling Man.
"So, once again, three decades later, we have mutilations, in this case directed to the mouths of victims and in each case meant to signify something different. Rita Ferris's mouth was sewn shut. What does that mean?"
"That she should have kept her mouth shut?"
"Probably," said Rachel. "It's not subtle, but whoever killed her wasn't interested in subtlety."
I considered what Rachel had said for a moment before I figured out what it might mean. "She called the cops on Billy Purdue and they took him away." That could have meant that he had been watching the house the night Billy was arrested, making him the old man that Billy claimed to have seen the night Rita and Donald were killed, maybe even the same old man who had attacked Rita at the hotel.
"In Cheryl Lansing's case," continued Rachel, "her jaw was broken and her tongue torn out. I'm pushing the envelope a little here, but my guess is that she was being punished for not speaking."
"Because she was party to the concealment of the child's birth."
"That would seem to be a plausible explanation. In the end, regardless of what made Caleb Kyle this way, and regardless of signifiers and whatever grievances he may feel, he's a killing machine, completely without remorse."
"But he felt something for the loss of his child."
Rachel almost leapt from her chair. "Yes!" She beamed at me the way a teacher might beam at a particularly bright pupil. "The problem, or the key, is the sixth girl, the one who was never found. For a whole lot of reasons, most of which would probably result in me being ostracized by my peers if I stated them in print, I think your grandfather was right when he suspected that she was also a victim, but he was wrong in the type of victim."
"I don't understand."
"Your grandfather assumed that she had also been killed but had not been displayed for some reason."
"And you don't." But I could see where she was going, and my stomach tightened at the possibility. It had been at the back of my mind for some time and, maybe, at the back of my grandfather's. I think he hoped that she was dead, because the other option was worse.
"No, I don't believe she was killed, and it comes back to the torture inflicted on those girls. This wasn't simply a means of gaining satisfaction and fulfillment for this man: it was a test. He was testing their strength, knowing at the same time, but perhaps not admitting it to himself, that they would fail his test because they simply weren't strong enough.
"But look at the profile of Judith Mundy. She's strong, well built, a dominant personality. She didn't cry easily, could handle herself in a fight. She would pass that kind of test, to the extent that he probably didn't have to hurt her very much to realize that she was different."
Rachel leaned forward and the expression on her face changed to one of deep abiding sorrow. "She wasn't taken because she was weak, Bird. She was taken because she was strong."
I closed my eyes. I knew now what had happened to Judith Mundy, why she had not been found, and Rachel knew that I had understood.
"She was taken as breeding stock, Bird," she said quietly. "He took her to breed on."
Rachel offered to drive me to Logan, but I declined. She had done enough for me, more even than I felt I had a right to ask. As I walked alongside her across Harvard Square, I felt a love for her made all the more intense by the fact that I believed she was slipping further and further away from me.
"You think this man Caleb may be connected to the disappearance of Ellen Cole?" she asked. Her arm brushed against mine, and for the first time since I had come to Boston, she did not pull away from the contact.
"I don't know for sure," I replied. "Maybe the police are right. Maybe her hormones got to her and she did run away, in which case I'm not sure what I'm doing. But an old man found her and drew her to Dark Hollow and, like I keep telling people, I don't believe in coincidences.
"I have a feeling about this man, Rachel. He's come back, and I think he's returned for Billy Purdue and to avenge himself on everyone who helped to hide him. I think he killed Rita Ferris. It may have been out of jealousy, or to cut Billy off so that he'd have no other ties, or because she was going to leave him and take the boy with her. I don't think that Donald was meant to die. Caleb would have wanted his grandson alive but, somehow, Donald became involved in the struggle. My guess is that he was fatally injured when Caleb tried to push him away."