That was a good question. Where should I begin? With Mrs Schneider? With Emily Watts? With my grandfather? With Ruth Dickinson and Lauren Trulock and the three other girls who ended up dangling from a tree by the banks of the Little Wilson?
‘Mr Parker, I asked you a question.’ I got the feeling that Sheriff Tannen was likely to be holding on to her post for some time.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s complicated. I heard it for the first time when I was a boy, from my grandfather, and now I’ve heard it twice in the last week.’ And then I told her what I knew. She listened without making any comment, and when I had finished telling my story there was a long pause before she spoke.
‘It was before my time,’ she said, at last. ‘Well, some of it was. The boy lived out in the Hill Country, maybe four miles south-east of here – him and his momma. He was born, best as I can recall without looking up a file, in nineteen twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but he was born Caleb Brewster. His pappa was a Lyall Brewster who went off to fight Hitler and ended up dying in North Africa and the two of them, Caleb and his mother, were left to fend for themselves. Plus, Lyall Brewster never got around to marrying Bonnie Kyle, Bonnie Kyle being his mother’s name. You see, that was why I was interested in hearing you say Caleb Kyle. There aren’t many people who’d know him by that name. Fact is, I ain’t never heard him called by that name. He was always Caleb Brewster here, right up until the time he killed his mother.
‘She was the devil’s own bitch, according to those that knew her. Kept herself to herself, and the boy beside her. But the boy was smart, Mr Parker: at school, he raced ahead in math, reading, just about anything he put his mind to. Then his mother decided that she didn’t like the fact that he was attracting attention to himself and took him out of school. Claimed she was teaching him herself.’
‘You think there was abuse?’
‘I think there were stories. I recall someone telling me that they once found him wandering naked on the road between here and Kerrville, covered in dirt and hog-shit. Police brought him home to his momma in a blanket. Boy couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. They heard him yelpin’ as soon as the door closed behind ’em. She sure took the stick to him, I reckon, but as for anything else . . .’
She paused again, and I heard her gulping liquid at the other end of the line. ‘Water,’ she said, “”case you’re wondering.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘Well, whatever. Anyway, I don’t know about sexual abuse. It came up at the trial, but it came up at the Menendez brothers’ trial as well, and look where it got them. Like I said, Mr Parker, Caleb was smart. Even at sixteen, seventeen, he was smarter than most of the people in this town.’
‘You think he made it up?’
She didn’t answer for a time. ‘I don’t know, but he was smart enough to try to use it as mitigation. You have to remember, Mr Parker, that people didn’t talk about it so much in those days. The fact of someone bringing it up was unusual. In the end, I guess we’ll never know for certain what happened in that house.
‘But there was more to Caleb Brewster than intelligence. People around here recall that he was mean, or worse than mean. He tortured animals, Mr Parker, and hung their remains from trees: squirrels, rabbits, even dogs. There was no evidence to tie him to it, you understand, but folks knew it was him. Maybe he got tired of killing animals, and decided to move up a step. There was other stuff too.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, let’s take this in the order it happened. We know he killed his mother and fed her to the hogs. Two or three days after that incident on the road, Sheriff Garrett and another deputy came up to check on the boy. They found him sitting on the porch, drinking sour milk from a jug. There was blood in the kitchen: on the walls, on the floor. The floorboards were soaked with it. Boy still had the knife beside him. Bonnie Kyle’s clothing was in the hog pen, along with some bones, which was pretty much all that the hogs had left. That, and her wedding ring. One of the hogs had passed it out in its stool. I think they got it in the Frontier Museum over in Banderas now, alongside two-headed lambs and Indian arrowheads.’
‘What happened to Caleb?’
‘He was tried as an adult, then sent down.’
‘For life?’
‘Twenty years. He got out in sixty-three or sixty-four, I think.’
‘Was he rehabilitated?’
‘Rehabilitated? Hell, no. I reckon he was off the scale before he ever killed her, and he never got back on it again. But someone saw fit to release him, taking into account the extenuating circumstances. He’d served his time and they couldn’t keep him locked up forever, no matter how good an idea that might have been. And, like I said, he was smart. He kept his nose clean in prison. They thought he was getting better. Myself, I think he was waiting.’
‘He came back to the hill country?’ I asked.
Again, there came that pause. This time, it remained unbroken for what seemed like a long time.
‘The house was still standing,’ began Tannen. ‘I remember him coming back into town on the Greyhound – I was maybe ten or eleven – and Caleb walking out towards the old house, and folks stepping onto the other side of the street and then watching him as he passed. I don’t know how long he spent there. Couldn’t have been more than a couple of nights, but . . .’
