It was a two-story Spanish-style stucco rectangle in the middle of three acres of land, with a high wrought-iron fence around it. He installed an electric gate, had a row of decorative spearheads welded to the top, and planted climbing roses along the fence that rapidly grew into a dense, thorny barrier. He dug up trees and ornamental gardens and had the yard graded with the regularity of a putting green. He had motion-sensitive security floods along the eaves that went on when anything as large as a cat crossed too near the house. They bathed the empty, featureless lawn in blinding light that converted it into a kill zone like the margins around prisons. The windows were equipped with steel shutters, and beneath each of them was a hollow window seat containing a flashlight, a cell phone on a charger, and a loaded Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter pistol.
He lived there for about three years before a job took him into the woods north of Minneapolis. He had been hired as a subcontractor by a private detective. The detective’s name was Paul Mellgrim, and he was a highly visible man who had made his name protecting celebrities and handling the investigations that surrounded their many lawsuits. Mellgrim was searching for the daughter of a studio executive who had been a student at the University of Minnesota. He had traced her movements, and found that she had been easy to follow until ten o’clock one evening when she’d left a coffee shop near the campus, said good-bye to a few friends outside the door, and walked off the face of the earth. Mellgrim had called Prescott and said, “I’m telling you, I got a real strange feeling about this. Ugly.”
It was ugly. The day after the call, the girl’s red Porsche turned up in Duluth painted green and with different plates, all ready for resale. Prescott arrived just as the state police and a group of local volunteers were starting on a sweep through the forest in St. Croix State Park. The place surprised him. It was only ninety minutes north of Minneapolis, but it was a kind of wilderness that he had not been expecting. The forest ran right to the highway. If a car entered on the only road in, it drove five miles through uninterrupted woods before it even reached the first ranger station, where visitors were supposed to stop voluntarily and buy a pass. Three times on the way in, Prescott had needed to slow down to let deer bound frantically across the road.
The reason for the sweep was that a biologist who had been busy following the trail of a tagged bear had come across the remains of a young girl in the forest. The body had been mutilated so badly that it was a good thing the biologist had been the finder: he had been able to assure everybody authoritatively that she had not been mauled by a bear. The preliminary examination that had been carried out in the city had confirmed his claim for any remaining doubters, but it had raised another: the girl wasn’t the one Mellgrim had been looking for. Prescott had parked his car and joined the search. It had taken hours of fighting blackflies and sweating through low brush, often losing sight of the line of searchers and staying with them by the sounds they made. But they found the bodies of four more girls, all killed with about the same ferocity and dumped in the woods.
Prescott recognized the pattern without waiting for the state police to get around to discerning it. One body belonged to a girl missing much longer than the others—nearly two years—but the third had died only two months after the second, and the fourth only two weeks after the third. The fourth was the one Prescott had come to Minnesota to look for, the daughter of Mellgrim’s client. The one that had set the sweep in motion, the one the biologist had found, was the most recent. She had been killed only a week after the fourth.
The pattern that sexual psychopaths often followed was asserting itself with unusual intensity this time: two years, two months, two weeks, one week. The first crime was some kind of power experiment, usually an abduction for the purpose of rape. The killing had probably not been planned. More likely, it had been the result of an impulse, or panic. That had ended the incident, but an unexpected problem had arisen after the girl was dead. The killer, consumed by the stew of emotions he felt—fear, shame, remorse, self-hatred—had looked back on it, and remembered. And when he’d remembered, he’d discovered that he liked it. He’d run through it in his memory, and reliving it had made him sexually excited. After a long interval, he’d become so obsessed with repeating it in his mind that he’d wanted to repeat it in the world with a new girl.
He’d tried to duplicate his first experience, and when he had, he’d made some more discoveries: he’d found that his fear had been groundless, because this time the crime was planned, and it was much easier. He’d found that once he had done this to the first girl, the shame and remorse had become meaningless: they were fake. He’d quickly begun to realize that he had never really felt those things. They were just ideas imposed on him by a repressive society, and he had imagined feeling them because he was supposed to. But now his mind had been expanded. He knew far too much to fool himself again. That took care of the self-hatred; he had transcended all rules.
After that, he’d become more and more attached to what had become his new purpose in life. Before long, he had turned himself into something that even he had probably never imagined existed at the start—a predatory creature that wandered in the night searching for victims, needing to feed on their fear and pain. Prescott judged that the man who had left the girls in the woods was reaching some final stage, doing practically nothing now but killing.
Prescott selected his decoy carefully. It was not hard to find a tall, thin blonde of about the right age in Minneapolis. This one was good at impersonating a University of Minnesota co-ed, because it had not been many years since she had been one, and she still returned to some of the hangouts from those days often enough to fit in. Her name was Stella Kaspersen, and she was working as a private detective out of an office on the other side of the river. He spent four hours with her one afternoon, partly letting her convince him that she knew exactly what he wanted her to do, and was capable of doing it.
It was Prescott’s theory that the man knew there were three or four policewomen out acting as decoys each night, but that he was very good at spotting the traps: there were always observation vans somewhere within view, and at least two chase cars around a corner. Prescott believed that the police operations offered a special opportunity. The sight of the policewomen would make the killer agitated, more eager to strike than he had been in the past. Those police operations would also keep him away from whole parts of the city. Any other place might suddenly become very dangerous for a woman alone at night.
Prescott and Stella Kaspersen began to work the streets in areas the police were not covering. Four nights later, they were at their third stop, and Stella was walking alone down the empty sidewalk away from the quiet bar where one of the girls had sometimes been seen. A man in a four-wheel-drive utility vehicle pulled over and asked her if she wanted a ride. She replied haughtily that she didn’t, then walked faster, as though her reply had been a way of hiding fear. But as she and Prescott had rehearsed, she was hurrying from a lighted, open street toward a dark parking lot at the end of an alley. Prescott watched the man from the dark space between two buildings nearby. He saw that Stella’s fear and revulsion were not disappointing to the man. They were making him more interested.
When Stella was in the alley, the man watched her for a moment, then pulled his vehicle over and turned out the lights. Prescott ducked back into the dark space where he had been hiding, and studied the man’s face. The man was aware that the police would be using decoys to find him, and that Stella might be one of them. He was using this time to study the area around him to detect the presence of cops. He looked closely at the line of cars parked along the curb for pickup teams, looked at the windows of buildings for spotters. Prescott could tell that he was frustrated and upset: he was not positive that the area was clear, but he was very aware that time was passing. If he let Stella make it to her car, she was going to be out of his reach. After thirty or forty seconds, the man made his decision: he would chance it. He turned on his lights, pulled out, and sped up the alley after Stella.