by Jo Macgregor
In an interview segment, his father described him as “smart and real funny but not the easiest kid to raise.” Then a sad expression came over the father’s face, and he added, “He, uh, he came out to me. That’s the phrase, right? He said he was a homosexual, and I … I reacted badly. I was just so shocked, you know? I never saw it coming. But I would’ve come around. I would’ve come around.” The heavyset man on the screen sighed and looked down at his knees. “But he just ran off, and I never saw him again. He died thinking I was angry and disappointed in him. And I have to live with that every day of my life.”
Anger rose in me at the killer who’d ended the lives of those young men and left so many broken people behind. I imagined shockwaves of pain, despair, and grief radiating out from the murders, rippling through time and touching hundreds of lives. I wanted to get away from the TV, to go outside and suck in a breath of cool night air, but the name of the next victim riveted my attention.
“Jacob Wertheimer, twenty-four, went missing in November 2009.” Familiar footage of the turnoff to the quarry outside of Pitchford filled the screen, and my father gave me a worried glance. “His skeletonized remains were stumbled on just last month by a hiker in the woods outside of Pitchford, Vermont.”
I was the hiker, though technically it had been a dog who’d found the remains.
“Jacob was a barman in a restaurant in Randolph with hopes of saving enough to start his own nightclub.”
I stared at the onscreen photograph of the young man whose rib bone I’d held in my hands. So Jacob had had black hair, blue eyes, and a smattering of freckles over his nose and cheeks, which made him look younger than he was. He wore a Kings of Leon T-shirt and was laughing at the camera, pointing at whoever’d been taking the shot.
The TV footage cut to a sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties, and the camera zoomed in for a close-up of his face with its sad brown eyes. “Who was he?” the man — Doug Piccolo, according to the title at the bottom of the screen — said. “He was my best friend and my lover. He was fun and daring and really brave. He didn’t care when people judged him or his lifestyle. He used to say, you only get one life, and you should live it being true to yourself. He wanted to take up skydiving as a hobby, but I begged him not to. I told him it was way too dangerous.” The man gulped back a sound that was half laugh, half sob.
My own throat closed, and the tears began to spill for Jacob, who’d laughed and loved and listened to Southern Rock, who’d tried to live life fully and honestly and had wound up with a garotte around his neck and a button stitched to his mouth.
Onscreen, Piccolo was still talking. “For almost nineteen years, I lived in limbo, waiting to hear what happened to him. I was stuck. Stuck in the past. Stuck in doubts and regrets, never knowing what happened to him. I couldn’t seem to get on with my life.”
I felt this man so hard. That was what it had been like for me after Colby died, but at least I’d known almost immediately that he was dead. It must’ve been excruciating to have lived in uncertainty for so long.
Piccolo said he hadn’t been taken seriously by the cops investigating Jacob’s disappearance. “As soon as I told them we’d had a fight, they wrote it off to him ditching me after a lover’s tiff and didn’t put much effort into searching for him. I hired a couple of private detectives, but they got nowhere.”
Maybe I should try to contact some of the friends and relatives mentioned in the TV show. I had their names now. Then again, I wasn’t really sure what that would achieve. I’d find out more about the victims but probably not about the killer. Maybe I should reach out just to Jacob Wertheimer’s partner, to give him some comfort since I knew firsthand the pain he must be going through. But I killed the impulse when I heard his bitter account of the “so-called psychics and charlatans” who’d taken his money and delivered nothing but false hope.
“One of them said Jacob was alive and well and living in Seattle with a new partner and had adopted a baby girl,” he said. “And all that time he was dead and buried.”
No, Piccolo would definitely not welcome a call from me.
– 12 –
After an ad break, the program switched to an interview with a clinical psychologist who was apparently an expert in the field of serial killers.
“How did the killer get away with it for so long?” the anchor asked him. “How is it possible he still hasn’t been apprehended?”
“Good question,” I murmured, leaning forward with interest.
“Everyone thinks they’d know a serial killer the minute they met one, but that’s just not how it is,” he said. “Many of them are extraordinarily ordinary. They hold down jobs, marry, and have children, all the while committing murder after murder on the side. They can be like chameleons, taking on whatever camouflage necessary in order to fit in and fool those around them. The friendly married man on the bus next to you, the cute guy who pats your dog in the park, the man at the bar everyone calls Santa because of his jolly laugh? Any one of them could be a killer. They wear a mask of sanity over their deviancy and often seem normal, pleasant, polite, and even charming. Under that façade, however, they’re cunning, callous, manipulative, exploitative, incapable of real love, and utterly self-serving. Many, if not most, serial killers are psychopaths.”
“Is that scientifically true?” my father asked me.
“Yeah, though some of them are psychotic.”
“I’ve never been entirely clear on the difference between those.”
I paused the TV and explained about the psychotic’s loss of contact with reality. “Psychopaths, on the other hand, aren’t insane. They know what they’re doing is wrong and illegal, but they simply don’t care. And while most serial killers are psychopaths, most psychopaths aren’t serial killers. Many are conmen or other criminals, but some make a great success of their lives because their personality make-up is an asset in a bunch of careers.”
