“Cameras at the marina?” I asked.
“Some, not comprehensive views. But the angles they had, you’d have to swim to a boat to take it without being seen, and I wouldn’t put that past this guy.”
I wouldn’t either. He’d be determined not to be caught and go that extra mile to make that so, and being in this competition with Bohannan, doing that even more so in order to best him.
Bohannan continued sharing.
“They sent agents to Berkeley. More than one person in Malorie’s dorm saw a guy hanging around that they didn’t get a good feel for. A couple even reported him. They saw him before she disappeared, but they haven’t seen him after. The witnesses were talked to separately, sat with artists separately, and the facial composites bear a resemblance, one that’s pretty striking. So it’s the same guy. No one has him in any classes or saw him around anywhere but loitering outside her dorm.”
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
He shook his head. “He looks a little like a guy who lives in the next town. A guy who’d have the skills to pull some of this shit off. But that guy has solid alibis for both murders. That said, I figure our guy will want to be closer to me. Never seen anyone like the man in the sketches around MP. Jace, Jess, Harry, any of the boys haven’t either. We aren’t releasing the composite because we can’t know our guy didn’t hire someone to lurk for that purpose, to throw us off on a line of inquiry that will lead nowhere, and we don’t want people to find his face on someone who isn’t going around killing girls. And our guy, he’s not gonna make it that easy. Still, we wanna find that man in Berkeley. If he was put up to it, it’s likely the bad guy did it without a face-to-face meet. But we need to rule that out. And we need to talk to him.”
I nodded, then asked tentatively, “She was killed before she got to Washington?”
“Malorie was serious and studious and kept to a schedule. So her roommate knew something was up right away. When her roommate couldn’t get hold of her, she reported her concerns the day before Malorie was dumped, but by that time, she hadn’t been missing for even a day. She was dead at least twelve hours by the time we found her. We estimate he had her less than twenty-four hours. On this particular mission, our guy didn’t have any interest in dealing with a scared, maybe fighting, likely erratic co-ed. Alice, he wanted fear and panic. Malorie, the element of surprise. This is him thinking this, baby, not me, but on that trip, he made her luggage.”
Dear Lord.
I swallowed and then, “Did he…was it as bad as Alice?”
He shook his head. “Totally different MO. One hundred percent to make it so we can’t get a bead on him. Or we’ll get the wrong bead. He strangled Malorie with gloved hands. There was some defensive bruising, but other than that, not a mark on her.”
“He didn’t…?”
Bohannan didn’t make me say the words.
“She was not raped or sexually assaulted in any way.”
I hated the fact that I was glad about anything that befell Malorie Graham, but I was glad that she didn’t bear any additional trauma before she was taken from this earth.
However.
“Alice?” I whispered.
“No, baby,” he whispered back.
I let out a relieved breath.
“My job right now is not to be out there bumping into shit McGill and Robertson are doing. My job,” he glanced to the file, “is to go through old cases to see if anything jogs in my mind. Brothers of victims. Boyfriends. Cousins. Acquaintances. Anyone who was keen on the crime I was investigating. Anyone who was overly helpful. Interested in what I was doing. Watchful or giving me a weird feeling.”
“Wouldn’t you have remembered that kind of thing without needing a jog?”
“I would hope so, but I’m still going over them.”
I nodded again.
“Also, gotta read my fan mail.”
This was a disgruntled mutter.
And this was a surprise.
“Fan mail?”
“The mail I get here is addressed to a PO box. We take pains to keep off the grid, including no social media. For any of us.”
I was surprised. “Even Celeste?”
“Especially Celeste. She gets on, but she does it because her friend Phoebe lets her share her accounts. She doesn’t post though, and she’s only allowed that if I’m Phoebe’s ‘friend’ so I can monitor it. The boys have ghost accounts, so they can use them if they need to look into something.”
That was a minor miracle, keeping a teenager from having her own social media.
Though, it did go to show, regardless of what they might claim in our current society, they could survive without it.
“Wouldn’t be hard to find this property, since it’s been owned by a Bohannan for a hundred and fifty years and I pay taxes on it,” he shared. “But records show it’s overseen by a corporation that’s owned by a buddy of mine. We have a contract, with me as the director of another corporation, that he administrates this property on my behalf, and I pay him. That isn’t a deep trail. Still, it’s a shield that might keep some out, we got it and my official address is a PO number. Same for the kids. Postman brings our mail because he knows us. Not much comes there, though. It goes to the FBI.”
That didn’t answer my preliminary question.
So I asked it a different way, uttering it as a surprised statement.
“You get fan mail.”
“Fan mail. Hate mail. Mail telling me I got shit wrong. You write thrillers, so you can get that Percy Gibson and Al Catlin have supporters.”
“Hang on,” I said, and I took a moment with that.
Al Catlin was another famous case. Serial rapist. He didn’t kill. But over seven years he raped nearly thirty women in nine states.
He’d been fascinating because, with method-actor-like intensity, he’d changed his appearance so completely between assaults, it took a tick in his behavior to link all of them. He gained weight, lost it, dyed his hair, changed his facial hair, wore colored contacts as well as a ski mask, Zorro-style eye mask, full-face clear plastic mask, changed the tone of his voice, assumed accents—anything to throw his victims off identifying him at all, but also in a way that would link his crimes.
Which also made it difficult to prosecute him.
But in each, he made a mistake that it was clear he didn’t know he was making.
He called his victims “poodle” as he was violating them.
I’d considered writing a book based loosely on him, but I didn’t get too deep into research before I gave up on it. It was far too disturbing, and I didn’t want to have any hand in lionizing those behaviors. Obviously, I wouldn’t have written it like that. But what many find distressing, others could find titillating, and I didn’t want to play a part in that.
I made another mental note: Get down to Googling Bohannan.
But since I was sitting on the man himself…
“You profiled Catlin?” I asked.
“I investigated a lot of crime and profiled a lot of people when I was with the Bureau, baby. I was with them for seventeen years.”
“Right,” I said.
“I don’t read any of that shit. The mail the FBI receives for me. They get it. They open it. They catalog it. They flag anything that needs flagged. They tell me if there’s something I need to know. Now I’m reading it. All of it.”