“Not much good’s better than no good.”
“Okay. I guess you want to tell me the bad news.”
“I guess I do. It’ll get around the island anyway.”
Still, for a few moments she said nothing at all, then seemed to gather herself.
“Several years ago there was a series of abduction murders. Young women, ranging from eighteen to twenty-three. They were all college students, twelve of them over a three-year period. California, Nevada, Oregon, New Mexico, Washington state were either abduction sites or burial sites—or both.”
It rang a bell somewhere, dimly, but he said nothing.
“They were all the same type—not physically, as he crossed races and coloring, but basic body types and all college students, athletic, outdoorsy, outgoing. He’d stalk them for weeks once he’d chosen a target. Sometimes longer. Meticulous, patient, he’d record their routines, habits, wardrobe, friends, family, schedules. He used a tape recorder and kept a notebook. All of them either jogged or hiked or biked routinely. Habitually.”
She drew another breath and made him think of someone preparing to execute a surface dive in murky water.
“He preferred women who went out alone, early morning or dusk. He approached from the opposite direction—just another jogger, another hiker. And when he closed in, he used a stun gun to take them down. While they were incapacitated, he carried them to his car. He had the trunk lined with plastic so there’d be no trace on the bodies, and no trace of them in the trunk.”
“Thorough,” Simon said, thinking out loud.
“Yes. Very.” She continued briskly, without inflection, like a woman giving a report she knew by rote. “He bound them with nylon cord, gagged them with duct tape, then gave them a mild sedative to keep them under, keep them quiet. He’d drive to a national park. He’d already have the spot picked out. While the search went on for her, in the area she’d been abducted, he was hours away, forcing this groggy, terrified woman to walk, through the dark, off the trail.”
Now her voice hitched, a quick tremble as she linked her fingers together in her lap and stared straight ahead. “He dug the grave first—not too deep. He wanted them to be found. He liked them to watch him dig so he tied them to a tree. They couldn’t beg, couldn’t even ask him why because he kept them gagged the entire time. He didn’t rape them or torture them, physically. Or beat them or mutilate them. He just took out the red scarf and, while they were bound and gagged, unable to defend themselves, strangled them. He tied it in a bow when he was finished, and buried them.”
“The Red Scarf Killer. That’s what the press called him,” Simon commented. “I remember this. They caught him after he shot some cop.”
“Greg Norwood. The cop was Greg Norwood, and his dog, his K-9 partner, Kong.”
The words throbbed in the air between them like an open wound.
“You knew him.”
“Perry laid in wait for them. Greg had a place, a nice little weekend place near Lake Sammamish. He liked to take Kong there, work on his training. Once a month, just the two of them. Boy-bonding, he called it.”
She laid her hands on her knees, a casual gesture, but he saw the way her fingers dug in.
“He shot Greg first, and maybe that was his mistake. He put two bullets in Kong, but Kong kept coming. That’s what they reconstructed, and that’s what Perry said happened, trading confessions, information, details against the threat of the death penalty when he knew he’d lose the trial. Kong tore Perry up pretty good before he died. Perry was strong, and he managed to get back to his car, even drove a few miles before he passed out, wrecked. Anyway, they got him. Greg, he was strong, too. He lived two days. That was in September. September twelfth. We were going to be married the following June.”
Useless words, Simon thought, but they had to be said. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too. He staked Greg out for months, maybe longer. Meticulous, patient. He killed him to pay me back. See, I was supposed to be his number thirteen, but I got away.”
She closed her eyes briefly. “I want a drink. Do you want a drink?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
When she rose and went in, he debated going with her, and decided maybe she needed a little time to pull it together.
He remembered bits and pieces of the story. Remembered now there’d been a girl who escaped, and who gave the FBI a description of the man who abducted her.
Years ago, he thought now, and tried to think what he’d been doing when the story had been hot.
He just hadn’t paid that much attention, he thought now. He’d been, what, about twenty-five? He’d just moved to Seattle and had been trying to build a reputation, make a living. And his father had that cancer scare about that time. That had eclipsed everything else.
She came out with a couple glasses of white wine.
“It’s an Aussie chardonnay. All I’ve got, apparently.”
“It’s fine.” He took the glass, and they sat in silence, watching the heap of dogs who’d decided to take a nap. “Do you want to tell me how you got away?”
“Luck, on the heels of stupidity. I shouldn’t have been out alone that morning on that jogging path. I should’ve known better. My uncle’s a cop, and I was already seeing Greg, and they’d both made a point of telling me not to run without a partner. But I couldn’t get one who’d keep up with me. Track star,” she added with a ghost of a smile.
“You’ve got the legs for it.”
“Yeah. Lucky me. I didn’t listen to them. Perry hadn’t crossed over to Washington at that point, and there hadn’t been an abduction for months. You never think it’s going to be you. You especially never think that when you’re twenty. I went out for my run. I liked to go early, then hit the coffee shop. It was a crappy day, gloomy, rainy, but I loved running in the rain. This was early November, the year before Greg died. I had a second, just a second when I saw him. So ordinary-looking, so pleasant, but I had that click. I had a panic button on my key chain. I even reached for it, but it was too late. I felt that shock of pain, then nothing works.”
She had to stop a moment, had to breathe. “Nothing works,” she repeated. “Pain, shock, then numb, useless. I felt sick when I came to in the trunk. It was dark, and I felt the movement, the sound of the tires on the road. Can’t scream, can’t kick, can hardly move.”
She stopped, breathed it out, took a slow sip of wine. “I cried awhile because he was going to kill me and I couldn’t stop him. He was going to kill me because I wanted to take a morning run by myself. I thought about my family, and Greg, my friends, my life. I stopped crying and got mad. I hadn’t done anything to deserve this.”
She stopped again, drank again while the breeze whispered through the pines. “And I had to pee. That was humiliating, and as stupid as it is, the thought that I’d pee my pants before he killed me just revved me up. So I’m fighting that, sort of squirming around, and I felt the lump in my pocket. I had a hidden pocket in my jogging pants—one of those inside-the-back deals. Greg had given me this little Swiss Army knife.” She reached in the pocket of her jeans, pulled it out.
“Tiny little knife, cute little scissors, mini nail file. A girl knife.” She closed her hand around it. “It saved my life. He’d taken my keys, the coffee money I had zipped in my jacket pocket, but he hadn’t thought of the inner pocket in the pants. Couldn’t know it was there, I guess. My hands were tied behind my back. I could just reach it. I think I was most scared then, when I managed to get the knife, when I started to think maybe, maybe there was a way out.”
“Can I see it?” When she offered it, Simon opened it, studied the knife in the bright afternoon sun. Half as long as his thumb, he thought. “You cut through the nylon cord with this?”
“Cut, sawed, hacked. It took me forever just to get it open, or it seemed like it, and a lifetime to saw through the rope. I had to cut through the one around my ankles because I couldn’t loosen the knot. First I was terrified he’d stop the car before I’d finished, then I was terrified he’d never stop that fucking car. But he did. He did, and he got out whistling a tune. I’ll never forget that sound.”