by Paula McLain
“Exactly. Shannan might have been someone he hooked up with, but I’m starting to wonder if his attraction to Cameron could be something else. If she’s some sort of ideal.”
“Meaning what?”
“I’ve seen this come up a lot in profiling,” I say, reaching for language that will help him understand my line of thinking. “Guys who are outsiders and can’t get close to people sometimes fixate on an innocent as a chance to redeem themselves. Or that’s the story they want to believe.”
“Wait. So he’s not a psychopath?”
Clearly I haven’t succeeded. “Maybe he is,” I try again. “But even the most twisted minds want love and connection. Maybe the reason we haven’t found Cameron’s body yet is because he thinks she can make everything bad inside him feel right again. Fix the ways the world has hurt him.”
“I don’t know,” Will says doubtfully. “That’s a pretty big hypothesis, Anna. Why are you assuming this guy has been wounded?”
I stare at him, feeling frustrated and out of sorts. This day has been too long, and way too hard. This week, and month, and year. “Because that’s how you make a predator.”
(fifty-three)
One year Frank Leary gave everyone at Searchlight a copy of a book called Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives and told us to treat it like the Bible. The writers were two FBI criminalists and a psychiatric nurse specialist who organized and conducted dozens of interviews with convicted killers and torturers, psychopaths, sociopaths, pedophiles, and sexual sadists, trying to understand the criminal mind in a systematized way they could share with professionals as a teaching tool.
It was provocative stuff, to be sure. The agents had gone into maximum-security prisons all over the country to sit across an interview table from Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Edward Kemper, and thirty-three others, hoping to learn from them. Not the facts of their cases or convictions, and not whether they could ever be rehabilitated, but what they were thinking in the moments before, during, and after the murders they committed. How and why they selected certain victims, what their triggers were, where their violent fantasies began, and what the most exciting parts of the crime were—basically how these brutal killers thought and what they felt around all aspects of what they’d done.
No one had ever tried to look so deeply into the criminal psyche before, let alone compile and catalog data so that law enforcement officers like myself could more accurately profile and identify suspects, and more readily solve cases. And though the depth of the fixation on warped minds was disturbing to me, and the way the writers sometimes lingered over gruesome, sensational details, as I read something clicked for me and opened a larger question about the connection between victims and perpetrators.
I remember trying to talk to Frank about it over drinks near our offices one night, the dim bar seeming to bend around us on our stools, and the whiskey to flicker. “When you read a book like this, the violence starts to feel like a movie. The crimes feel like sick plots, not real life, and all the details are so lurid and specific. But it is real. And the victims, who just come through as names with thumbnail photos, just targets, we don’t know them at all. We never get the whole picture, how they got drawn into the story in the first place, how certain sets of experiences made them vulnerable, and not just in a general way either but to the particular predators who targeted them. That book would be fascinating, wouldn’t it? That’s the stuff I want to know.” I stopped there, catching my breath. Feeling everything I’d said and meant.
He looked at me for a long time. “Well, maybe you’ll have to write it one day.”
“Right. That’s going to happen.”
“Why not? These are good questions, and no one’s asking them. Not yet, anyway. This is obviously your lane, Anna. I’ve seen how involved you get in your cases, how much you care about the victims, how you try to understand their side of the story. It’s how you’re built, I guess. So why not feed it, and see what happens?”
What Frank didn’t know that day—because I’d never been honest with him—was that I wasn’t just involved in my cases, I lived and breathed them. If my level of dedication made me a good detective with a high solve rate, it was also ruining my personal life. Those questions Corolla had asked about sleep, about drinking too much. I hadn’t told the truth that day. I had nightmares consistently and often woke in the middle of the night feeling as if my whole body was buzzing, set on high alert. The minute I walked in the door after work, I had to pour a stiff drink or three just to come down from the intensity of the day. But even when the edge was gone, I couldn’t quite land in my body. I was always thinking about a case, trying to crack an interview or tease out a complex lead, canvassing witnesses in my mind, even in the shower. When Brendan would complain or get mad at me, I would go on the defensive. The truth was I didn’t have any control over my obsession, nor did I have the energy to fight with him. I would never have said it out loud, but he wasn’t my priority.
* * *
—
Then things got worse. I had just come off ten weeks of maternity leave when Frank gave my partner and me a particularly tough case—an infant. The father had called it in, thinking drug dealers had kidnapped the boy. They lived in a rough neighborhood. It wasn’t out of the question. Meanwhile the boy was only six months old, and he had seizures, the family reported, something to do with a difficult delivery. He was still on medication and could die without it. Time was ticking as we searched for him, and the stress was getting to me. I kept having dreams about children screaming on the other side of a brick wall. Whole families under water and no way to reach them. During the day, I was edgy and distracted, and Frank noticed.
“I think you need more time off, Anna. I pulled you back in too soon.”
“No, no. I can do this,” I raced to reassure him. “It’s just hormones or something.”
“At least go back to that therapist,” he suggested.
“It’s not necessary.”
“Asking for help doesn’t make you weak, Anna.”