“Such as?” my father asked.
“Being a surgeon, for example, or a sniper in the armed forces. Those require you to stay cool under pressure. And if you’re willing to cut corners or bend the rules, you’re likely to do well as a salesman or politician. If I remember right, the careers with the highest proportion of psychopaths are CEOs, lawyers, and journalists.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” my father said. “Which careers have the lowest?”
I smiled wryly. “I can’t remember exactly, but I do know that therapists were near the bottom of the list.” I turned back to the TV and hit Play.
The psychologist onscreen said, “Psychopaths are apex predators of other humans because they lack empathy and are largely insensitive to fear due to their underactive autonomic arousal systems.”
“Ohhh,” I said.
My father frowned. “What’s that mean?”
I gave him the CliffsNotes version. “Psychopaths don’t scare easy.”
It made sense. I knew psychopaths usually had chaotic childhoods. It sounded like that rewired them neurologically, so they developed a physical tolerance for the sort of extreme thrills and danger that would turn your average Joe Schmoe into a quivering sack of nerves. It explained why, as adults, they got bored and restless easily and tended to be sensation-seekers who got a kick from lying, cheating, stealing, and of course, killing. It took a big thrill to move the needle on their excitement gauge.
“When we return,” the anchor said, “what makes a serial killer?”
I fast-forwarded through the advertisements and pressed Play in time to hear the anchor ask, “Are serial killers natural-born killers, or are they made?”
“It’s probably a combination of both nature and nurture,” the psychologist said and went on to explain that the repeated experience of trauma and abuse — physical, sexual, or emotional — was a common theme in the childhoods of serial killers.
“Not always,” my father said. “Ted Bundy had a reasonably happy childhood with no abuse. Jeffrey Dahmer was wanted and deeply loved by his parents.”
“But most victims of childhood trauma don’t grow up to be abusers, let alone serial killers,” the psychologist continued. “Apart from possible genetic influences, other common factors we see in their backgrounds include being abandoned or neglected in childhood, prolonged bedwetting, early use and subsequent abuse of drugs and alcohol, head injuries, and the use of pornography, which gets increasingly more graphic and violent as they grow older. As children, they tend to be loners who struggle to make friends, and that isolation increased their withdrawal into an inner fantasy world. They have more brushes with the law at a young age for things like molesting other children, vandalism, arson, cruelty to animals, shoplifting, and Peeping Tom activities.”
My father chimed in again. “Not always. The BTK killer, Dennis Rader, seemed like a normal kid; he was active in Boy Scouts and the church. And Jeffrey Dahmer’s classmates remember him as an oddball — the class clown who often played pranks — rather than as a juvenile delinquent.”
I nodded. “A professor I spoke to said there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to serial killers.”
Onscreen, the interviewer asked the psychologist, “The real question, I suppose, is can they be treated?”
“There’s no cure for psychopathy,” he replied.
The interviewer looked shocked. The general public, I’d discovered, believed that therapy could fix pretty much everything. The general public was dead wrong.
“Well, for one thing,” the psychologist explained, “they take no responsibility for their own actions and usually feel no remorse, so they don’t volunteer for treatment. And because they lack anxiety for the most part, they’re motivated more by the reward of indulging their desires than the fear of punishment, so they aren’t easily stopped or reformed.”
“And why,” the interviewer asked, “does this killer specifically target young gay men?”
Perhaps she hadn’t gotten a nice, simple soundbite from the psychologist because the program now presented us with another sort of “expert,” a man whose sole qualification appeared to be that he ran a website about serial murder.
“The killer is probably gay himself,” he said, tossing his head to shake his bangs out of his eyes. “He’s a lust killer who gets his kicks from killing men after satisfying his sexual urges with them. Or he could still be in the closet, a repressed homosexual who envies them their freedom to be who they are and who punishes them for it.”
“The professor I spoke to — and he’s a real expert — said the killer could just as easily be straight,” I told my father.
“Up next,” the anchor said, “the New Hampshire bodies, plus a shocking new revelation!”
“You’ve read hundreds of books on these guys. If you had to do a profile of this killer, what would it be?” I asked my father.
“From what I’ve read,” he said, gesturing for me to pause the program while he gathered his thoughts, “your average American serial killer is male, from a lower-to-middle-class background, with little education, and of low or average intelligence. He’s most likely to be white, although in recent years, black killers have taken the top spot.”
“The FBI profile was very similar,” I said, remembering the details Ryan had once shared with me. “They also said he’d probably have a job where he travels a lot, like a salesman or a truck driver.”
“Moving around gives them access to a bigger pool of victims and makes them harder to track down,” my father said. “Let’s see, what else do I know? They’re impulsive, likely to abuse substances — oh, and they often have a fondness for bitter foods.”
“That’s bizarre. Do you know why?”
“No idea. I do know that most of them operate alone, though some work in pairs. I even read a post that speculated about a syndicate of connected killers who might be kidnapping and killing young college-aged men.”
“I’m glad I’m not the cop investigating that one,” I said and pressed Play.
“While the Slayer’s earlier victims were disposed of in a variety of locales around New England,” the anchor said, “it seems that his most recent kills were all buried in a single spot in the Nash Stream Forest in New Hampshire. Why? What prompted the change?”
