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  “Besides, this is all pagan stuff. A good little cradle Catholic like you would have no reason to know all this.”

  She leaped inside and leaned over to unlock my side. As I was climbing behind the wheel, she leaned over with an expression of barely contained excitement. “They also believe that the veil between the world of the human and the dead is at its thinnest on Samhain and that spirits can cross freely back and forth, both benevolent and malevolent ones.” She looked up at me as if she had just asked a question to which she expected me to know the answer.

  I shrugged at her. “So?”

  “So, this guy is telling us that he’s planning something big on Halloween. Just under three weeks away. And now every Don-Tom, Dick and Harry knows it.”

  I shook my head as I started the engine. “I betcha Dad’s pretty steamed.”

  Dad got home around six o’clock and after a distracted “hello” to me and Claudia, went straight upstairs. Mom followed but came down soon after with a shrug that told us that she did her best, but he wasn’t talking. She invited Claudia to stay for dinner and together she and I decided that I should let her do the talking for both of us.

  Once at the table, we spent the first fifteen minutes of dinner making small talk before Claudia made her first move. “By the way, Mr. Graves, I want you to know that I defended the Sheriff’s Department today at school. I said that they would never have willingly let information like that out and that it must have been a mistake.”

  Dad looked up at her with glistening daggers for eyes and suddenly I was thankful that I’d let someone outside the family take this particular bullet. Eventually, he sheathed them and focused on his meal instead. “It’s become a whole big scandal down at the department. Everybody accusing everybody. Hell, some new guy had the gall to question my motive for even being there.” He took a sip of iced tea and started again. “Be Be asked him point blank if he was questioning his judgment.”

  Be Be was Bruce Brannigan, current Sheriff of Broward County. He and Dad had been friends since even before his days at the department and had continued to keep in touch after his retirement. I didn’t know anyone else who called Sheriff Brannigan Be Be to his face besides Dad.

  “You two have got to understand that the control of information to the public is vital to an investigation this sensitive. One piece of information like the one that got leaked today could cost more innocent lives because a lead gets blown. We’ve already started getting calls from cranks claiming to be the Samhain Strangler.” A dark shadow seemed to roll over the table and for a moment, I thought we would all be electrocuted by my father’s rage. “I mean, can you believe the gall of the media? Do they just sit around and toss names around in their comfy little offices? ‘Which one sounds more menacing to you, Dave, the Samhain Strangler or the Sam I Am-Green Eggs and Ham Killer?’”

  Claudia bit her lip in an effort not to laugh and glanced over at me.

  “See this is why I can’t tell you anything about the case, Paul. It’s not because I don’t trust you, but because you might inadvertently give someone a piece of information that might compromise the case.”

  “Can I ask you something, Mr. Graves, if you promise not to get angry.”

  All the lines on Dad’s face disappeared as he seemed to recognize that his anger, like a bad odor, had become obvious to everyone at the table. He put on the face of patience and replied, “You know you can always speak your mind in our house, Claudia.”

  “I’ve been doing a little research myself. Would it be okay if I give you information I think might help in the investigation?”

  Dad just stared at Claudia. I couldn’t tell from his neutral expression if he was surprised or angry. “What do you mean?”

  “I can see how my perspective might seem a little naive, but I figure being a teenager myself might give me a unique insight into the victims that adults might not have considered.”

  Dad eyeballed me at this point, but I was too busy considering my mashed potatoes and gravy to respond. Finally, he shrugged and murmured something about it being harmless.

  Claudia leaped to her feet. “Let me go grab my notes. I’ve got them in my bookbag up in Paul’s room. I’ll be right back.” She took off upstairs like a shot.

  Both Mom and Dad were looking at me now.

  “When she said that she was doing research,” Mom offered. “I’m sure she meant ‘we.’”

  I sighed and looked up at her.

  “What did we talk about the other night, Paul? Didn’t I ask you to cool it with this investigation of yours?”

  “I told her at lunch today that I wanted to stop talking about it.” I made canals through my potatoes. “I’m not sure she heard me though.”

  Dad gave Mom a look that somehow eased her off. “What’s this about, Paul? Are you actually interested in criminal profiling?” Something appeared in his face that I couldn’t read. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought it was pride.

  “Honestly, I found it fascinating at first, but then the reality of what was going on set in. Claudia’s got all these books, filled with crime scene photos. I mean, how could it ever get easier to look at things like that?”

  “It doesn’t,” he replied bluntly. “But there are coping techniques that a friend of mine at the Bureau…”

  Mom dropped her fork loudly into her plate and stood. “Excuse me.”

  Dad and I watched as she pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen. He gave me a look and glanced at the stairway to make sure that Claudia wasn’t coming down yet. “Paul, you know that your mother never liked my line of work. And now that I’ve come out of retirement because of this thing...” He sighed heavily. “I suggest you steer clear of this subject altogether for the near future.”

  I nodded and returned to my meal.

  He finished what was left on his plate and seemed nonchalant when he asked me, “Are you interested in law enforcement, Paul?” Despite trying to hide it, I could still sense a barely restrained excitement in his voice.

