Cody McFadyen - Abandoned

Listening to him, I guess that Cooper is probably a lecturer in demand. He has a laid-back but engaging way of speaking that makes you feel as if you’re just having a conversation. Sitting in the living room, feet up on the coffee table.

“The key with your boy and me, if I’m any help at all, is going to come down to distance. There’s a difference, you see, between perceived distance and actual distance. If any of you have ever walked toward the mountains on a horizon or tried to swim across a lake to the other shore, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. They look close, but you could walk for days before you reached those mountains or swim ’til you drowned and never reach that other shore.

“It works in reverse too. A killer might think something is just too far when it’s actually too close to home. It helps to know method of transportation—in this case a car—as that gives us an idea of his mobility range.”

“It sounds like a drifter is easier to catch with geographic profiling than a man with a car,” Alan says.

“That is a fact,” Cooper agrees. “It’s unhelpful that your boy is operating in different states. Still, the distance factor might turn up something. In relation to the abductions, I mean.”

“How’s that?” Alan asks.

“Where he took them, how he took them. He’s a pragmatic man. What does that tell you?”

I nod, seeing it. “That he’s not going hundreds of miles away,” I say. He smiles. “Kee-rect.”

“But that’s not always going to be under his control,” Callie says doubtfully. “His victim choice is limited by need—the needs of his clients. He can’t know where they’re going to be located.”

“Good thinking,” Cooper says, “but not so fast. Los Angeles proper—the city, I mean—is somewhere around forty miles wide. Hell, Portland is only about a hundred forty-five square miles to Los Angeles’s four hundred seventy, and it’s not long after you leave the city that you can be out in the middle of the woods.”

He turns to the whiteboard.

“The parking-lot angle is a good one. I think you’re right. He’s taking them there because he needs to feed his little sexual sideline of making the cars crash. That’s behavior. Combined with geography, it tells us what? What are you missing there?”

It’s a gentle probe, a teacher’s insistence to look. We all stare at the whiteboard, James and I most of all. I see it first, a forehead slapping moment.

“How does he see the crash?” I say. Cooper smiles.

“Right,” James says. “He has a victim. He can’t very well sit there and wait all night for the crashes to occur. He can’t count on the media—too many variables, might or might not be newsworthy.”

“So?” Callie asks.

“So,” I reply, “he’d set up a way to record it.”

Cooper tilts his head at me in acknowledgment. “I’m no gadget genius,” he says, “but I’d think his options in that regard would be limited. How long would a battery-operated system last? If no Internet’s available to pipe it to his computer, how many hours can a stand-alone system record? I’d look for local hotels and neighborhoods nearby with wireless capabilities—on the most recent crimes. The older ones …” He shrugs. “I can’t say. You’ll have to ask one of them tech boys I’m sure you have on the payroll.

“As far as my neck of the woods goes, get me copies of everything. Here, the Oregon and Nevada cases. I need your notes too, anything that might or might not be relevant. I’ll stir it all up together and add some eye of newt and a little finger-crossing, and we’ll see what I come up with.”

“You’ll have it all today,” I tell him. “We really appreciate your assistance.”

He tips his hat at me. “No promises.”

“You’ve already helped,” I tell him. “You’ve given us some new things to look at.”

After Cooper leaves, I give James the job of gathering copies of everything Cooper needs. He accepts this task amiably enough, for James.

“The spatial-distance angle is interesting,” he allows. “As is the linkage with the theory of symphorophilia.”

“Interesting,” I agree. “Now let’s turn it into something we can use. Callie, you help James with this. Alan, please give Leo a call and find out where he’s at with the LAPD.” I glance at my watch. “I’m going to bring the AD up to date.”

Not just on this, I think. I need to talk to him about the other thing. It’s time to let someone in on the secret, now that I know the changes the future will bring.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

AD Jones regards the ceiling of his office, pondering everything I’ve just told him.

“So you think he was telling the truth?” he asks. “You think he has more victims stashed?”

“I think it’s likely, sir, if we operate on the theory that it’s a financial model. No victims, no money.”

“Probably not a shitload, though,” he muses. “He wouldn’t want to risk drawing too much attention.”

“Perhaps,” I agree. “Then again, there’s kind of a mutual code of silence. He probably records and keeps copies of everything that goes on between him and his ‘clients’ in case something goes wrong.”

“A dead man’s switch.”

“Sure. That and the whole I’ll-ruin-your-life-if-you-renege thing. Douglas Hollister tried to screw our perp, so he got buried. That’s a pretty convincing deterrent.”

“How’s Heather Hollister?”

“Not good. Some part of me wants to say she’s better off than Dana, or Jeremy Abbott, but I don’t know.”

“She’s better off.” He says it flatly. “You should know that better than most. If she’s tough enough, she’ll pull back from the edge. If she’s not, she won’t. At least she’s got the chance.”

“You’re right,” I say, “I guess it just creeps me out. My two biggest fears as a kid were getting locked in the dark forever and going crazy but not knowing I’d gone crazy.”

He smiles. “Maybe you’re already crazy now, and you just don’t know it.” He indicates his office with a sweep of his hand. “Maybe none of this exists, and you’re sitting in a padded room somewhere in a straitjacket, imagining it all.”

I give him a withering glare. “Not funny, sir.”

His grin tells me he feels otherwise. “And the other boy?”

“He’s alive. He’ll probably be turned over to social services, until and if Heather comes out of her funk enough to claim him.”

“So what’s the plan of attack?” he asks.

“Maybe Earl Cooper will help, but at the moment I think our best leads are the Internet aspect and the car crashes.”

“I assume you’re planning a sting on the Internet end of things?”

“I’m considering it, sir. I’ll know better when Leo gets back.”

“And the crashes?”

“If James is right and it’s a sexual need, he probably won’t have been able to limit himself to feeding it only when he’s performing an abduction. There should be other instances. I think it’s important. In most ways this offender appears to be incredibly disciplined and careful. The paraphilia is a deviation from that. It could be one of the places where he makes mistakes.” I shrug. “It’s a stretch, but it’s what we have.”

He thinks about it. “Good,” he agrees. “You should also look into Internet communities on the car-crash angle.”

“What do you mean?”

“Every fetish and weirdo perversion out there probably has a community of some kind connected to it. Pedos do. Places to share photos and experiences. If Cooper is right and he records his exploits, maybe he shares them too.”