"A serial murderer? That's what McCabe said in California!" I described the videotape of the Cadmus murder, the "Hi, Sam!" Post-it notes, other things, including the act of the female spider preserving sperm inside her body for eighteen months. Durant listened without interrupting. While I spoke, he pulled the dog. back onto his lap and scratched its head.
When I was finished, he reached into a pocket and took out a pack of Gauloises cigarettes and an old Zippo lighter. The smell of summer in the room was quickly replaced by acrid cigarette smoke. He offered me one but I refused, remembering that smoking a Gauloise was like inhaling a volcano.
"This is the only good thing about dying. I always loved smoking, but gave it up years ago with the provision that if I ever became very ill, I'd do it to my heart's content.
"I wouldn't have believed it was possible if there hadn't been one other thing in that envelope, Sam. It convinced me." On the coffee table, among the magazines, ashtray and many books was a small silver pocketknife. Durant pointed to it and I picked it up. Nothing special – a silver knife with two blades and no gewgaws like a bottle opener or scissors. There was a long deep scratch down the length of it. In the middle was engraved the name Sparky. I remembered my father using a similar knife to scrape tobacco out of his pipe.
"It belonged to my father. Sparky was his nickname. He gave it to me when I went to Korea. I gave it to Edward when he went away to college. It was a good-luck charm for the Durant men. I wanted him to have it. Edward remembered using it the day of the murder to carve Pauline's and his initials into a tree. Whoever does that anymore? Then he explained its history and gave it to her.
"We talked about it when he was on trial. Despite all the terrible things happening, he became fixated on finding that knife. I looked everywhere and checked with the police, but it had disappeared. Killers often take souvenirs from the scenes of their crimes. When I was practicing, we were often able to convict people on the basis of the mementos we found in their homes.
"It's quite remarkable. Practicing law all those years, I saw every kind of human aberration but never once, not once did I think Pauline's murder was only one of many. It never crossed my mind."
All the crimes described in the photocopied articles were unsolved. Durant had used his considerable pull to find out as much as possible about each one. With the exception of David Cadmus, there were a great many similarities.
I asked the same question I'd asked Frannie. "But why did he wait all this time? If he wanted to be known for these murders why didn't he advertise after he'd done them? The first girl was killed thirty-four years ago. Today she would be fifty!"
Durant chuckled and clicked his lighter open and closed a few times. "You're asking a dying man that question, Sam. Believe me, your perspective changes when the Grim Reaper is on the horizon. Who knows why he's doing it? Maybe he's sick like me, or just sick and it's finally beginning to ooze out. Maybe he wants to be on television like every other celebrity murderer these days.
"We spend so much time looking for patterns and reasons, understandable motives and grudges, but it's fruitless. Some things just are. and that irrationality terrifies us. We keep searching and saying, 'But there's got to be a reason!' Sorry, not always. Less and less frequently, if you look at the way the world is moving.
"Take your natural disasters. Whenever a tornado or hurricane strikes, some church is destroyed with a hundred good people inside. There's no explanation for that, so what do we do? Assess the damage and say a hundred million dollars. Count two hundred and nine dead. Hooray for numbers! Something we can understand. They may not explain, but they do create an ordering that we need to bear it.
"My son and daughter-in-law died because they had a fight one night and the wrong person was watching. Now he wants us to know he was there."
The next week felt like I was on one never-ending plane ride. I spent three days in Big Sur, California, flew down to Los Angeles, then over to St. Louis, where I rented a car and drove to Eureka, Missouri.
Durant had loaded me down with information. When I told McCabe his story, Frannie was ecstatic and went to work finding out more. I spent most of the time in the air reading their combined research.
How many other people had this man killed? What had he been doing all the years in between? I kept picturing an old thin electrician in a nowhere town. Drinking beer at night in a dumpy bar and then going home in a haze to look at his souvenirs and clippings. I'd watched documentaries on television about mass murderers. They're often abused as children or the father abandons them when they're very young. Was this guy one of those? All of his victims had been hit on the head and then thrown into water where they drowned. No sexual abuse. Nothing of importance taken, other than a pocket knife here and who knows what else there. Did the killer keep these things in a box, a drawer, a special bag hidden in a closet? How did he know I was writing the book about Pauline?
That last question was answered when I arrived in Los Angeles. In between sniffing around the death of David Cadmus, I stopped at Book Soup with an hour to kill. Browsing the magazine racks outside, I picked up a recent People and riffled through it. I hadn't looked at one in a long time, basically because Cassandra's mother read it religiously. Every time I saw the magazine I was reminded of the pit viper who'd once been my wife.
"I saw an article about you in there a couple of weeks ago."
I turned around and Ann English, the store's beautiful manager, was smiling at me. We kissed cheeks and I asked what she was talking about.
"You were in there, didn't you see?"
"This is news to me, Ann."
"I saved the article and put it up on the wall in the office. Come in, I'll show you."
We went into the store and climbed the staircase to the offices. Ann walked to a wall behind her desk and pointed. The date at the bottom of the page was two months past. In a section of the magazine I didn't recognize entitled "What Are They Doing Now?" there it was – a large picture of me. I read that Sting was about to release a new album, Producer Eric Pleskow was working on a film about Chernobyl, and bestselling novelist Samuel Bayer was writing a non-fiction account of the murder of a girl in his boyhood hometown, Crane's View, New York.
I swore loudly and then asked if I could use the telephone. In a few seconds there was the hale and hearty voice of my editor, Aurelio Parma.
"Aurelio, you hamster dick, did you tell People about my new book?"
"How are you, Sam? Nice to hear your voice. It's been a long time, not that I mind your not returning my calls. Sure I told them. It's great publicity. Tell your fans what you're up to. Notice you were the only writer mentioned in the column?"
"I don't want to be mentioned! I didn't want anyone knowing about the book. You have no idea how you've complicated things."
His voice jumped down the staircase to the cold and distant bottom. "I have a job to do. Part of it is keeping you in the public eye. If you don't want to tell me how the work is going, that's your choice. But I have to sell it when you're finished. This is how it's done. Don't be naive."
Three days later back home in Connecticut, I hunkered down and returned to work on the book. At first I thought it would be best to throw out everything I'd written so far and start again. This time tell the story of four murders and how they eventually connected.
I worked on that premise for a week but.grew increasingly more uncomfortable with the idea. It's easy to lose sight of what you want when you think you want everything. Discovering the very real possibility that Pauline might have been "only" one of a series of victims threw me way off. Her killer was still alive, taunting Durant and me to come find him. Was his story the one that needed to be told instead? And what about the other victims? Were they to be only footnotes?