“I know that.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” he said, clearly unconvinced. “Baby doing all right?”
“The baby’s fine.” I forced myself to sound cheerful. “We’re all fine.”
“Let’s keep it that way.”
Days later, my partner and I found Jamie Rivera’s body in the basement of his family home. We discovered him by accident almost, under fifty pounds of processed venison. The freezer was one of those old Whirlpool chests that open like a coffin. The compressor had been wheezing as we searched the space, giving off a chemical smell. We’d already opened it, but my instinct told me to go back and recheck. He was all the way at the bottom, under strange red bricks that had once been living creatures. We threw them to the floor—and then we saw the boy. A glaze of frost stiffening his eyelashes. His small blue hands.
(fifty-four)
Once Shannan Russo’s remains have been identified, media trucks set up camp in Gualala, in front of Rumor’s All About Hair, and on Lansing Street in Mendocino, where our case is finally gathering steam. I don’t watch the looping clips of Karen Russo because I can’t bear to see her face. Instead, I focus on the new momentum and direction Shannan’s discovery has created. Finding her body has helped us begin to compile and refine a profile for her killer, which might also aid in our search for Cameron.The torture and strangulation Shannan endured and the controlled incineration of her car don’t immediately seem to dovetail with the details of Polly’s abduction, but Rod Fraser is being briefed on every significant finding, and on the profile we’re still building, bit by bit.
For the moment, we’re looking for a federal- or state-level parks employee, a firefighter, or a military guy, single probably, and somewhere between the ages of twenty-seven and forty-five, given statistical averages and the physical strength he’s already demonstrated.
; The media likes to sensationalize psychopaths and evil geniuses like Charles Manson and David Berkowitz, but in real life, people who commit serial murders are typically of average intelligence, and rarely show an obvious degree of mental illness, at least not on the surface. In this case, there’s even more reason to believe our suspect blends easily into his environment. He probably first encountered Shannan in a public place and hadn’t frightened her or given her cause to be alarmed, not enough to make any kind of scene. The same had probably been true with Cameron, if my instincts are on track. Because of her age, he would have needed to move slowly in getting close to her, and also have had something to offer her, some opportunity or possibility she didn’t see at home. We only have to find out what that is, now, and comb through tens of thousands of records, hoping someone jumps out.
The discovery of Shannan’s remains in our county has given us greater traction in the search for Cameron overall. We’ve always been missing evidence and hard clues. Now that it seems more and more likely that the two cases are linked, we finally have more manpower and equipment, not to mention volunteers. Reserve land is being searched mile by mile, plus the estuaries and the coastline, with particular emphasis on any cabin, shed, or structure in or near Montgomery Woods. Most serial killers have a comfort radius and a clear anchor point they hunt from, a narrow range of territory they’re intimately familiar with. All things being equal, Cameron is probably no more than thirty miles, give or take, from her own home and where we found Shannan’s body. This is our most plausible grid.
* * *
—
The Cameron Curtis Rescue Center begins to run twenty-four hours a day. Local business owners donate postage, phones, and fax machines. Everyone does what they can to help with the mailings, stuffing envelopes, pasting flyers all over the area, and answering the phone. Calls begin to come in by the hundreds, some just to say that Cameron is in their prayers, some offering ten dollars, twenty dollars, kids wanting to donate birthday money and allowances. Most of the calls are from women reluctant to give their name. “I know who he is,” one says. “I dated him in college.”
Patterson’s hosts a fish fry for all of the volunteers. A team of counselors is sent into Mendocino High as well as the elementary and middle schools, to offer support and comfort. Some of the older kids in the community start doing afternoon shifts, going door-to-door, organized by Gray Benson. Clay LaForge and Lenore spend hours a day addressing envelopes to hotels and restaurants, gas stations, laundromats, anywhere someone might have seen Cameron since she disappeared. In each mailing—Lenore’s idea—there’s a handwritten note asking whoever receives it to place Cameron’s poster in a prominent location and not let it be taken down or covered over. It’s a small touch, personal and direct.
Wanda volunteers to be in the center late nights. “I’m a night owl anyway,” she explains when I find her there, alone at a long collapsible conference table, stuffing envelopes. She perks up to see Cricket, the two falling on each other like old friends. And then the door swings open, and Hector walks in, blinking against the yellow fluorescent lighting.
He wears a denim jacket that seems to jut at the shoulders and the same ass-kicking boots I noticed in Ukiah, but the look on his face is tentative. Uncertain. “I read about that murdered girl,” he says. “That can’t happen to Cameron. Tell me what to do.”
I soften just looking at him. Cricket trots over to refamiliarize herself with his smell, and Wanda says hello, seeming to know there’s a story here, one she can learn some other time.
“You can help with the mailings or in the field,” I throw out. “We’ve got four or five different groups going out every day. Come tomorrow morning. We’ll be here.”
He nods and takes in the room, heading to the bulletin board, our shrine to Cameron. I watch his eyes move over the images, the poems and drawings, each a new part of her he’s never had a chance to know.