  I opened my mouth to answer, then realized that the idea that I was about to express was foreign to me and shut it again. “Enforcing the law is a start.” The thought occurred to me that what I really wanted to do was fight the evil that respects no law.

  A clear picture of Father Hank appeared in my mind and I wondered where this incongruence had come from.

  We were interrupted by Claudia starting downstairs with a sheet of paper in her hand. She glanced around and asked about Mom. I shook my head and took the page of paper from her, handing it over to Dad.

  “Can you give us any of this?”

  Dad dabbed his mouth with a napkin and gave it a look. After each question, he would punctuate it with a stern “No.” He had given us three no’s, when his eyes lit up. “Interesting.”

  Claudia literally vibrated in her chair. “The letters of the names? What do you think of that?”

  Dad folded up the sheet of paper as Mom came out with the desserts. Claudia and I straightened in our chairs and made polite dinner conversation all through dessert.

  As Mom was clearing the table, Dad turned to me just before following her into the kitchen. “Amy and Anh,” he whispered to me.

  I raised my brows and gave him a look of confusion.

  Then as he disappeared into the kitchen, it hit me. “The girls’ middle names.”

  Grace Amy Fischer and Sadie Anh Nayar.

  Claudia rushed over to me, her anticipation close to bursting.

  “He just gave me the middle names.”

  “I know. Amy and Anh,” she said, though she was nowhere within earshot when he’d told me.

  She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away from the kitchen. “Tell them you’re walking me home. I’ve got to tell you all I found in your Dad’s office upstairs.”

  On the way home, after a brief but bitter argument we had about respecting one another’s privacy—punctuated by such classic exchanges as Q: “What the hell is wrong with you
?” A: “Can you be more specific?”--Claudia explained to me what she had found in the process of rifling through my Dad’s briefcase in his office upstairs.

  “I wish you would have told me you were going to do this.” I snapped.

  “Why? So you could talk me out of it?” she answered. Then she shushed me and continued to busily scratch notes from memory into the spiral notebook from her bag.

  We sat out on the steps of the Wicke’s porch. I could hear an owl somewhere interjecting itself over the racket of the crickets. Anyone who thinks that rural America is quiet has never stopped to listen.

  “It’s cold out here,” I complained. It was a cool breezy night and I was shivering, while Claudia was warming herself by the fire of her passion.

  “Then go inside. You’re distracting me.”

  Claudia knew that I had no desire to face her mom. I hadn’t talked to her since the cemetery incident and wasn’t sure if I was in the mood to defend my actions one more time to another adult. For right now, I preferred avoidance.

  As I peered over Claudia’s shoulder to see what she had scribbled down, I thought about what she had told me on the way to her house. In that patchwork quilt-like stream of consciousness style of a genius explaining a new theory, she told me all that she had learned from my Dad’s files.

  “We already knew the physical attributes of the girls. Grace Fischer was eighteen. A tall girl. Five foot eight inches. She wore her dark brown hair short.

  “Sadie Nayar, on the other hand, was sixteen, was only five foot four, and had long black hair. I’m thinking she must be Middle Eastern or Indian. I didn’t notice anything in the files about background. I need to do some research on the surname.”

  “There was an article in the newspaper about her disappearance when the first body was found,” I told her. “I think there may have been a photo of her. Dark complexion. Dark eyes.”

  Claudia shook her head in frustration. “There must be some other link between the girls that goes beyond physical appearance.”

  “Did they have boyfriends?” I asked her.

  “It didn’t say… or I didn’t read that far into the files. I don’t know. I was trying to absorb as much information as I could as quickly as I could. We already know that the body of the second victim was found in a dumpster behind an abandoned building that sold machine parts for a factory that shut down. Here’s something we didn’t. She wasn’t strangled as everyone had assumed, seeing as how this guy was instantly nicknamed the Mad Strangler and all.

  “Now, these are the important parts, the facts that no one outside of the investigative team knows. One, she was wrapped in a funeral cloth and burned. Two, an ankh was found on her remains.”

  “What’s an ankh?”

  “Two things, it’s Egyptian and I believe it means eternal life. Anything outside of that, I need to do some digging.”

  “Was she Egyptian?”

  “Like said less than a minute ago, I didn’t catch anything on her background in the files,” she snapped with annoyance. “Maybe if you could go back in and do a more thorough....”

  “Nope,” I immediately snapped. “Out of the question.”

  We walked in silence for awhile, Claudia glowering and giving me the silent treatment.

  “Burned, huh?” I took a deep breath. Somehow it had seemed a little more palatable when it had just been a scarf wrapped around a neck. “So this guy was trying to remove all identifying characteristics then?”

  “No, y’see, that’s the thing. Her face and hands were intentionally left unburned! Protected with fireproof cloth.”

  I shook my head. “What does that mean?”

  “My guess is he wanted the investigators to know who he was killing.”

  “Is that normal, Claudia,” I asked, “y’know, for a serial killer to change his method of killing?”

  “Maybe he didn’t change his method, though there wasn’t anything in the notes about her being strangled. One thing’s for sure, he disposed of the body differently.” She nibbled on the tip of her pen unconsciously. “Although, if it wasn’t to cover his tracks, then why?”

