Once you got behind the glamour of their celebrity, Zandt knew that serial killers were not the way they were portrayed in the movies: charming geniuses, slick with evil, charismatic crusaders of a bloody art. They were more like drunkards or the slightly mad. Impossible to talk to, or to get sense out of, sealed off from the world behind a viewpoint that could never be expressed or made accessible to those who lived outside it. They came in all shapes, sizes, and types. Some were monstrous, others were fairly decent individuals — aside, that is, from the propensity to kill other people and ruin the lives of those who had loved them. Jeffrey Dahmer had initially made every effort not to yield to urges that he knew placed his desires well outside normal life. He failed, big-time. He did not ask for clemency when caught, did not play games with the police, did nothing except admit his guilt and express sorrow at what he had done. Within the confines of being a murderous sociopath, he behaved as well as he could. The fact remained that he had ended the lives of at least sixteen young men in circumstances almost too horrendous to believe.
Other killers basked in their notoriety, bartered for publicity or privileges through manipulation of the media and police, toying with the grief of the people from whom they had amputated something irreplaceable. They revelled in what they had done, in their rich secrets. They devoured the newspaper coverage of their trials, profoundly content that they had finally achieved the attention they had always felt they deserved. This did not necessarily make them worse. It simply made them different. Ted Bundy. The Casting Agent. John Wayne Gacy. Philippe Gomez. The Yorkshire Ripper. Andrei Chikatilo. Some were better looking, some were more efficient; some intelligent, some border-line or even demonstrably subnormal. Some came across like regular guys; others you would have thought could have been spotted as wackos from across a busy street. None were special humans or touched with evil except in the most superficial sense. All were simply men with a craving to take the lives of other people, to augment their sexual experience with the torture and degradation of others. They were not demons. They were just men
— and women, very occasionally — who did unacceptable things, as a factor of neurotic obsession. It was not a binary of good or evil, but a spectrum also inhabited by people who had to check their locks ten times at night, or who could not rest until the kitchen was tidy after each meal. Serial killers were not chilling in and of themselves. The chill was in the realization that it is possible to be human without feeling as other humans do. Zandt knew the factors that could produce a serial killer. A violent and domineering mother, an abusive or weak father. Early and conflictive sexual experience, especially with parents, siblings, or animals. Being a native of America, the former Soviet Union, or Germany, areas that produce multiple murderers out of all proportion to their populations. Exposure to dead bodies at a formative age. Head injuries, or juvenile heavy metal poisoning — the elements, not the music. A trigger event, something that caused the potential to be actualized. None were necessary or sufficient conditions, merely part of a syndrome that sometimes provided a soil dark enough to yield a sickly flower of urges: an anxious, neurotic and violent individual who could not live as others did. The shadow in our streets. The bogeyman.
He'd seen enough of them. He didn't want to know any more. In his private thoughts, he always referred to The Casting Agent as just that: The Casting Agent. He went to some trouble not to think of him by his real name, but to assign to him the same cartoonish unreality that the killer had evidently believed his victims to possess. If he had been unable to credit the six young boys with the dignity of their individuality, then Zandt felt it was the least he could do to consign The Casting Agent to the same fate.
In the meantime he worked the usual drug-, love-, and profit-related murders. He drank with colleagues, listened to Nina talk about her attempts to connect Josie Ferris, Elyse LeBlanc, and Annette Mattison's disappearances. He had dinner with his wife, drove his daughter places, went to the gym.
On May 15th 2000, Karen Zandt left school at the end of the day. She didn't come home.
At first her parents assumed the best. Then the worst. A sweater was delivered three endless weeks later.
Zandt called Nina. She arrived very quickly with two colleagues. The parcel was unwrapped. This time there was no name embroidered on the sweater inside, and it was not Karen's sweater. Hers had been peach in colour; this was black.
There was a note tucked into it, laser-printed in Courier on a paper stock used in offices and homes across the country.
Mr Zandt,
A 'delivery'. You'll have to wait for the rest.
I have seen thy affliction and the work of thine hands, and rebuked thee.
The Upright Man
A month after that, the body of Annette Mattison was found in a canyon in the Hollywood Hills. Same condition as Elyse LeBlanc, same lack of forensic evidence. No other girls were abducted, at least none whose disappearance was subsequently marked by the delivery of a garment. No other bodies were ever found.
After two hours the Promenade was nearly deserted. Barnes and Noble and Starbucks were shut. People shuffled past the bench periodically, winos on their way to the Palisades for the night, pulling neat little trolleys with their belongings. They saw a man who sat with his hands lying open by his sides, eyes staring straight down the street. No one pulled over to ask for money. They steered clear.
Eventually Zandt stood up and dropped his empty cup in the trash. He realized that he could have gone into the bookstore and established what points within it could have given The Upright Man a vantage from which to watch for Sarah Becker. Though there was no physical evidence for this, Zandt believed he staked out his victims carefully before striking. A few didn't, most did. It could have been that Karen had been a special case; The Upright Man making a point. Zandt didn't think so. The girls were too similar, the disappearances too immaculately wrought.
Barnes and Noble could wait, possibly for ever. He had allowed Nina to convince him to come back. He had wanted to believe that this time it would be different, that he would be able to do more than run around the city, chasing his tail, shouting in the night, never finding the man who had taken his daughter from him. Who had taken Zandt's life in the palm of his hidden, rabid hand, and crushed it to death. Tonight he didn't believe it any more.
He walked back to The Fountain, picking up a few groceries on the way. The lobby of the apartment building was empty, with nobody behind the desk. There was no Muzak, and little reason to believe that there was anyone apart from him inside. The elevator ascended slowly and fitfully, letting him know that its was a difficult task.
While he waited for water to boil he stood and watched the television, as CNN did its best to reduce the world's complexity to bullet points a businessman could parrot over lunch. After a few minutes it cut back to a breaking story. A middle-aged man had walked down the high street of a small town in England, late in the morning. He'd had a rifle, with which he'd killed eight adults and wounded fourteen others.
Nobody knew why.
9
I was sitting in the passenger seat of my car with the door open. It was just after eight in the morning. I had a latte in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. My eyes were wide and dry and I was already regretting the cigarette. I used to smoke. I smoked a lot, for a long time. Then I gave it up. But during the night, which I had spent driving slowly and aimlessly down unlit roads as if trying to find the exit from an endless system of tunnels, I'd come to believe that smoking was the only thing that was going to help. Once you've smoked for a while, there are situations where you're always going to feel something's missing if you don't have a tube of burning leaves in your hand. Without a cigarette you feel friendless and clueless and alone.