Chapter 31
The Weber news should have removed a burden from Benjamin’s shoulders, but he seemed to struggle under an even heavier weight now.
He roamed the apartment with an awkward, stiff posture, like he was expecting someone to jump out from a closet.
He was neither hot-tempered nor sassy nor completely silent but something else entirely—cautious and brooding.
Like he was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I knew that feeling. It summed up most of my adolescence.
Two days had passed since I found out about the identity of Chris Weber.
One day had passed since Curtis spoke to Benjamin about Weber privately.
After I got home from shopping with Willa, Robert stopped by to casually congratulate Benjamin and ask if he wanted to go for a drive—something I encouraged, just in case Benjamin wanted to confide something to Robert that he wouldn’t say to his own therapist. None of it persuaded Benjamin to open up.
He returned to his bedroom, telling me to let him know when dinner was ready.
“Not pizza, if I get a vote,” he said, just as I’d pulled the Giuliano’s menu flyer from the fridge.
“You want to make some pasta and homemade sauce, together?”
“Not really.”
But he didn’t sound rude about it, just fatigued.
Since he was stopping by, Robert had brought the box of criminology files he’d mentioned, so we could look through them together. I grabbed two beers from the fridge and told him we could make tacos, the boring kind. Ground beef, hard-shell tortillas, a packet of spices.
“Nothing boring about that,” Robert said. Would I ever date someone with more refined tastes?
I took out the ground beef and put it inside a Ziploc and then into a pot of cool water to defrost, since our microwave’s defrost function always ended up cooking the meat into a rubbery gray mess.
Back in the living room, I started to pull the files from the box and lay them out on the coffee table.
“Just from what I’ve read online, I’ve started to have nightmares. ”
“You still want to look, then? The Mayfield and Scarlatti cases are closed.”
“But what about Harper McKibben? What about Veronica Lovell? What about all the other women who are still missing?”
Robert whispered, “Tell me you haven’t gone nuts. You’re not still worrying about Benjamin.”
“Of course not. Not in the way you think.”
“Thank god, because he wasn’t even born when half this stuff happened.”
I rolled my eyes. “I know that, Robert.”
“Then?”
“Let’s just say my view has expanded. The world’s a more violent place than I thought. It’s the world in which Benjamin will be living and I need to understand it.”
That seemed to satisfy him. I would have told him everything if I had more than just a feeling, too shadowy to pin down.
“Suit yourself. As long as you skip the photos, this stuff is actually pretty dry. Half of it is numbers and tables and stuff.”
Robert started with a simple graph. “This is the first one that got me thinking.”
The graph showed the changing behavior of over fifty known serial killers over time, according to how many victims they had murdered.
One line tracked the distance killers had traveled from home in order to kill—never very far.
The other line tracked the distance killers had traveled to dump bodies—an average of fourteen miles.
The more victims a killer had—the longer he’d killed, in other words—the less he was willing to travel in order to kill or dump.
“It’s like I’ve told you. Killers get lazy,” Robert explained.
“And cocky. The longer they’re not caught, the more they become convinced they never will be.
And sometimes they seem to take extra chances on purposes, like it’s fun.
You know you see serial killers taunting police in stupid movies?
It’s not stupid. Many of them do that. They seem to need stimulation, whatever the cost.”
“So, the FBI already has that figured out.”
“Yeah, but we don’t have the same sort of stats and graphs for every part of the country. And we can’t pin down the patterns for the cases where we don’t know the killer—or even if a woman was killed. Add in unsolved crimes and missing women, and everything gets a lot more complicated.”
He showed me some maps he’d made on his own for murders from our area, confirming the same general patterns found among well-known serial killers.
In cases that seemed connected, even if the killer was not identified and arrested, the pickup and disposal sites got closer and closer over the lifetime of the person assumed to be responsible.
“How about these?”
I pointed to some other associated dot pairs that got farther apart over time.
“Those are cases where the early crimes—especially the very first killings—are haphazard, less planned, carelessly executed.”
“Like Christopher Weber’s.”
“We’ll never know if he would have gained enough selfcontrol to become more careful over time.”
“So some of them do become more careful.”
“A smaller subset, and obviously, we know the least about them, because in many cases, they’re never caught.”
I saw a margin notation for Harper McKibben along with the color-coded dots indicating where she was picked up, not far from her home, and where her body was found.
“You didn’t mention that she was part of some serial killer spree.”
“Not an identified one. But if she was a first, she was a surprisingly clean and disciplined first. If that person kept killing—as a few FBI reports have hypothesized—it just means that particular killer did an even better job later.”
“Better how?”
“Better choice of victim. The person is never missed. Or better choice of disposal site. The victim is reported missing but never found. Either way, it can’t get definitively logged as a homicide.”
A half hour later, I checked the meat. It was still frozen. Screw it, I’d order pizza after all, as long as they would deliver. I got us two more beers.
“Now I understand,” I said to Robert. “You really wanted to be a detective.”
“Yes, I did.”
“I hope you haven’t blown your chance. I didn’t realize how many monsters are out there.”