  “Well, you’re either covering or leaving a trail.”

  Claudia turned to stare at me.

  I shrugged. “Maybe this guy is trying to throw everyone off by making them think a certain way, right? Were there signs of a struggle?”

  “There were no scratches and abrasions on the face and hands that were unburned. Either the victim went willingly or she was rendered unconscious. Also, there was no trauma to the sexual organs. She wasn’t raped.”

  She went quiet and raised her eyes to the sky, humming what sounded like Iron Butterfly’s “In a Gadda Da Vida.”

  I sighed, hugging myself against the cold, and tried to be patient.

  Suddenly, she asked: “Do you remember the motives?”

  “Sure. Power/Control, Gain, Hedonistic… Visionary and…”

  “Missionary. Non-sexual, right. Missionaries believe that they’re getting rid of someone undesirable.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but this guy could be getting off on killing these girls without actually… you know.”

  “Penetration?” She locked eyes with me. “Saying the word won’t attract lightning bolts, y’know. Watch: ‘Penetration.’”

  I dropped my eyes and felt immediately guilty for doing it. “My point is that we really can’t rule out any of those motives,” I snapped, glaring back at her.

  She picked up her pace slightly, leaving me behind. “I need to get to my house and put all this down on paper so that I won’t forget.”

  So, here we sat on her front porch now, trying to wring out every last drop of information she had briefly glimpsed in my Dad’s files. Claudia stopped scribbling and stabbed a period on the end of a sentence. She glanced hurriedly over her notes and gave a yawn. “I guess I better go in now. I want to check out a few things on the web.”

  She leaped up onto the porch and turned back to me. “There were no signs of a struggle, right?”

  I nodded. “You tell me.”

  “If there wasn’t, what would that tell you?”

  I considered: “Well, there must have been either surprise or trust.”

  Claudia gave me her brightest smile. Her eyes seemed to sparkle as she gazed down at me from the porch of her house. I basked in that glow like a dog in a patch of sunlight. “I’ll make a profiler of you yet, Graves.”

  Chapter 14 (Tuesday, October 13th)

  It was one of those generational events that from that moment after you might be asked, “Where were you when..?” My parents’ generation had the assassination of JFK and the moon landing. For us it was September 11, 2001 and the school shooting in Jasper, Texas on October 13th.

  The first shot was fired at 7:36 am and before 9 o’clock twenty-six human beings were dead.

  I told Claudia at her locker that I didn’t feel much like having lunch (or talking about serial killers, I felt it unnecessary to add). She gave me a simple nod of acknowledgement. When she asked me if I was okay, I lied to her. “I just have to practice some music in the band hall.”

  The afternoon slid by uneventfully, and by the time I reached Honors English class, I was starting to recover from the dark feeling that had enveloped me at lunch. Mrs. Hebert (with a tip of the hat to King Arthur) had arranged our desks in the circle, which she must have felt was more conducive to equity.

  She said that we would set aside our discussion of the assigned reading, a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, so that we could talk about the more important issue of what happened today in Jasper.

  First she asked us how we felt about what happened.

  “Sad,” Katy Drummond responded.

  “Sick,” said Victor Avison.

  “Angry,” was what James Anderson said.

  Finally, Vicki Duplantis admitted, “It makes me afraid.”

  “Anyone else afraid?” Mrs. Hebert asked.

  There were scattered grunts of agreeme
nt from most of the girls. A couple of boys were brave enough to admit that they were.

  “Nah, mostly I’m pissed,” James Anderson murmured.

  “Okay, James. Who are you angry with?”

  “The gunman.” James shrugged. “I guess I’m angry with the school, too. How could this thing go on for almost two hours without anyone doing anything to stop it?”

  “What makes you think no one tried?” Vicki asked accusatorily.

  James stared down at his desk, slowly simmering in a vat of anger.

  “Doesn’t anyone know why he did this?” Stephanie Tidwell asked hoarsely. She appeared as though she had been crying and sounded like she might be on the verge of beginning again.

  “That’s a good question,” Mrs. Hebert added. “And since the gunman committed suicide, I’m not sure we’ll ever really know for sure.”

  “Didn’t they find anything explaining what he did? Like a suicide note or something?” asked Nick Woodward, speaking up for the first time. For most of the class, he and Henry Felder had been whispering back and forth to each other (probably talking about their grand plans for the weekend or something), seemingly oblivious to the whole conversation.

  “No, not that I know of. We might just have to accept the fact that we’ll never know the reason for this. Does that bother anyone?”

  There was complete agreement on that issue and everyone seemed to want to talk at once. Mrs. Hebert called order and let that loudmouth Vicki Duplantis have the floor again.

  “It might help if we knew that he was depressed or being bullied. That way we would know why he did what he did.”

  And suddenly before I could temper the force of my words, I found myself saying aloud: “Why is everyone talking about the murderer and not the victims?”

  “I think it’s because the victims don’t need explanation. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Ginger Reynolds responded in her annoyingly sing-song voice that had the affect of rendering anything she said sound like part of a comedy routine. All she had succeeded in doing was incite me further.