Apparently, nobody had a good answer for this. She went on to list the names of the five newly-identified victims who'd all gone missing since 2010: Denzel, a ski instructor who’d disappeared from a resort near Stowe; Rory, an accountant who’d longed to get into acting; Zack, who’d just been awarded a scholarship to study chemistry at Boston U; Benjamin, who’d painted portraits of cats; and Nathan, the most recent victim.
One by one, I took in the stories of the young men, the achievements of their short lives, their photographs, the painful statements made by their grieving families. Each of them had been a unique individual whose life was cut brutally short, leaving dreams unfulfilled, hopes ended, and loved ones empty armed. The family and friends they’d left behind tried to keep the memories of them alive, but the truth was that people tended to remember the names of killers rather than those of the victims. I felt a moment of unprecedented charity toward Singh. I might not like the man, but I gave him credit for not giving up on the investigation, for doing his best to bring the victims and their families justice by tracking down the monster who’d killed them.
To a soundtrack of somber music, a collage of eight blocks filled with the photographs of the recent victims appeared. Each block was labelled with the victim’s name and date of disappearance, while the two unidentified victims were represented by a blank profile with a question mark.
“Hey!” I said, noticing something. “Look at the dates.”
“Sharp-eyed viewers will have noticed a startling pattern,” the voiceover said. “While the victims of earlier years seem to have been killed on random dates with multiple murders occurring in later years, the recently discovered victims were killed at a rate of one per year. And each of them went missing and was presumably killed on May sixth.”
My father and I exchanged a shocked glance, and I said “But that means …”
“The clock is ticking for the FBI to find and apprehend the Gay Slayer before he strikes again in just three and a half weeks,” the anchor said.
The show ended, but I sat staring at the credits, feeling weighed down by what I’d learned about the victims. Wanting to solve this case was no longer an academic challenge for me. Now that I knew who the victims had been, it was much more real and urgent. It was personal. But the problem was, I hadn’t learned much more about who the Button Man might be or how he operated.
When I was about six years old, I’d gone through a phase of being terrified of the boogeyman. Part of that fear, perhaps the worst part of it, had been that the monster could be anywhere or anything. Anyone. He could be slender enough to secrete himself in the folds of my dressing gown hanging behind the bedroom door or as flat as a toppled gravestone lying under my bed, watching for the moment I dropped my guard and let my foot hang over the edge. He could be the shadow behind the shower curtain, patiently waiting until I could no longer hold it in and had to run to the toilet at night, terrified to go in the dark and yet too scared to switch on the light because who knew what I might see? Maybe he could shape-shift himself to look like the mailman, a teddy bear, my father. Unknown and invisible, he loomed huge in my imagination.
That was how I now felt about the Button Man. In my mind, he was a nebulous cloud of darkness, a murky shadow that resisted my attempts to define him. I wanted to reduce him to what he was: a mere mortal. I needed to contain his presence in my mind by giving him a form, a face, a name. When I knew him, I’d be able to find him. And when I found him, I’d stop him.
Watch your back, Button Man. I’m on your trail.
– 13 –
Friday, April 13
I woke up early the next morning, determined to get going as soon as possible. After what I’d learned about the Button Man’s victims on the television program, I was determined to give the
investigation my all, not to impress Singh or to convince myself that my gift had value but to do right by the victims. I would do it for Jacob Wertheimer, Antoine, Denzel, Rory, and Zack and all the other young men whose lives had been extinguished so brutally. I would do it to spare another man from being killed in less than a month’s time. I would hunt the Button Man, and I would find him. I vowed it.
And the first item on my to-do list was a visit to the FBI field agency in Rutland. As my mother would say, “If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.” Then again, knowing her habit of confusing words and mangling expressions, she’d probably say, “If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then faith as small as a mustard seed must move it.”
I set out at eight o’clock sharp, which gave me enough time to drive down to Rutland, buy a big box of doughnuts — Singh would be a hard nut to crack, and I hoped fried dough and sugar would soften his shell — and present myself at the FBI resident agency office by five past nine.
Even though the address was freely available online, it wasn’t easy to find. Google Maps directed me to a nondescript building located between a Wendy’s and a tire dealership in Rutland’s small commercial district. The roadside signage indicated the two-story office complex housed a realtor and a dentist’s office, but there was no indication of an FBI presence. Not even a flag flew outside the building. I parked my Honda in the small lot and went to check whether I had the right place. Inside the building, a small sign on a door at the end of a corridor indicated that I did, as did the fisheye camera mounted above it.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered and pressed the buzzer.
After about a minute, during which I assumed someone on the other side of the door was checking me out and assessing my potential risk, the door clicked open, and I stepped into a small room. I’d been expecting a reception area, but the room was empty except for a ceiling-mounted camera and a big potted plant in one corner. I recognized its variegated crimson and emerald leaves. My mother had one of those plants in her living room and claimed it was called a “crouton plant.” Directly facing me was a wall made of thick glass, inset with an intercom and a door, presumably for staff to gain access to the offices beyond. To my left, was a small empty office with an open door.