Moved, I go over and stand next to him. He’s staring at a photo I don’t recognize. Gray must have brought it in recently, maybe just today. In it, Cameron is almost unrecognizable. Her hair has been gathered into a low, sleek ponytail and pulled over her left shoulder. Her eye makeup looks professionally done, with winged liner that makes her look not older exactly but wiser, more confident and experienced. There’s also an imitative quality to her pose and expression—I don’t know how else to explain it to myself—as if Cameron was acting for the camera, somehow, pretending to be someone else, someone not just beautiful, but famous. Her black blouse has draping sleeves and bares her midriff. Her black skinny jeans look painted onto her body above low-heeled black boots. I stood in her closet and didn’t see anything like this. Are they even her clothes?
Hector is still staring. “Where was this taken?”
I step closer. The background is wooded and lush. Cameron leans against a tree trunk that’s deeply textured, curved like a body, its color almost mauve with shadows. The light is eerie and familiar, I realize, and the shapes of the trees, too. Suddenly I feel a jangle of dread, like a premonition that’s come true. This is the krummholz grove.
(fifty-five)
Before seven the next morning, I’m headed back to Cahto Street, my mind a hive of questions. Is the krummholz grove just a random place Cameron and Gray decided to hang out one day, or is it connected to our killer’s territory? Did I miss a sign of him when I hiked into the grove? Was he nearby then, or when the photos were taken? Had he brought Cameron there some other time? And whether he had or not, why is she so unrecognizable in the picture?
Di Anne answers the door in her bathrobe and slippers, looking rumpled but tender somehow without a trace of makeup. Offering coffee, she leads me into the kitchen, where Gray stands packing his lunch for school, cheese and apples in a brown paper bag, a Dr Pepper, a Hostess cupcake, all of it so ordinary and uncomplicated, I almost hate to ask my questions.
I hold up the photo of Cameron. “Did you take this, Gray?”
“Yeah.” He seems confused by my intensity. “We did them when we were bored one day over the summer. Just screwing around.”
Really? Cameron doesn’t look like she was killing time to me. She had a purpose of some kind, even if I can’t yet identify it. “I think they’re good. She doesn’t even look like herself.”
Gray brightens. “I did her makeup. I got a new camera for my birthday. She shot some of me, too.”
“Why did you choose this place? Had you been there before?”
He shakes his head. “It was her idea. I thought it was creepy at first, but the light was supercool.”
“The shoot was her idea, too?”
“I think so. I don’t remember how it came up.”
“I don’t recognize that outfit on Cameron, do you?”
“She brought it over with her. She’d just been to a thrift store.”
“Gray.” I put my coffee down, needing his complete attention. “These don’t look like thrift-store clothes. And even if they were, if she brought them over, it’s likely she had a clear objective in mind.”
“I don’t get it. Why?”
“That’s a great question. Had she ever talked about the grove before? Do you remember what she said when she suggested it?”
“No.” His forehead wrinkles. I can tell my questions are scaring him. He clearly hasn’t registered the possible significance of this day in Cameron’s disappearance and now is worried he missed something important, a chance to help me, a chance to find his friend.
“It’s okay,” I say, trying to ease his mind. “Tell me, did Cameron ever talk about wanting to do modeling?”
“She wasn’t tall enough. She knew that.”
“I don’t mean the practical side of her, Gray.” As I fumble for the right words, Di Anne sits down, closing her robe with her hands.
“Honey, I think Anna’s asking if Cameron ever dreamed about that kind of lif
e for herself. You know, the way kids your age do, wanting to travel the world, be famous, meet interesting people? Do something wonderful.”
Gray blinks, his eyelashes spiked with mascara, the makeup subtle, almost invisible, but not quite. “Sometimes we both talked like that, sure. Her mom was always so negative about Hollywood and being beautiful, a celebrity, but sometimes Cameron and I talked about how cool it would be to be discovered like Emily was. To have money enough to go anywhere we wanted together. Doesn’t everyone want that, though?”
“I’ve never met anyone your age who doesn’t have some sort of fantasy they like to imagine,” I tell him, “no matter how impossible it feels, how far away. The tougher the real world, the more important that dream becomes. Do you know what I mean?”
“The stuff she was struggling with? Her parents lying to her all the time, and the bits of memories coming back.”
I nod, encouraging him. “That would make sense, wouldn’t it?”
There’s a creak as Di Anne shifts in her chair. I can see from her expression that Gray hasn’t told her anything about Cameron’s situation at home or her abuse, but she doesn’t pull back or away. Maybe she’s intuited the darkness Cameron carries.
“Dreams can tell us a lot of things,” I go on. “They’re a kind of map of the inner life. Sometimes thinking of who we might someday be is the only way we can get through the reality of who we actually are.”
Di Anne’s look is soft. “Like not quite fitting in in a small town where no one looks or thinks like you, honey.”
I can’t help but admire her. She’s a single parent. Gray has never mentioned his dad, but Di Anne seems to be doing okay on her own, at least in one way. She’s trying to meet her son where he is, accepting him as he finds his way, loving him.
“I guess so,” Gray answers quietly.
“Dreaming is brave,” I say. “Sometimes it’s all we have.”