“This makes sixteen! Imagine. And they’re sure it’s the same guy. The MO is distinctive, that’s what they said.”
MO. Civilian talk learned from watching television. I know what it means though. Modus operandi. Method of operating. Whoever has done this heinous thing has done it frequently enough that his style can be determined by examination of what has occurred. A chilling thought.
I reposition myself so I can see the television better, and the clerk and I both turn our heads to see the screen where distraught-looking parents are being interviewed by a woman whose pale-blond hair seems to perch on her head like a hat. The body of the missing child has not yet been found, but there is little hope she is alive—that’s what is under discussion. Everyone expects that she is dead. The child had been spotted getting into a van, driven by the man they knew had been taking these children. An item of clothing has been recovered. Things do not look good.
“Sixteen,” I repeat. It’s an impossible number.
“That they know of. They say there have been others they haven’t been able to connect to the same guy. Not for sure.”
Murder database. The phrase comes back to me again. In this context, it has a whole new meaning.
The camera is now showing a charming town. A bandstand. A high school football team. Oaks whose branches are heavy with Spanish moss sway over a golf course so green it makes you doubt the color balance of the set we are watching it on. Then a smash cut back to the grieving parents. The highlight of this hour. Something so raw in them. Animal grief. I recognize it. I feel it in my soul. They are my siblings. I am connected to them.
The reporter sticks a microphone in the mother’s face.
“Do you have anything you’d like to share with my audience, Mrs. Webster?”
The eyes she turns on the camera are dead. Empty. She moves her mouth, but no sounds come out. It is like looking at the shell of a person. Like whoever usually lives inside has moved out. I recognize the expression, the emptiness. More than that, I hear the things she does not say, the tears she can’t yet cry.
“My God,” I say out loud, her tears running down my cheek.
“Yes,” the clerk agrees, her voice bringing me back. I am in a butcher shop. For a heartbeat, I’d forgotten. “Unthinkable.”
“Yes. Beyond thought,” I say, as something hard locks inside me. It pushes the tears away. I complete my transaction, money and meat change hands, but my mind is elsewhere.
I go home with the three pounds of lamb I’d come for. The pomegranate molasses. Kosher salt. Figs. After a while, I start making the stew I’d been so excited about. But even following the recipe, my motions are automatic. Chopping, searing, deglazing; I am on autopilot. My mind is elsewhere.
I can’t get the images out of my head. The dead eyes of the parents. The bleating newscasters. The trail of children lost. There is no room in my head, my heart for all of this grief. Mountains of it. Rivers. Even with my kitchen alive with the scent of onions, garlic, and spice, that grief wells up and overflows. More than I’d thought could be left in the world. And all of it had happened fifteen times before. At least. In some ways, I feel it more than I’d felt my own loss, even if only because, at that time, I’d been too numb to feel.
In desperation and like all the sheep around me, I pull out my laptop and look for the news. Finding it is maddeningly easy—the story is everywhere—though none of it is even really “new,” simply constant rehashing of stories already told. There is only the occasional addition of some morbid detail, sometimes told in the breathless tones of someone craving and fishing for enthusiastic response.
Authorities know that the perpetrator—the monster—is a young man in San Pasado County in California. William Atwater, twenty-seven years old. The photos that are constantly being aired show pale blue eyes, a strong jaw and light hair that curls slightly. If he ever smiled, the total effect would be that of a surfer kid, though none of the photos show a smile.
Various newscasters are reporting that confirming that it had been Atwater had been surprisingly simple. After killing several of his young victims, he had posted photos to his Facebook page. He didn’t have a lot of friends. Even so, several people had reported it instantly. And, the next time, several more. After a while, the officials had begun to believe and had looked into things. This alone, of course, had caused outrage. Had the authorities paid attention sooner, lives would have been saved, Atwater apprehended. And this is part of the reverberations that move through the news just as I tune in. Negligence of several sorts had been involved, various parties are saying. And the Facebook tie-in provides an Internet connection of the sort the media loves to crow about. Now it was an Internet killing, though from what I could see, that didn’t reflect the actual picture at all.
But it is the local authorities who are being given the most grief. Those in charge had not paid attention and with that had not protected several young citizens who had come to horrid ends, that’s what is being said. No one wanted to think about it, but there it was. The system had somehow broken down. Children had gone missing and had probably died. Children continued to die because, by the time the police and the powers that be put everything together, Atwater had fled.
I get up from my reading and watching. Move to the bathroom. Throw up tidily into the toilet. Wash my hands and then my face to redness with a rough washcloth. Go back to my computer. Continue reading. I don’t know how much of what I read is true, but