“Downside of being a cop. You know the worst that people can do. It gets in your head.”
I studied the maps some more.
“Willa mentioned to me that we seemed to have an increase in murders of women during her lifetime. I was a kid, so this was maybe twenty-five or thirty years ago at most. Late ’90s onward.”
“Not a lot of people pick up on that. I think it’s one of those tunnel vision things.
For a long time, people assumed your average quiet white guy wasn’t the kind of person who would murder.
But then we had the golden age of serial killers—’70s through about 2000—and the thinking reversed.
The quiet white guy became the prime suspect. ”
“Right. So?”
“And in our area, it wasn’t just the quiet white guy.
It was the gay loser who targeted vulnerable young men.
We had John Wayne Gacy, doing his clown thing in the ’70s—that was the Chicago area.
We had Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal, in the ’80s up until ’91.
These guys were weird as hell and dumb as stumps.
Only people dumber were the cops who didn’t catch them.
“Both men died in ’94. Two terrifying murderers, out of everyone’s hair.
Before, detectives didn’t understand about men preying on men.
But after Gacy and Dahmer, that’s what they started looking for, if they looked for anything at all.
Like I said, a lot of people thought the age of serial killers was over. ”
“So now there was a new kind of tunnel vision?”
“Yeah, and a lot of self-congratulation—like police and FBI finally knew what they were dealing with. Which only continued in the 2000s. Like Willa told you, there seemed to be more killings of local women in the late ’90s, but then that wave passed, too. Supposedly.”
“I get the sense you don’t think it really passed.”
“I think we started finding fewer bodies. And the ones we found didn’t seem connected in ways anyone could figure. But maybe that’s because we weren’t dealing with killers who were as dumb as Gacy and Dahmer.”
“That sounds ominous.”
I turned over the pizza flyer to use the blank side on the back for scribbling notes. “Where’s that table that shows the dates victims disappeared?”
He dug through a folder and pulled out several photocopied pieces of paper. “Which counties you want?”
“For Illinois, Lake, and McHenry. For Wisconsin, whatever is just north of there.”
He pulled out three tables: Kenosha, Racine, and Walworth.
“And I’ll give you a couple extra counties farther west. Not a lot of disappearances, because the populations are smaller, but an increasing number of disposal sites, starting in .
. .” He flipped through loose pages until he’d found the right one. “Maybe twenty years ago.”
It was going to be a bigger job than I thought. I fetched my laptop and opened a spreadsheet.
I said, “These were disposals of bodies from . . . ?”
“Closer to us. North Shore and north to the border. Some from Kenosha-Racine.”
“And where did the disposals cluster, before then?”
“Closer to where the girls and women were picked up.”
“So over time, bodies were being disposed farther away, which isn’t part of the national trend or anything like that graph you first showed me.”
Robert laughed. “Maybe gas prices were going down.”
“Well, were they?”
A minute later he looked away from his phone and back at the papers spread across the table. “No, they were going up. At least until 2009, gas was a little cheaper, but then it started climbing again.”
The maps were a confusing mess of multicolored dots, the margins crowded with names and codes. I needed to see it all chronologically, organized in a way I could re-sort each time new data was added, until the patterns became clearer.
It took longer than I’d expected, the two of us busy using Google Maps and paper maps, me telling Robert to pause as I sorted rows and made room for another girl last seen at a highway rest stop, a girl gone missing from a party held on a farm, a girl who’d gone canoeing with someone she met in a campground, a girl who’d called a rideshare service but was gone by the time the driver arrived.
And those were just the ones who’d later be found dead.
We had to consider the ones who had never been found, whether the cops considered their cases open or closed.
Robert put the ground beef back in the fridge and called for pizza. The pizza came. Benjamin ate in his room, watching YouTube videos, and I didn’t dissuade him because I didn’t want him to ask what we were doing.
Over the next hour, I made additional spreadsheets, focusing on the few cases in which the killers were known.
“Let’s add Veronica Lovell, too.”
“That seems like bad luck.”
I added her hometown and the place from which she’d disappeared: twenty-eight miles apart.
Robert said, “We don’t know the ‘point of fatal encounter,’ if there even is one in her case. All we know is where he snatched her—Fox Lake. If the person was being careful, he’d live more than three miles from there.”
“Doesn’t narrow it down too well, does it?” I drew an imaginary circle with my finger.
“The more careful he was, the less it narrows it down. The radius just gets bigger and bigger.”
“So the question—if you were looking for her—is to figure out how careful this particular man is.” I studied the first graph he’d shown me and the spreadsheets we’d made together.
“You told me most killers get less careful. But it looks like in our area, they got more careful starting in the early 2000s and really careful from at least 2010, at least in terms of how far they traveled to find a victim and dispose of the body.” I looked at the spreadsheets again. “What changed?”
“Netflix?”
I elbowed him.
“I’m not kidding. Between streaming true crime and using the internet, it’s easier to learn how to avoid getting caught.”
“It should be easier. But you already showed me. The most notorious serial killers get more reckless over time. Except, not lately.” I pointed to the nearest map on the table. “Not where we live.”