The Scarecrow

by Michael Connelly

  “Lead the way. Hurry!”

  We quickly walked, half carried Carver through the facilities room and into the narrow equipment room beyond. The whole way, he moaned and uttered words I couldn’t understand. He was tall but thin and his weight was not overbearing.

  “Jack, that was good, figuring out the back door. I just hope we’re not too late.”

  I had no idea how much time had passed but was thinking in terms of its being seconds not minutes. I didn’t respond to Rachel but believed we had a good chance to get to her fellow agents in time. When we reached the back door of the server room, I took on Carver’s weight and started to turn him so Rachel would be able to put his hand up on the scanner.

  At that moment, I felt Carver’s body stiffen. He was ready for me. He grabbed my hand and pivoted, letting my momentum carry me off balance. My shoulder slammed into the door as Carver dropped one hand and went for the gun in my waistband. I grabbed at his wrist but was too late. His right hand closed around the gun. I was between him and Rachel and I suddenly realized that she couldn’t see the gun and that Carver was going to kill us both.

  “Gun!” I yelled.

  There was a sudden sharp explosion next to my ear and Carver’s hands fell away from me and he slumped to the floor. A spray of blood hit me as he fell.

  I stepped back and doubled over, holding my ear. The ringing was as loud as a passing train. I turned and looked up to see Rachel still holding her gun up in firing position.

  “Jack, you okay?”

  “Yeah, fine!”

  “Quick, grab him! Before we lose the pulse.”

  I moved behind Carver so I could get my arms underneath his shoulders and lift him up. Even with Rachel helping, it was a struggle. But we managed to get him upright and then I held him under the arms while she extended his right hand onto the reader.

  There was a metal snap as the door’s lock disengaged and Rachel pushed it open.

  I dropped Carver on the threshold, keeping the door open to let air in. I opened the case and grabbed the breathers. There were only two.

  “Here!”

  I gave one to Rachel as we entered the farm. The mist in the server room was dissipating. Visibility was about six feet. Rachel and I put on the breathers and opened the airways, but Rachel kept pulling hers off her mouth in order to call out her fellow agents’ names.

  She got no responses. We moved down a central corridor between two lines of servers and were lucky as we came upon Torres and Mowry almost right away. Carver had put them near the back door so he would be able to escape quickly.

  Rachel crouched down next to the agents and tried to shake them awake. Neither was responsive. She tore off her breather and put it into Torres’s mouth. I took mine off and put it in Mowry’s.

  “You take him, I’ll take her!” she yelled.

  We each grabbed one of the agents under the arms and dragged them back toward the door we had entered from. My guy was light and easy to move and I got a good lead on Rachel. But I started running out of steam halfway there. I needed oxygen myself.

  The closer we got to the open door, the more air I began to get into my lungs. Finally I reached the door and dragged Torres over Carver’s body and into the equipment room. The bumpy landing seemed to jump-start Torres. He started coughing and coming to even before I put him down.

  Rachel came in behind me with Mowry.

  “I don’t think she’s breathing!”

  Rachel pulled the breather out of Mowry’s mouth and started CPR procedures.

  “Jack, how is he?” she asked without taking her focus off of Mowry.

  “He’s good. He’s breathing.”

  I moved to Rachel’s side as she conducted mouth-to-mouth. I wasn’t sure how I could help but in a few moments Mowry convulsed and started coughing. She turned on her side and brought her legs up into the fetal position.

  “Its okay, Sarah,” Rachel said. “You’re all right. You made it. You’re safe.”

  She gently patted Mowry’s shoulder and I heard the agent manage to cough out a thank-you and then ask about her partner.

  “He’ll be fine,” Rachel said.

  I moved to the nearby wall and sat with my back against it. I was spent. My eyes drifted to the body of Carver sprawled on the floor near the door. I could see both entry and exit wounds. The bullet had strafed across his frontal lobes. He had not moved since he had fallen but after a while I thought I could see the slight tic of a pulse on his neck just below the ear.

