Michael Prescott - Last Breath

The S’s had been particularly productive for him. Never a Sarah, but there’d been a Sonya in Austin and a Stacey in Wyoming and two Stephanies. The first had been a nine-year-old girl in the Mojave-this was during his desert wanderings. The second, more recent-a nurse in Salem, Oregon. He didn’t think her body had ever been found. There was a lot of wilderness in that part of country, and carrion flesh didn’t last long.

He drove farther along the curving avenues. Patty and Petra and Priscilla passed him by without eliciting any nostalgic recollections. But Paula Street brought a smile to his face. Paula had been a memorable one. Barmaid, Houston, 1991. Hot summer night, with that insufferable Texas humidity choking the air. She went home with another man. Treat followed. The man didn’t stay the night. When he left, Treat broke in and smothered Paula under a pillow. The pillowcase was a daffodil print-funny how he remembered that. Later he read that the unlucky bar patron who picked her up had been arrested and charged with the homicide. Treat never followed up on the case to learn if the man was convicted.

Yes, Paula. A good one.

Serial killers were said to take souvenirs, mementos of their kills. No doubt most did, but Treat had never been much of a collector. He saw no point in weighing himself down with a lot of bric-a-brac when he was so often on the move. And why give the police any help in apprehending him, or in making a conviction stick? A room full of incriminating evidence was just the break they needed.

So he had not followed the example of other killers like himself. He took nothing from his victims except their breath, their lives, and their names. This was the secret hoard stashed in the treasure chest of his soul. He remembered their names, always.

Amanda Street. Bernadette Court. Cynthia Court.

He’d had his share of A’s, B’s, and C’s, but not those particular ones. He headed toward the other end of the community, past more sleepy homes, more droning TV sets, more affectionate couples and cranky kids, more of the normality that surrounded him but never touched him, was never fully real.

Into the G’s now. Gabriella, Gina, Gloria, Gail. He’d had a Gina in West Palm Beach. Left her dead in her condo with the air conditioning turned up high to keep the body cold. He hadn’t wanted the smell of decomposition to alert the neighbors until he was far away.

Faith, Frieda, Flora, Felicia. He recalled a Faith in the Mojave, eleven years old. A Felicia, too, though she had been one of his less satisfying kills-a patrol car nearly spotted him as he was dragging her into an arroyo, and he had to quickly cut her throat and flee in case the cops doubled back to investigate. A waste. Treat sighed sadly. He hated waste.

Erica, Erin, Evangelina, Evelyn, Elena…

So many names. And he’d had no small number of them. Erica in Las Cruces, killed in an alley during a street festival, left on the pavement with cotton candy sticking to her face. Erin, another child of the Mojave. Evelyn-she’d been a driving instructor in San Francisco, whom he’d met during a stroll in Golden Gate Park. She had rebuffed his advances, but she hadn’t noticed him follow her home. San Francisco was a fun town. All those people living atop an earthquake fault line that could rupture at any moment. Crowded life and mass death so closely intertwined. He would like to return there someday.

More streets, more names. He paid less attention. Occasionally a sign would catch his eye-Christie Lane; he’d known a Christie in New Orleans, pretty girl, slightly plump, squealed like a stuck pig when he put the ice pick in her skull-but mostly he just drove and let his thoughts wander.

After a traumatic experience, such as his run-in with officers of the law in their stormtrooper regalia, it was best to relax and reorient oneself. Nervous exhaustion would lead to panic, and panic produced stupidity, and stupidity was the single vice he could not abide.

Had he been stupid, he would not have lasted this long.

He’d been at the game for twenty years now. His first kill had been claimed at the tender age of twenty-one. He had preyed on children in the early years. In retrospect, he could see that his choice of victim had been dictated by his youthful insecurities. He had not felt competent to go after adults.

There had been children in Montana and Nebraska and the Mojave Desert. One of those children-a rare failure-had been Caitlin Osborn, age ten. He had seen her in the shopping district of her small hard-scrabble town and had been instantly captivated. Such a pretty little thing. He’d known he must have her. He had followed her home and watched her parents’ house on and off for days, until the opportunity offered itself.

She would have been a memorable kill. He had planned to strangle her with his gloved hands. Strangulation had been one method he employed during his early wanderings, but not the only one.

Even in those formative years, he had begun to perfect his craft, testing new techniques, seeking variety. His inspiration was the famed Zodiac killer of California, who had never been caught. The Zodiac was unusual among predators of his kind because of his willingness to alter his modus operandi. Other killers repeated the same shopworn MO, invariably relying on the knife or the garrote or the gun, but the Zodiac was more clever, more creative than that. He tried different methods of execution, while varying the locale of his crimes.

More important, the Zodiac resisted the temptation to advertise. There was a fetishistic impulse among serial killers to identify themselves with a “signature”-a term of art used by psychological profilers and other overpaid savants to designate a nonessential, highly personal feature of the crime. To kill with a knife was an MO. To mutilate the corpse in a distinctive fashion was a signature.

Because the Zodiac varied his MO and left no signature, for a long time his homicides, occurring in different jurisdictions, perpetrated by different means, had not even been connected. There was still some debate as to whether certain crimes were his work or someone else’s.

At first Treat, emulating his hero, had left no signatures. Later he devised a variation on this approach. He concocted a specific persona, complete with MO, victim profile, and signature, for a brief stint of killing. Then he relocated, adopted a new MO and a fresh signature. He was the man of a thousand faces, protean in his ability to reinvent himself, prolific in his output.

He did not fool himself that he had mastered every nuance of his work. What was it old Chaucer had said, in a rather different context? “The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” Yes, that stated it exactly. He could never be the complete master of such a complex art. Still, he had progressed. And he’d had his fun.

Having read the literature on serial murder, he knew that it was the fashion among investigators to classify a killer as organized or disorganized, social or asocial, according to the condition of the victim’s body and the crime scene. He played games with the small minds that would pigeonhole him so neatly.

He fit the profile of a disorganized asocial killer on some of his outings, then switched to the organized social type, then mixed and matched, all the time moving from state to state, until the authorities in their blessed confusion must have thought they were dealing with three, six, a dozen separate maniacs.

As his confidence grew, he expanded his menu of victims. He put the lie to any accusation of gender bias by selecting the occasional boy, though the females always pleased him best. He overcame his insecurities by graduating to teenagers, then young adults, and finally to anyone who struck his fancy.

He had been the Bay Area Doctor, dispensing lethal injections to red-haired housewives; the Seattle Bedroom Invader, who killed couples-the husband executed with a silenced pistol shot, the wife asphyxiated with a plastic bag; the Twin Cities Arsonist, who burned his victims in their mobile homes; and others.