Run for Cover

by Michael Ledwidge

  “It’s not an ID but the next best thing,” she said. “I compiled a bunch of medical device manufacturers’ databases and the breast implant serial number came up first thing. The implants are registered to a plastic surgery office in Casper, Wyoming. Fletcher Cosmetic Surgery Center. I was just looking at its website. It’s only five years old.”

  “That’s awesome,” Gannon said. “So the patient’s name should be in the office file, right? Did you check for any missing women in Casper?”

  “That’s the second thing I did,” Kit said. “But no. There’s no one.”

  “Is Casper far from here?”

  “It’s east of here. Four and a half hours by car.”

  “Not around the corner but definitely doable,” Gannon said, nodding. “We’ll head out tomorrow first thing. Talk about hitting the ground running. This a home run.”

  Ten minutes later, they were sitting in the waterfall lobby, waiting for the valet to bring their Armada around, when Kit suddenly started shaking her head.

  “Shit!” she said.

  “What is it?” Gannon said.

  “What you said about the ID being a home run. This is a home run on a tee. It took me two minutes and a couple of clicks to get a real lead. And my boss, Sinclair, has this? Has had it for a week? And nothing? He said he’d keep me up-to-date, but I haven’t heard a word from him. They’re just sitting on it? Because of politics or something? The media? Why?”

  They both looked over as the doorman came in waving at them.

  “Good question, Kit,” Gannon said, standing.

  44

  They were coming across a bridge over a reservoir on Interstate 25 outside of Shoshoni, Wyoming, at around eight thirty the next morning when Kit in the Nissan Armada’s passenger seat closed her laptop.

  There were a couple of large cardboard coffee cups with bucking broncos on them in the drink holders from a place near their hotel called the Cowboy Coffee Company. Leaving just after six, they wanted to get a jump on things so instead of sitting down for breakfast, they just grabbed some coffee and takeout.

  Gannon watched as Kit lifted one of the cups out and took a sip.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Gannon said.

  “Sorry,” Kit said. “I haven’t said anything for an hour, have I? I’m just rereading the autopsy report.”

  “Rereading it?” Gannon said with a squint. “I thought you were memorizing it.”

  “I know, I know,” Kit said, laughing. “Sometimes I start digging in and I look up and it’s the next day. Dennis was funny. He would say, ‘Earth to rain woman. Come in, rain woman.’”

  Gannon looked out the windshield on the left, where a mesa-like landform was slowly rising up out of the flat horizon as if it were coming up out of the ground.

  It reminded him of a crude arcade game he had played as a kid where you were a prism-like tank on an endless horizontal battlefield made of straight green lines.

  That’s what driving in Wyoming is like, he thought, yawning. Flat and straight-edged as vintage Atari.

  “I read in the paper your partner was a cop before he became an agent,” Gannon said. “Where again? In Boston?”

  “Yes. He was in charge of Boston Homicide. How about you? How long were you a cop?” Kit said.

  “Thirteen years,” Gannon finally said. “Five as a detective.”

  “And you said you did thirty murders? Wow, that’s a lot in five years.”

  “Five years. Are you kidding? I worked in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the middle of a gang war. Most of the thirty I did was in only eighteen months. They were shipping us in and out like it was Vietnam.”

  Kit shook her head.

  “That’s an incredible volume. That’s what? One every two weeks?”

  He nodded.

  “It was busy all right. A real bloodbath but practically all of them were drug-related. No serial killers. How about you? How did you become a serial killer investigator?”

  “I was a field agent in LA for about five years, and I was looking for a change and the slot came up. I’ve been doing it for about seven years,” she said.

  They drove on for another mile.

  “You know, I’ve always wondered why serial killers actually do what they do,” Gannon said, glancing out at the open fields.

  “Making light conversation, are we?” Kit said with a smile.

  Gannon laughed.

  “Exactly. Weather, sports, torture, murder. Polite small talk is my specialty.”

  Kit took a sip of her coffee and looked at him.

  “Dennis actually taught me a basic working theory he had come up with that I’ve found helpful. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Definitely,” Gannon said.

  “Let me ask you a question first. Why do you think they do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Gannon said, glancing at her. “Some folks are born nuts?”

  Kit shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “Dennis thought most of the complex psychiatric and psychological and even neurological theories are just a bunch of TV show flimflam. It’s really not that complicated. Most serial killings, like most mass shootings, hell, like most crimes in general, are merely acts of societal revenge.”

  “Societal revenge?”

  Kit placed the laptop back in her bag as she nodded.

  “Though no one really talks about it, when we are children our first entry into society is often quite brutal. Peers that are put together, especially males, away from the eyes of adult authority will immediately create animalistic pecking orders based on strength, natural social acceptability and competence. Handsome, tall, strong, confident children will be at the top of the human ladder of prestige and those who are less so will be relegated to its bottom rungs.”

  “So you’re talking about childhood bullying?” Gannon said.

  “Bullying,” Kit said and laughed. “Dennis said he loved when people talked about bullying like it’s a bad habit that can be curbed. He especially laughed when people talked about stopping it. As if human beings could stop assessing and outdoing each other.”

