"Maybe he's embarrassed," Frank offered. "Doesn't like women. Maybe he's afraid of them, maybe they're dirty. A clothes fetish?"
A smile tweaked Clay's lips. He was in his element and loving it.
"First of all, they're not women, only girls. And to me, why he's assaulting the girls isn't as telling as how he's doing it. Do you ever have dreams that you're naked?"
Caught off-guard, Frank chuckled self-consciously.
"Sometimes," she admitted.
"And how do you feel?"
Frank had to think for a moment. "Like I need to get some clothes on."
"Why?"
She'd worked with Clay enough to know he was going somewhere with this, so she humored him.
"I don't want anybody to see me."
"What would happen if somebody saw you?"
"It'd be embarrassing."
"So if someone took your clothes off how would you feel?"
"Pretty pissed," she responded quickly, but knew from Clay's penetrating gaze that he wanted more. She felt sympathy for his patients.
"I'd be..." Frank ran a list of adjectives through her head and settled for "...vulnerable."
The doctor nodded happily.
"It would be very demoralizing, and it would place your attacker in a position of power. He'd have the advantage and be superior to you."
"Which I would think this guy would like to do to his victims."
"But he's not, is he? Think about it. Taking someone's clothes off is a highly personal act. Whether it's consensual or not, it's a very profound intimacy."
Clay sat back, waiting for Frank to make the leap.
"So he doesn't want that."
He nodded, encouraging her on to the next step. He could see she was struggling.
"Okay, this...detachment from his victims is more important to him than making them feel vulnerable."
"Right."
"Why? I don't get that. I would think he'd want to impress them with his power."
"How big did you say our suspect is?"
"Probably around six feet, maybe over, weighs maybe around two hundred pounds."
"Alright. And how much did his heaviest victim weigh?"
Frank shrugged. Agoura was around one hundred twenty pounds.
"And how tall?"
"About 5'4"."
"So he's already got a considerable size advantage over these girls. If we assume he's taken them all by surprise, he has that advantage as well, and he maintains that advantage by choking them, rendering them even more helpless. These victims are very nonthreatening. He has them completely at his mercy and he knows it."
"So why doesn't he take it a step further?"
Clay leaned across the desk at Frank. In his enthusiasm his voice became louder and he gestured with open palms. Frank sat back, intrigued.
"He doesn't need to. What's critical to him is to assault these girls. He's very physical. He's not looking at them, he's not talking to them except to keep them from giving him away, he's not touching them. What does that tell you?"
Frank pushed her lips together and draped an arm around her chair, aware of Clay's scrutiny.
"Well," she finally answered, "I'd guess our boy doesn't want to make any emotional connection with his victims. He just wants to physically dominate them. What I wonder, though, is what that lack of connection means—I mean homicide is a very emotional business."
Clay nodded, adding, "For your average murderer. This guy you are dealing with has bounced far out of the norm. Serial offenders, the good ones, can only do this because they are so unable to relate to people. They don't have what we call normal emotional connections. What your offender is doing to his victims is highly satisfying for him. Through his physical actions he's achieving some kind of an emotional release. Because he's not engaging his victims at all, I'd be inclined to say he's reliving something that's happened to him, something intensely personal and private. Only now he's on the giving instead of the receiving end, and that's where his satisfaction comes from. Now he is indisputably in control."
Clay held up pictures of Agoura and Peterson, going on to explain the rage evident in the assaults. He suggested that pent-up rage might have come from the suspect's own abuse.
Frank puzzled, "Then why not assault boys if he's trying to relive it, or choose victims more closely resembling his attacker?"
"Okay," Clay said patiently. "One of the things we know about this man is that he prefers teenage girls. For some reason, at some point in time he became fixated on them. Yet this fixation is not personal. Look at the variety of victims he's selected. White, black, Hispanic, blonde, brunette, thin, plump. He's all over the place. I think his lack of focus indicates more concern for an abstract image than a real one. Girls this age represent some thing to him rather than some one. What I suspect drives him is visions of himself with so much power. The fantasy of him abusing these girls is far more important than who the girls actually are."
Clay paused before adding, "You asked why he's not choosing boys to relive this. There could be a number of reasons. If he was assaulted, I think it was by someone older, definitely someone with considerable power, a parent, teacher, close older relative. It could have been a female, but I think again we'd see him assaulting a specific stereotype, someone that resembled his abuser. That leads me to think it was a male who abused him, an older male, someone he doesn't feel able to strike back against. If this person raped him, that would explain his anal fixation."
Frank shook her head.
"Also, attacking boys could be too confrontational, too personal. It would be harder to disassociate from a boy," Clay continued. "Whoever he is, he is crazy like a fox."
"He's smart," Frank agreed. "Careful."
"This could go on awhile, couldn't it?"
"Maybe," Frank said coldly, "but sooner or later he's going to trip up. And when he does, I'll be right there waiting."
They made it into the district play-offs. His team had fought hard all season, and they were finally here. He had fought harder than anybody, knew the rest of the team was riding in his wake, but he didn't care. It was his junior year, and he needed this moment. Dressing in the locker room, he remembered his father's face in his this morning.
"There's going to be a scout from USC at the game today. This is your chance, boy. Don't blow it," he'd warned, and the boy had no intention of that. He dressed quietly, and alone, not sharing in the nervous, pregame banter caroming off the locker room walls. He stayed focused, reviewing over and over in his head, like a prayer, the play signals. He saw the team reacting to the quarterback's calls, thought of his moves in response to his teammates, the defense. He was ready. He was so ready he was almost getting a hard-on. No one better get in his way because there was no stopping him today.
This was finally his moment. At last his father would be proud. This was it. Do or die.
14
The days that followed were monotonous and frustrating. Frank and Noah had followed up on all the assaults they could and were glad when they wrapped up interviewing the girls. Lisa McKinney was the last girl they talked to, a gangly blonde sporting a healing scar for her fifteenth birthday. When Noah asked her about it, she shot him a look full of misplaced venom, vehemently declaring, "That's where my face was pressed against a rock when he was pounding on me."
"What did he pound you with?" Frank asked easily, thinking it might be better if she took over the questioning.
"He was ramming his head and his shoulder into me the whole time he was...," the girl's defiance faltered, "...doing what he did to me."
Her account was much like that of the later victims.
Based on the limited recall of their one possible witness, Frank had a sketch drawn of their perp. Two of the girls confirmed that their assailant had brown hair and one remembered him wearing dun-colored workboots. The sketch was widely distributed, and a special task force was set up to handle the subsequent load of phone calls. The majority of calls were ridiculously unrelated. One woman reported a man with the same height and weight, but he was black. It turned out he was her ex-boyfriend and she wanted to get back at him for breaking up with her. Another caller was sure she knew the man and took Bobby and Jill straight to him. He was a Vietnamese grocer, stood barely taller than Jill's big tummy, and couldn't have weighed more than one hundred thirty pounds. The caller accused him of tipping the scales, and the detectives left them screaming insults at each other.