The land is green in April, and always flat. You can see oil rigs and water towers far out in the distance against the vast sky, and have little idea of how far away they really are. Oil goes boom and bust out there, and right now, it’s mostly bust. There’s some ranching and farming — cattle and cotton. It was a big cattle center for a while. I always thought the Texans were smart to exploit their land for beef and oil, two staples this country will always need.
The locals are quick to point out two things of interest. First is that Larry McMurtry lives near here, and he is just a regular guy. You see him all the time. Second is that Wichita Falls sits in “Tornado Alley,” as mentioned by a convenience store employee, the Holiday Inn desk clerk and a desk officer at the WFPD, who answered my arrival call to his captain. The desk clerk told me the big one of ’64 flattened her parents’ house and threw a heavy steel mascot steer that once adorned a local butcher shop some eight hundred yards into a cotton field. It was found there, upright, the next day. It also blew blades of straw into a soft-drink bottle that her dad discovered, unopened and perfectly intact, after the twister passed. She said she’s seen the bottle and it’s true — he still has it on his fireplace in the new house they built.
Police Captain Sam Welborn had a friendly, green-eyed face with a smile that seemed half for me and half for himself. He seemed amused. He was tall and big boned, with thinning black hair and an air of congeniality. He was the kind of big friendly cop you wouldn’t want to get riled up. He handed me file 199591, then rolled back on his chair and spit a brown tobacco blast into a plastic cup. I could smell the wintergreen.
“She was a real sweet girl, they say. Good student, minded her parents real good. It was a pretty big deal here, when she went missin’.”
I opened the folder. “We’ve got a guy who’s taken three in less than two months. Hasn’t raped them yet. Hasn’t killed them yet. He dresses them up in old clothes, these lacy robes and hoods, then cuts them loose out in the woods. We think he’s escalating.”
“This one here had a thing about clothes. Trying to get young girls to put them on.”
“That’s what got our attention.”
“FBI?”
“Yeah.”
“Those boys can be pushy sometimes, but they’re pretty sharp, too.”
I scanned through the missing persons’ report on Mary Lou Kidder. She left school a little late after talking to a teacher, never came home. A woman who lived on Mary Lou’s route home from school said she saw a white van parked on her street that she hadn’t seen before and never saw again. She didn’t notice who was driving it, and she didn’t see anybody get in or out. Mary Lou Kidder had been gone now for two years, one month and three days. There was a picture of her from school — a round-faced, happy-looking girl with bangs and a bow in her hair.
“We couldn’t connect the clothes guy with Mary Lou,” said the captain. “But we still think he took her.”
“I’d think that, too.”
In line with that assumption, the WFPD had included in Mary Lou’s file the incident reports, witness and subject interviews on the UNSUB Male who’d been trying to outfit school girls in free clothes that weren’t new. The physical description was somewhat similar to our early Horridus: white male, early thirties, medium build, eyeglasses, beard and mustaches. The cops had even put together a composite sketch of the suspect. I took a copy of our first Horridus attempt from my briefcase and compared the two. He looked not unlike Amanda’s version from Steven Wicks, with the facial hair and glasses. The Texas version was fuller in the face, and his hair was longer. The glasses were shaped differently. Both sketches were frustratingly vague. I handed our sketch, and the file, over the desk to Welborn.
“Hmm. Eyes look the same. He’s got that... intellectual look. Like a guy who went to college, maybe. But these sketches — seems they’re either right there or way off.”
“I know.”
“I’ll tell ya, we passed that picture out to everybody in town, twice. We had it on the TV and all the papers. We thought we’d probably run him out, then the girl went missing. Man, it was bad. Just breaks your heart when something like that happens on your watch.”
“I know that, too, Captain.”
He studied me with his clear green eyes. I could see the lump of dip stuck up under his cheek, and smell the wintergreen flavoring.
“My personal belief is that he wasn’t from this town,” Welborn said. “Now, I can’t substantiate that with anything concrete, but I believe it. See, we get to know our people here pretty well. We only got about a hundred thousand in Wichita, and we get to know ’em. You got your black element on the other side of Flood Street, then you got your Mexicans mostly grouped up in the north end, around Scotland Park and the river. This fella was Caucasian. Preying on his own type. And that group is pretty well connected up. They recognize each other, mostly. We recognize them. Know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“I think he lived somewhere close by. Not here, though. It’s just a theory.”
I took back the file and scanned through. “If I wanted to check real estate listings for the time period after Mary Lou Kidder disappeared, who would you recommend?”
“Katie Butler, over at Coldwell Banker. Happy to make a call for you. What’s the idea behind that?”
“If you smoked him out of town and he owned a home, he’d sell. The Bureau has a strong hunch that our guy lives in a place that has a detached second unit. If your guy is our guy, maybe he lived in one here, too.”
“Well, the big mansions in Country Club all have servants’ quarters. Rent them out now, mostly.”
“We wouldn’t anticipate him coming from that kind of wealth. We’re thinking middle class. A house with a granny flat or maybe even a detached garage he could convert.”
Welborn’s green eyes settled on me again. “Convert into what?”
“A place to take them. His victims.”
“You got evidence of that?”
“Some.”
“The Feds do up one of those profiles for you?”
“They did.”
He shook his head. “I always thought that was voodoo, myself. But that’s just me. I hope you catch your guy. I hope he’s our guy, too. We can execute him once in each state.”
“If you’d be willing to call Ms. Butler, I’d much appreciate it.”
He set his dip cup on the desk and dialed out. “Katie, this is Sam. How ya doin’ over there, sweetheart?”
Katie Butler was stout and wide faced, with a swirl of red hair done up stiff. She smiled like she’d known me all her life. She welcomed me to Wichita — the locals all seemed to drop the Falls — and said if I ever wanted to move here, it was a buyers’ market, great deals all over, get three times the house I could have in California, for less money.
“A course, we’ve got our tornadoes here,” she said. “You just have to include acts of God as part of life. But you got your quakes and all, so you know what natural disaster is like. They’re usually not so bad as everybody likes to make out.”
“Most of our earthquakes aren’t so bad, either. You don’t even know they’re happening.”
“Well, we do get champion-sized twisters here, I’ll tell you. In ’72 the steer blew off the butcher and landed in Archer County, standing up in a pasture like the real cows. That’s a five-hundred-pound, decorative steel steer. Funny things like that happen all the time.”