  Kit took a sip of her coffee.

  “Every face that we look into we measure and judge. All of us do this. Where there are groups of people, there is bullying. Bullying is just a ham-handed strategy of climbing up the human pecking order ladder. Since to be more socially accepted is to have a better chance of surviving and thriving, social positioning isn’t just a hobby or something that some mean snot-nosed punk does to make fun of a skinny nerd. It actually lies at the core of everyone’s existential human nature.”

  “Come on. We’re not that monkey-like, are we?”

  Kit folded her hands in her lap as she gave him a small smile.

  “In every game—even a casual game of, say, cards, checkers, Monopoly, you name it—who wants to win?”

  “Everyone,” Gannon said.

  “Exactly. Everyone,” she said. “Now, who wants to lose?”

  “No one,” Gannon said, looking at her.

  “Precisely. It’s embedded in the depth of our nature to want to win, to be better than others. It’s one of the major prime directives built into nearly everything we do. For example, do you ever get tense as you approach the checkout line at the supermarket? Or feel an inordinate amount of joy when a new slot opens and the clerk says you’re next? That’s your primal human nature aching to score the best spot over everyone else there.”

  Gannon laughed.

  “You’re right. I actually have felt that. But how did you know? You profilers can’t read minds, too, can you?”

  “Not quite,” Kit said with a small smile.

  45

  They both looked out the window as they came past an old trailer. It was down a soft rolling slope in the landscape to their right and there was a blue-tarp-cov
ered boat beside it that was easily the same size of the home. Next to that was a basketball hoop with a once white backboard that was now black with what looked like mold.

  The smallness of the rusty run-down single structure against the immensity of the surrounding desolate terrain was off-putting, Gannon thought as they sped past it. It was like seeing an empty rowboat in the middle of the ocean from the deck of a cruise ship.

  Speaking of serial killers, Gannon thought.

  “Go on,” Gannon said. “You were talking about pecking orders.”

  “See, the problem is that not everyone can win,” Kit said. “The person with the most visible social vulnerability or defect will be placed on the lowest rung of the ladder. They just will. And it is here where we find the first origin for the motivation for inhuman sexual violence.”

  “So it’s the bullied who do it?” Gannon said. “But what about someone like Ted Bundy. He was a nice-looking guy, right? He was smart and socially adept.”

  “On the surface perhaps,” Kit said, nodding. “But who knows what happened to him when he was a boy. I’d venture something quite bad. Because, believe me, by and large most of the violators in our files are former scapegoats.

  “See, the problem with human society is that the socially dejected and shunned and spurned are still human beings. Everybody wants friends and a chance to be an accepted part of a group. But some people, because of their looks or a stutter or being the odd one out ethnically or racially, get rejected. For all of them, this marginalizing and scapegoating is an unjust affront. It rightly wounds all who experience it. Most get over it eventually. But a very small minority never does.”

  “So it all starts in the schoolyard?” Gannon said.

  “Yes. Or in an extremely abusive home. Usually both. Denied by nature or circumstance to receive acceptance from others freely and naturally when they are young, serial killers, as they grow in size and strength, decide to make their own personal secret and brutal amends.

  “The sexual thrill in killing a victim comes from finally having the chance at dominance that was denied to them. All the hate and pain and humiliating submission they had to accept, they now pass on to another. To rape and kill is in essence to un-scapegoat oneself, to put someone else on the bottom rung for a change.”

  “I see what you’re saying, I think,” Gannon said. “It’s a pecking order reset.”

  “Yes, well put,” Kit said. “In the mind of the killer, each murder is an attempt to rewrite the sad and sorry tragic history of their youth. They wish to be at the top of the ladder for a time. But after they are done with the killing, the old social shame—and now new social shame of being an actual killer—combine to make the primal pain and rage even stronger. Hence you get more and more murders.”

  “They’re like addicts,” Gannon said.

  “Precisely,” Kit said. “And as with any addiction, the perpetrator thinks that it will be the next one that satisfies the yearning once and for all. But of course, like the drug addict, they’re always wrong. They’re always just digging the hole deeper.”

  “But so many people are bullied,” Gannon said. “Everybody is at one time or another. Why don’t we have more killers?”

  “Because most people learn over time through friends and family or just on their own to get over their childhood social wounds,” Kit said. “Or they eventually learn to win in other ways. Sports, school, work. Or taking care of a pet. Maybe they discover a religious vocation or maybe they move and finally find a girlfriend. Or maybe they don’t and just decide to get a grip and suck it up.”

  “So these killings stem from our nature, from the way people and society are fundamentally set up?” Gannon said.

  “Yes, it’s an unfortunate side effect of forming into groups. Groups require hierarchies for order. These necessary hierarchies cause resentment and sometimes a keen desire for social revenge.”

  “Revenge of the nerds on steroids,” Gannon said with a shake of his head. “So it’s built in, baked into the cake of who we are. We’re basically doomed as a species, then?”

  “No, not at all,” Kit said. “Serial killings are still thankfully very rare.