‘But?’
She sighed. ‘A girl died. Lillian Boyce. They reckon she was the prettiest girl in the county, and they were probably right. They found her down by the Hondo Creek, near Tarpley. She’d been cut up pretty bad. That wasn’t the worst of it, though.’
I waited, and it seemed to me that I knew what was coming, even before she said it.
‘She was hung from a tree,’ she said. ‘Like someone wanted her to be found. Like she was a warning to us all.’
The line seemed to hum, and the cell phone was hot in my hand, as Sheriff Tannen concluded her story. ‘When we found her, Caleb Brewster had gone again. There’s still a warrant outstanding, far as I know, but I didn’t think anyone would ever get to serve it.
‘At least, I didn’t until now.’
After I hung up, I sat on my bed for a time. There was a deck of playing cards on a bookshelf in the room and I found myself shuffling the deck, the edges of the cards blurring before my eyes. I saw the queen of hearts and drew her from the deck. ‘Hanky-poo’, that was what Saul Mann used to call ‘Find The Queen’. He would stand at his felt-covered trestle-table, seemingly talking to himself as he arranged the cards before him, flipping one card over with the rim of another. ‘Five gets you ten, ten gets you twenty.’ He didn’t even seem to notice the punters slowly gathering, attracted by the sure movement of his hands and the promise of easy money, but he was always watching. He watched and he waited, and slowly, surely, they came to him. The old man was like a hunter who knows that, at some point, the deer must surely cross his path.
And I thought too of Caleb Kyle, staring at the remains of the girls he had torn apart and hung from trees. A memory came to me, a recollection of a legend told of the Emperor Nero. It was said that after Nero killed his own mother, Agrippina the Younger, he ordered that her body be opened, so that he could see the place from which he had come. What motivated this action is unclear: morbid obsession, perhaps, or even the incestuous feelings that the ancient chroniclers ascribed to him. It may even have been the case that he hoped to understand something of himself, of his own nature, by revealing to himself the site of his own origin. He must have loved her once, I thought, before it all turned to fury and rage and hate, before he found it in himself to take her life and rend her remains to pieces. For a brief moment, I felt a kind of pity for Caleb: a sorrow for the boy he once was, and a hatred for the man that he became.
I saw shadows falling from trees, and a figure moving north, ever north, like the needle on a compass. Of course he would have headed north. North was as far away from Texas as he could get after avenging himself on the community that had seen fit
to jail him for what he had done to his mother.
But there was more to it than that, it seemed. When my grandfather was a boy, he told me that the priest would read the gospels at the north side of the church because north had always been perceived as an area that had not yet seen God’s light. It was the same reason why they buried the unbaptised, the suicides and the murderers on northern ground, outside the boundaries of the church walls.
Because north was black territory.
North was the darklands.
The next morning, the bookstore was crowded with students and tourists. I ordered coffee and read a copy of Rolling Stone, which someone had left on a chair until Rachel arrived, late as usual. She still wore her black coat, this time with blue denims and a sky-blue V-neck sweater. Beneath it, her blue-and-white-striped Oxford shirt was buttoned to the neck. Her hair hung loose on her shoulders.
‘Are you ever early?’ I asked, as I ordered her a coffee and a muffin.
‘I was up until five a.m. working on your damned file,’ she replied. ‘If I was charging you for my time, you couldn’t afford me.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I can barely afford the coffee and muffin.’
‘You’re breaking my heart,’ she said, but it seemed that her attitude had softened a little since the day before, although it could have been wishful thinking on my part.
‘You ready for this?’ she asked.
I nodded, but before she went on I told her what I had learned from the sheriff in Medina and how Caleb had taken his mother’s name to escape his past.
She nodded to herself. ‘It fits,’ she said. ‘It all fits.’
The coffee arrived and she added sugar, then unwrapped the muffin, tore it into bite-sized pieces and began to talk.
‘Most of this is guesswork and supposition. Any decent law enforcement officer would laugh me out of the building, but since you’re neither decent nor a law enforcement officer, you’ll take what you can get. Plus, everything you’ve given me is also based on guesswork and supposition, with a little superstition and paranoia thrown in.’ She shook her head in bemusement, then grew serious as she opened her wire-bound notebook. Line upon line of closely-written text lay before her, dotted here and there with yellow Post-its. ‘Most of what I’m going to tell you, I think you know already. All I can do is to clarify it for you, maybe put it into some kind of order.