  Exhausted, Rachel moved over and slid down the wall next to me.

  “Backup’s coming. I should probably go up and wait for them so I can show them the way down here.”

  “Catch your breath first. Are you okay?”

  She nodded yes but she was still breathing heavily. So was I. I watched her eyes and saw them focus on Carver.

  “It’s too bad, you know?”

  “What is?”

  “That with both Courier and Carver gone, the secrets died with them. Everybody’s dead and we’ve got nothing, no clue to what made them do what they did.”

  I shook my head slowly.

  “I got news for you. I think the Scarecrow’s still alive.”

  NINETEEN: Bakersfield

  It has been six weeks since the events that took place in Mesa. Still, those events remain vivid in my memory and imagination.

  I am writing now. Every day. I usually find a crowded coffee shop in the afternoon in which to set up my laptop. I have learned that I cannot write in authorial silence. I must fight distraction and white noise. I must come as close as possible to the experience of writing in a crowded newsroom. I seem to need the din of background conversations, ringing phones and keyboards clacking to feel comfortable and at home. Of course, it is an artificial replacement for the real thing. There is no camaraderie in a coffee shop. No sense of “us against the world.” These are things I am sure I will miss about the newsroom forever.

  I reserve the mornings for research on my subject. Wesley John Carver remains largely an enigma but I am getting closer to who and what he is. As he lies in the twilight world of a coma in the hospital ward of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Los Angeles, I close in on him.

  Some of what I know has come from the FBI, which continues to work the case in Arizona, Nevada and California. But most of it I have gotten on my own and from several sources.

  Carver was a killer of high intelligence and clear-eyed self-understanding. He was clever and calculating, and able to manipulate people by tapping into their deepest and darkest desires. He lurked on websites and chat rooms, identified potential disciples and victims and then followed them home, tracing them through the labyrinthine portals of the digital world. He then made casual contact in the real world. He used them or killed them or both.

  He had been doing it for years—well before Western Data and the trunk murders had caught anyone’s eye. Marc Courier had only been the latest in a long line of followers.

  Still, the record of grim deeds Carver committed cannot overshadow the motivations behind it. That is what my editor in New York tells me each time we talk. I must be able to tell more than what happened. I must tell why. It’s breadth and depth again—the ol’ B and D—and I am used to that.

  What I have learned so far is this: Carver grew up an only child without ever knowing who his father was. His mother worked the strip club circuit, which kept the two of them on the road from Los Angeles to San Francisco to New York and back during his younger years. He was what they called a dressing-room baby, held backstage in the arms of housemothers, costumers and other dancers while his own mother worked in the spotlights out front. She was a featured act, performing under the stage name “L.A. Woman” and dancing exclusively to the music of the signature Los Angeles rock band of the era, The Doors.

  There are hints that Carver was abused sexually by more than one of the people he was left with in dressing rooms and that on many nights he slept in the same hotel room where his
mother entertained men who had paid to be with her.

  Most notable in all of this was that his mother had developed an unnamed but degenerative bone disease that threatened her livelihood. When not onstage, and away from the world in which she worked, she often wore leg braces prescribed to provide support for weakening ligaments and joints. Young Wesley was often called upon to help secure the leather straps around his mother’s legs.

  It is a dismal and depressing portrait, but not one that adds up to multiple murder. The secret ingredients of that carcinogen have not yet been revealed—by me or the FBI. What made the horrors of Carver’s upbringing metastasize into the cancer of his adulthood remains to be learned. But Rachel often reminds me of her favorite line from a Coen brothers film: Nobody knows anybody, not that well. She tells me no one will ever know what sent Wesley Carver down the path he took.

  I am in Bakersfield today. For the fourth day in a row I will spend the morning with Karen Carver and she will tell me her memories of her son. She has not seen or talked to him since the day he left as an eighteen-year-old for MIT, but her knowledge of his early life and her willingness to share it with me bring me closer to answering the question of why.

