Indeed, unlike other victims, Cathy had not been re-dressed in someone else’s clothes, no wildly striped men’s socks going up her legs like a clown or a chicken, nor were her arms stuffed inside a T-shirt, no coats over her head or plastic bags over her torso. Cathy had somehow become more personal to the Killer, her death mattered more than the ultimate place she would come to occupy in his mosaic of murder. But, so there was no mistaking the Killer’s work, Cathy had been punctured between the legs with a sharp knife, she’d been stabbed in the chest, and, like several other victims, her right breast had been removed.
With each breast excision, the Killer had gotten better and better, more meticulous, more sure. Cathy had been cleanly sliced right down to the fat, and this time he hadn’t nicked the ribs. Mercifully, she’d been strangled before the heavy cutting began, so there was little blood and much unreality to the scene. And, unlike other victims, she had no cigarette burns on her, nor had her belly button been carved out so he could look inside her and see what ticked. Cathy’s sightless eyes and expressionless face made her seem a mannequin rather than a mother.
You can’t look at dead bodies and talk about them or write about them if you think they’re real. You have to tell yourself they’re not people now, and they never ever were. Then, if you can distance sufficiently while nonetheless remaining focused, you can actually begin to see the victims through a killer’s eyes.
I remember when my comatose brother went cyanotic and the life force left him—he was technically alive but he was gone, and although he still had a human shape he was no longer a human being. His nurse in Neurological Intensive Care had made the break from him before she’d even known him—after he died, I chanced to see her daily log. In every entry she referred to him as an “it”.
More dramatic, simultaneously terrifying and comforting, was my mother at her funeral. I’d wanted to see her one last time, so I insisted on an open casket, until I saw her and realized it wasn’t her, not anymore. Her soul had moved on, and mortuary makeup had turned her into someone else’s hideously mistaken version of what she’d been. Had she still looked alive, I think I would have had to have killed myself.
Having seen her, I postponed the interment so she could be cremated and then buried. My father indulged me because he knew I was hanging on by a single emotional thread. I just didn’t want her buried looking like that. We don’t bury our loved ones so that we can forget them, we bury our memories of them so that we know where to find them when we want to remember. When I was to visit the cemetery, I needed to be able to see my mother as she had lived.
On the other hand, the serial killer doesn’t see his victims for what was in life, only for what is in death, which is the killer’s own eternal creation. I go to the cemetery and have to jog my fading memory of the past, while the serial killer exists easily in the present. He wanted the woman dead—that’s when she would become his. He saw her dead before he ever met her. Alive, she was always an “it”—one potential victim could easily have been interchanged with another, so many potential victims never became victims at all, thanks to sheer circumstance—but dead, each victim is finally and irretrievably distinct. And now, since it’s always the present, she exists for him forever—she’s dead, but she’s very much alive.
Cathy McDonald knew she was going to die. The Killer had her bound hand and foot in the back of his van, and he was driving her some-place, and she knew she wasn’t coming back.
But she had to try to save herself—she owed that to her children, the ones waiting at home and the one she carried in her womb.
So, when the Killer parked by this desolate field, when he climbed into the back of the van and hovered over her, his eyes burning with hate, she swallowed hard and tried to speak to him.
She told him she would do whatever he wanted. This would not come as news to him, of course, since she was hardly in a position to resist, but she thought maybe he wanted to hear the words. Maybe he’d even believe that she was submitting by choice rather than by force.
But the Killer didn’t take heed—he was too busy preparing his gar-rote, unwrapping his knife, cutting off her clothes.
Now she begged—she told him about her children, about her pregnancy. She was lucid and she was direct, and this he heard. The other women, they were all too drugged up to be so conversant, nothing they said amounted to much, but this one was intelligent and sensible, and he could listen because he wasn’t so full of rage against her as he’d been with the others. The others had made him mad—some were women he’d known, women he’d loved, not random as the police thought—but this one, this black woman he was killing partly because he needed some relief tonight and partly because he needed to kill a black woman in order to thumb his nose at the police and their profiles.
Yeah, the Killer had read the newspaper. How dare they say he only killed white women? He could kill any damn woman he pleased. This would tell the police that they ought to give up, that they were to blame. This black woman wouldn’t have died if the police hadn’t done that profile.
For the Killer knew he’d been careful not to leave enough evidence anywhere at any time that could tie him to the killings, so he couldn’t be found out and he couldn’t be stopped unless he was caught in the act. To catch him they’d have to predict where he’d be and then be there waiting for him to show. But he was unpredictable. Killing this black woman would prove it. Maybe next time he’d kill someone orange, or green, or purple. Maybe he’d kill someone white and paint her purple.