  “Though our lower nature is potentially deadly, most people learn the mature reality that though being socially accepted is a strong desire, one can decide bravely to be his own successful, productive, peaceful person no matter what other people’s opinions are.”

  Gannon tilted his head and looked out the window. A line of cruciform telephone poles was passing by on the road’s edge now, high and dark against the beige of the sunburned grassland.

  “Your partner, Dennis, must have been a pretty smart guy,” he said. “Because what you just laid out there makes a boatload of sense.”

  46

  A few miles west of the outskirts of Casper, they began to pass huge airplane-hangar-like steel industrial buildings on both sides of the road.

  Gannon looked out at the dusty fields beside them where large amounts of heavy metal objects were arrayed in rows. Acres of bulldozers zipped past. Hectares of galvanized pipe.

  One of the windowless hangars was actually some kind of bar, Gannon realized as they sped past it. A plastic sign strung from its corrugated steel facade said !!!DELICIOUS BURGERS!!! and beside it another one said !!!SMOKE EM IF YOU GOT EM!!! !!!WE STILL ALLOW SMOKING!!

  “Live free and die. Interesting,” Gannon said.

  “You don’t smoke, Mike, do you?” Kit said, smiling.

  “Not normally,” Gannon said. “But sometimes after a juicy six-exclamation-point steel-warehouse burger, who can resist? What time you got?”

  “Ten thirty,” Kit said, checking her phone.

  They had to slow as they started to come upon more vehicles. The traffic had become bumper-to-bumper by the time they crossed the North Platte River into the center of town.

  Down the leafy streets they passed there were American flags flying everywhere. There were sidewalk benches out in front of pharmacies. Ice cream shops with hand-painted signs above the plate glass. Everything clean and shiny and perfect-seeming in the clear desert morning light like they’d suddenly driven into an Edward Hopper painting.

  “I like this town,” Gannon said as they cruised past an old-fashioned barbershop with a red-and-white spinning pole. “Even if it was named after a friendly ghost.”

  Fletcher Cosmetic Surgery Center was in a new three-story building a little over a mile south from the city center. There was an empty spot right out front of its main door, and Gannon parked and killed the engine and got out.

  It was about eighty degrees outside and humid. Gannon stood by the car rolling his neck for a moment and stretching his legs. Across the street one of those huge cannon-like water sprinklers was going off in an athletic field.

  “We’re on three,” Kit said as they pushed into the building’s cool air-conditioned foyer. “It’s suite three oh three.”

  They walked past the elevator and found the stairwell. Lights on a motion detector flickered on above them as they came out into the narrow corridor of the third floor. They made a left past marked and unmarked doors. There was a dentist in one of the suites, Gannon saw, and on the door of another was a sign for a pain management doctor.

  Fletcher Cosmetic Surgery Center was the very last door on the end. Gannon arrived a step before Kit and grasped the knob. It wouldn’t turn no matter which way he spun it so he gave up and started knocking.

  “Closed?” Kit said. “That’s weird. It’s not even lunchtime.”

  “Exactly,” Gannon said, knocking some more. “Closed at eleven o’clock on a Friday? Aren’t plastic surgeons like the busiest doctors of all?”

  “Maybe there’s something on the voice mail?” Kit said, taking out her phone as they heard it.

  From behind the office door came a distinct beep and a loud click, and then the chugging sound o
f a laser jet printer started going off.

  47

  Kit hammered at the door with the metal case of her phone.

  “Hello?” she called. “Hello? Is there somebody in there?”

  They listened intently. There was nothing but the rhythmic hum and squeal of the printer. As it began to power down, there was the loud clack of a door opening twenty feet down the corridor behind them. Gannon turned to see a figure bolting from an unmarked doorway on the right and running down the long narrow corridor.

  It was a woman, Gannon saw as he immediately took off after her. A short woman in workout clothes and a black-and-white truckers cap.

  “Hey,” Gannon yelled as she flew into the stairwell.

  When he got to the stairwell, he heard her opening the door of the lobby below and by the time he pushed into the lobby, he saw she was already outside in the parking lot. He watched as she ran full-speed across the street and straight through the athletic field’s sprinkler.

  “Mike, what’s up?” Kit called from the stairwell as Gannon sped across the lobby.

  “White female,” he called as he yanked the door. “Dark leggings and dark pullover and a black-and-white ball cap.”

  Gannon pounded across the lot and then the street into what he saw now was a soccer field. Stoneline Community College, he read off a banner strung along a low fence.

  Gannon’s new shoes and socks were soaked through by the time he cleared the field. When he looked up, he saw the woman still running a couple of hundred feet ahead of him. She was flat-out booking now, Gannon saw, really putting on the jets as she tore down a short road, then disappeared behind a brick building.

  A sign atop the door of the building Gannon arrived at a few seconds later said it was the college’s cafeteria. On the other side of it was a deserted plaza, three brick buildings in a horseshoe around a green lawn with a limp American flag in the middle of it.

  Gasping from his run, Gannon scanned around for the running woman. No dice. He didn’t see anyone.