Michael Connelly - The Scarecrow

“You take him, I’ll take her!” she yelled.

We each grabbed one of the agents under the arms and dragged them back toward the door we had entered from. My guy was light and easy to move and I got a good lead on Rachel. But I started running out of steam halfway there. I needed oxygen myself.

The closer we got to the open door, the more air I began to get into my lungs. Finally I reached the door and dragged Torres over Carver’s body and into the equipment room. The bumpy landing seemed to jump-start Torres. He started coughing and coming to even before I put him down.

Rachel came in behind me with Mowry.

“I don’t think she’s breathing!”

Rachel pulled the breather out of Mowry’s mouth and started CPR procedures.

“Jack, how is he?” she asked without taking her focus off of Mowry.

“He’s good. He’s breathing.”

I moved to Rachel’s side as she conducted mouth-to-mouth. I wasn’t sure how I could help but in a few moments Mowry convulsed and started coughing. She turned on her side and brought her legs up into the fetal position.

“Its okay, Sarah,” Rachel said. “You’re all right. You made it. You’re safe.”

She gently patted Mowry’s shoulder and I heard the agent manage to cough out a thank-you and then ask about her partner.

“He’ll be fine,” Rachel said.

I moved to the nearby wall and sat with my back against it. I was spent. My eyes drifted to the body of Carver sprawled on the floor near the door. I could see both entry and exit wounds. The bullet had strafed across his frontal lobes. He had not moved since he had fallen but after a while I thought I could see the slight tic of a pulse on his neck just below the ear.

Exhausted, Rachel moved over and slid down the wall next to me.

“Backup’s coming. I should probably go up and wait for them so I can show them the way down here.”

“Catch your breath first. Are you okay?”

She nodded yes but she was still breathing heavily. So was I. I watched her eyes and saw them focus on Carver.

“It’s too bad, you know?”

“What is?”

“That with both Courier and Carver gone, the secrets died with them. Everybody’s dead and we’ve got nothing, no clue to what made them do what they did.”

I shook my head slowly.

“I got news for you. I think the Scarecrow’s still alive.”

It has been six weeks since the events that took place in Mesa. Still, those events remain vivid in my memory and imagination.

I am writing now. Every day. I usually find a crowded coffee shop in the afternoon in which to set up my laptop. I have learned that I cannot write in authorial silence. I must fight distraction and white noise. I must come as close as possible to the experience of writing in a crowded newsroom. I seem to need the din of background conversations, ringing phones and keyboards clacking to feel comfortable and at home. Of course, it is an artificial replacement for the real thing. There is no camaraderie in a coffee shop. No sense of “us against the world.” These are things I am sure I will miss about the newsroom forever.

I reserve the mornings for research on my subject. Wesley John Carver remains largely an enigma but I am getting closer to who and what he is. As he lies in the twilight world of a coma in the hospital ward of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Los Angeles, I close in on him.

Some of what I know has come from the FBI, which continues to work the case in Arizona, Nevada and California. But most of it I have gotten on my own and from several sources.

Carver was a killer of high intelligence and clear-eyed self-understanding. He was clever and calculating, and able to manipulate people by tapping into their deepest and darkest desires. He lurked on websites and chat rooms, identified potential disciples and victims and then followed them home, tracing them through the labyrinthine portals of the digital world. He then made casual contact in the real world. He used them or killed them or both.

He had been doing it for years-well before Western Data and the trunk murders had caught anyone’s eye. Marc Courier had only been the latest in a long line of followers.

Still, the record of grim deeds Carver committed cannot overshadow the motivations behind it. That is what my editor in New York tells me each time we talk. I must be able to tell more than what happened. I must tell why. It’s breadth and depth again-the ol’ B and D-and I am used to that.

What I have learned so far is this: Carver grew up an only child without ever knowing who his father was. His mother worked the strip club circuit, which kept the two of them on the road from Los Angeles to San Francisco to New York and back during his younger years. He was what they called a dressing-room baby, held backstage in the arms of housemothers, costumers and other dancers while his own mother worked in the spotlights out front. She was a featured act, performing under the stage name “L.A. Woman” and dancing exclusively to the music of the signature Los Angeles rock band of the era, The Doors.

There are hints that Carver was abused sexually by more than one of the people he was left with in dressing rooms and that on many nights he slept in the same hotel room where his mother entertained men who had paid to be with her.

Most notable in all of this was that his mother had developed an unnamed but degenerative bone disease that threatened her livelihood. When not onstage, and away from the world in which she worked, she often wore leg braces prescribed to provide support for weakening ligaments and joints. Young Wesley was often called upon to help secure the leather straps around his mother’s legs.

It is a dismal and depressing portrait, but not one that adds up to multiple murder. The secret ingredients of that carcinogen have not yet been revealed-by me or the FBI. What made the horrors of Carver’s upbringing metastasize into the cancer of his adulthood remains to be learned. But Rachel often reminds me of her favorite line from a Coen brothers film: Nobody knows anybody, not that well . She tells me no one will ever know what sent Wesley Carver down the path he took.

I am in Bakersfield today. For the fourth day in a row I will spend the morning with Karen Carver and she will tell me her memories of her son. She has not seen or talked to him since the day he left as an eighteen-year-old for MIT, but her knowledge of his early life and her willingness to share it with me bring me closer to answering the question of why.

Tomorrow I will drive home, my conversations with the now wheelchair-bound mother of the killer completed for the time being. There is other research to complete and a looming deadline for my book. More important than all of that, it has been five days since I have seen Rachel and the separation has grown difficult to take. I’ve become a believer in the single-bullet theory and need to return home.

Meantime, the prognosis for Wesley Carver is not good. The physicians who tend to him believe he will never regain consciousness, that the damage from Rachel’s bullet has left him in permanent darkness. He mumbles and sometimes hums in his prison bed but that is all there will ever be.

There are some who have called for his prosecution, conviction and execution in such a state. And others have called this idea barbaric, no matter how heinous the crimes he is accused of committing. At a recent rally outside the corrections center in downtown L.A., one crowd marched with signs that said PULL THE PLUG ON MURDER, while the signs of the competing group said ALL LIFE IS SACRED.

I wonder what Carver would think of such a thing. Would he be amused? Would he feel comforted?

All I know is that I can’t erase the image of Angela Cook slipping into darkness, her eyes open and afraid. I believe that Wesley Carver has already been convicted in some sort of court of higher reason. And he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.