  Tomorrow I will drive home, my conversations with the now wheelchair-bound mother of the killer completed for the time being. There is other research to complete and a looming deadline for my book. More important than all of that, it has been five days since I have seen Rachel and the separation has grown difficult to take. I’ve become a believer in the single-bullet theory and need to return home.

  Meantime, the prognosis for Wesley Carver is not good. The physicians who tend to him believe he will never regain consciousness, that the damage from Rachel’s bullet has left him in permanent darkness. He mumbles and sometimes hums in his prison bed but that is all there will ever be.

  There are some who have called for his prosecution, conviction and execution in such a state. And others have called this idea barbaric, no matter how heinous the crimes he is accused of committing. At a recent rally outside the corrections center in downtown L.A., one crowd marched with signs that said PULL THE PLUG ON MURDER, while the signs of the competing group said ALL LIFE IS SACRED.

  I wonder what Carver would think of such a thing. Would he be amused? Would he feel comforted?

  All I know is that I can’t erase the image of Angela Cook slipping into darkness, her eyes open and afraid. I believe that Wesley Carver has already been convicted in some sort of court of higher reason. And he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

  TWENTY: The Scarecrow

  Carver waited in darkness. His mind was a jumble of thoughts. So many he was not sure which were true memories and which were made up.

  They filtered through his mind like smoke. Nothing that stayed. Nothing that he could grab on to.

  He heard the voices on occasion but could not make them out clearly. They were like muffled conversations all around him. Nobody was talking to him. They were talking around him. When he asked questions, nobody answered.

  He still had his music and it was the only thing that saved him. He heard it and tried to sing along but often he had no voice and had to just hum. He kept falling behind.

  This is the end… beautiful friend, the end…

  He believed it was his father’s voice that sang to him. The father he never knew, coming to him in the grace of music.

  Like in church.

  He felt a terrible amount of pain. Like an ax embedded in the center of his forehead. Unrelenting pain. He waited for someone to stop it. To save him from it. But no one came. No one heard him.

  He waited in darkness.

  Acknowledgments

  The author gratefully acknowledges the help of many in the research, writing and editing of this book. They include Asya Muchnick, Bill Massey, Daniel Daly, Dennis “Cisco” Wojciechowski, James Swain, Jane Davis, Jeff Pollack, Linda Connelly, Mary Mercer, Pamela Marshall, Pamela Wilson, Philip Spitzer, Roger Mills, Scott B. Anderson, Shannon Byrne, Sue Gissal and Terrell Lee Lankford.

  Many thanks also to Gregory Hoblit, Greg Stout, Jeff Pollack, John Houghton, Mike Roche, Rick Jackson and Tim Marcia.

  Excerpt from “The Changeling,” words and music by The Doors, © 1971 Doors Music Co. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission; Excerpt from “Riders on the Storm,” words and music by The Doors, © 1971 Doors Music Co. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission; Excerpt from “The End,” words and music by The Doors, © 1967 Doors Music Co. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  About the Author

  Michael Connelly is a former journalist and the author of the #1 bestsellers The Brass Verdict and The Lincoln Lawyer, the bestselling series of Harry Bosch novels, and the bestselling novels Chasing the Dime, Void Moon, Blood Work, and The Poet. Crime Beat, a collection of his journalism, was also a New York Times bestseller. He spends his time in California and Florida.

  Also By Michael Connelly

  Fiction

  The Black Echo

  The Black Ice

  The Concrete Blonde

  The Last Coyote

  The Poet

  Trunk Music

  Blood Work

  Angels Flight

  Void Moon

  A Darkness More Than Night

  City of Bones

  Chasing the Dime

  Lost Light

  The Narrows

  The Closers

  The Lincoln Lawyer

  Echo Park

  The Overlook

  The Brass Verdict

  Nonfiction

  Crime Beat