Abandoned

getting caught. Much easier and much safer to house them locally.”

“I agree with the princess,” Callie says.

“These would be places that he’d own,” I say. “Rentals would be risky too. No good having to take an ax to the landlord because he dropped in for a surprise cup of coffee.”

“Agreed,” James says.

“So what kind of properties would we be talking about?” I ask.

“Remote,” Alan says. “Either because it’s literally remote, like out in the boonies, or figuratively remote, as in no one’s around or no one gives a shit.”

“Warehouses?” I ask.

“I don’t think so,” Callie replies. “There are too many variables in a warehouse district. Squatters, or fires, or drug busts because someone is growing the wrong kind of nursery. He’d want something dedicated, something no one else could interfere with.”

“I can think of all kinds of things to fit that bill,” Alan says, “but if I were him I’d probably just have it built. Concrete building on private land, add the custom stuff—steel cots and eye rings for the shackles—myself.”

“How would he keep an eye on them when he travels?” I ask.

“Video surveillance is something you can watch over an Internet connection now,” Callie says. “I know because Sam has been installing a number of them at our house. They transmit an image to your computer, and you can access the feed from anywhere in the world as long as you have a connection to the Net.”

“Sam’s a little paranoid, huh?” Alan asks.

“Careful. I think of it as careful.”

“We’re cutting too wide a swath here,” I say. “Even if Alan is right, so what? I’m not sure how we’d go about doing a statewide search for concrete structures built by individuals and, if we did, what it would net us. We don’t know where he’s located.”

“Geographic profiling might help,” James says. “He’s a commuter, but it can’t hurt.”

Geographic profiling is essentially a mathematical process that attempts to predict the most likely location of a serial offender, and it’s based on the same bedrock as the rest of what we do: Behavior is everything.

One suggestion is that there are basically two types of offenders: the commuter and the marauder. The marauder is a localized offender. He commits his crimes in a geographically stable area. The marauder is the best candidate for geographic profiling.

The commuter is mobile or transient and commits his crimes over large distances. He tends to be a complex hunter who can cross cultural and psychological boundaries. He’s the hardest to pin down with geographic profiling. Son of Sam was a marauder; he was caught because of parking tickets. Bundy was a commuter; he was caught because he wouldn’t stop killing and the evidence and his own decompensation caught up with him.

Geographic profiling is relatively new but has been steadily building its own database of interesting behavior tidbits. When lost, for example, men will go downhill while females will go up. I didn’t believe it when I heard it but am assured it’s true. Another: A right-handed criminal who has to scram in a hurry will run to the right and discard weapons to the left. Geographic profiling is a controversial, complicated, but sometimes useful tool.

“I’m not sure how useful it will be in this case,” I say. “Four victims only, in three different states? Not too many variables to plug in there.”

James shrugs. “We should do it anyway.”

“You have someone in mind?” I ask.

“Dr. Earl Cooper. He’s a little annoying, but he knows his science.”

I stare at the whiteboard. It stares back, mocking me with silence and incompleteness. I wonder about the other Heathers, women stuffed into darkness and kept there until they can no longer see the light. I stand up and grab my purse.

“Let’s go see the man.”

Motion is motion. Stillness is death.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Dana Hollister listens to a loud hum that never goes away. It’s as if someone picked a single note and is singing it with forty mouths. It’s taken over her world, that hum.

Most of the time it runs over her like water, and she is submerged. There is light and there is the hum and there is no thought.

But every now and then, the hum stutters.

These are millisecond flashes. Once, the hum stuttered and she thought a single word: I, she thought.

Then the hum returned, drowning out even the idea of the rest. A stutter comes now, longer than the others. She swims up inside herself, from the bottom of a lake filled with syrup. The man, she thinks.

The man bending over, a needle in my eye. Something is seen.

The humming is coming, a roar in the distance.

Something is seen that’s important. Something about the man.

I should tell them.

Who is them?

Who am I?

I—

The hum covers her, and she is nothing again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Earl Cooper, as it turned out, came to see us. He’s standing in our office, something from another time.

He’s wearing a cowboy hat and boots and a flannel shirt and a pair of battered blue jeans. He’s a short man, about five-seven, and he’s broad in the chest but thin in the waist. He’s sixty-two years old and looks every minute of it. He has a craggy face, a huge nose, and, to top it all off, a handlebar mustache that’s been waxed at the ends. It’s a good face, unique, made by its wearer rather than the other way around.

The eyes sparkle with intelligence and have a depth of distance that tells me he’s seen things, done things, gotten dirty in the living of life.

Once you get past all of the exterior apparel, it’s the eyes that reveal the most: This is a vital, intelligent man with a touch of the maverick and a dash of the sad.

“Pleased to meet you,” he says to me, with a bare smile as he shakes my hand. “Heard about your work. Sorry about your family and your face.”

It’s so brief and so genuine that I can take no offense from it. “Thank you, sir.”

Earl Cooper seems like a “sir” to me, the way some older men just naturally are. He’s an elder, a teacher with experience to be listened to, and it’s draped all around him like a cloak of quiet certainty.

“Young James has a quick tongue, but he’s pretty sharp. That’s why I put up with his back-talking. He came to a forensics symposium I was speaking at.”

“Where are you from, sir?” Alan asks.

“Texas. Place near Dallas. But I come out here three months of the year to consult and lecture. Pays the bills and keeps me occupied.”

“Are you a cowboy, Earl?” Callie teases.

He grins at her, and it lights up his face. “Me? Naw. I’m just an academic who wears cowboy boots. I do some shooting, though.”

“What kind?” I ask, interested.

“Handgun,” he says. “Nine mil is my gun of choice.” He rolls his eyes. “Some of my contemporaries think