‘Bird, if this man does exist – at least, if the same man, Caleb Kyle, is responsible for all of these killings then you’re dealing with a textbook psychopathic sadist. Actually, you’re dealing with worse than that, because I’ve never encountered anything like this in the literature, or in clinical work; at least, not all in one package. By the way, this file doesn’t record any killing after 1965. Even allowing for the newspaper photograph, have you taken into account the possibility that he might be dead, or maybe imprisoned again for other crimes? Either could explain the sudden cessation of killing.’
‘He could be dead,’ I admitted, ‘in which case this is all a waste of time and we’re dealing with something else entirely. But let’s assume that he wasn’t imprisoned: if the sheriff was right, and Caleb was as smart as she believed, then he wasn’t going back to prison again. Plus my grandfather checked at the time – it’s in the file – and I know that he consulted on a random basis in the intervening years, although he would have been looking for Caleb Kyle, not Caleb Brewster.’
She shrugged. ‘Then you have two further possibilities: either he continued to kill, but his victims are all listed as missing persons if they’ve been missed at all or . . .’
‘Or?’
Rachel tapped the top of her pen on her notebook, beside a word encircled in a red ring. ‘Or else he’s been dormant. The possibility that some serial killers enter periods of dormancy is one that’s being considered by the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit, the folks in the Criminal Profiling and Consultation Program. You know this, because I’ve told you about it before. It’s a theory, but it might explain why some killings just cease without anyone ever being apprehended. For some reason, the killer reaches a point where the need to find a victim isn’t so strong, and the killings stop.’
‘If he’s been dormant until now, then something just woke him up,’ I said. I thought of the timber company surveyor, heading into the wilderness to pave the way for the forest’s destruction, and what he might have encountered in the forest. I recalled too Mrs Schneider’s story, followed up by a piece in the newspaper, and Willeford’s old-style investigation, where you knocked on doors and pinned up notices and put the word around until it filtered down to the person you were trying to reach; and the newspaper story about Billy Purdue’s arrest at St Martha’s. If you put out honey, you shouldn’t be surprised when the wasps come.
‘It’s tenuous, but those are the possibilities you have to consider,’ Rachel continued. ‘Let’s look at the original killings. First, although it may only be a minor point, the location where the bodies were found was important. This Caleb Kyle determined how soon they would be found, where they would be found and by whom. It was his way of controlling and participating in the search. The original killings may have been disorganised – we’ll never know for sure, since we don’t know where they were killed – but the display of the bodies was very organised. He wanted to be part of some element of the discovery. My guess is that he was watching your grandfather right up to the moment when he found the women.
‘As for the killings themselves, then if what the Schneider woman told you is true, which depends in turn on the truth of what Emily Watts told her, Kyle was already killing during their relationship. The extent of decay on each of the five bodies differed: Judy Giffen and Ruth Dickinson were killed first, with a gap of almost one month between them. But Laurel Trulock, Louise Moore and Sarah Raines were killed in rapid succession: the ME’s report indicated that Trulock and Moore could have been killed in the same twenty-four-hour period, with Raines killed no more than twenty-four hours later again.
‘My guess is that each of these girls – or certainly the last three – were physically similar to Emily Watts. They were slim, delicate girls: more passive than Emily, maybe, who was strong when the need arose, but still of a type. You encountered revenge rapes when you were a policeman, didn’t you?’
I nodded. I knew what they were.
‘A man argues with his wife, or his girlfriend, storms out of the house and takes out his anger on a complete stranger,’ continued Rachel. ‘In his mind, all women bear collective responsibility for the perceived faults of one woman, and therefore any woman can be disciplined and punished for the real or imagined slight or insult or overstepping of whatever boundaries the rapist has established in his mind as acceptable behaviour for a woman.
‘Well, Caleb Kyle is like those men, but this time it went much further. The ME found no evidence of actual sexual assault on the three later victims, but – and here we’re into classic morbid fear of female sexuality territory – there was some damage to the sexual organs, presumably inflicted by the same instrument that was used to make stab wounds to the belly and to destroy the womb of each victim. In fact, what’s interesting is that, in the cases of Giffen and Dickinson, he stabbed them after they had been dead for almost one month, probably after he killed the other three girls, or shortly before.’
‘He went back to them after he thought she had lost the baby.’
‘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 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. 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 fulfilment: 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 violent activity; low activity between the limbic system and the frontal lobes, leading to a virtual absence of guilt or conscience.’ She shook her head, as if she was marvelling at the behaviour 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 afterwards. 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.’
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