The Dead Man

nightmares that were disturbing her sleep.

Next was a psychological test titled Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. When the FBI was trying to decide whether I had a disabling movement disorder or was just a head case, they sent me to a neuropsychologist who gave me a battery of tests spread over three days, one of which was the MMPI. The neuropsychologist explained that the MMPI is used to identify personality structure and psychopathology, including depression, anxiety, and fears. It made sense that Corliss would ask his volunteers to take such a test.

The MMPI in Anne's file hadn't been completed. There was a handwritten note reading Anne Kendall, Monday 5:30 p.m. clipped to the front page, presumably confirming when she was supposed to have taken the test. The note also confirmed the second and last time Corliss had scheduled a meeting with her.

Her file was Exhibit B against Corliss, establishing their connection and putting them together when she got off work on Monday. Corliss was supposed to have administered the MMPI to her the evening she was killed though the test was still in his drawer. No wonder he had refused to take a lie detector test.

The last item in her file was a document titled Harper Institute Dream Project, the next line reading Confidential Dream Narrative. The fine print below the title assured the volunteer that the narrative would be used only for the research project and not disclosed without the subject's written consent. To further preserve confidentiality, the subject was assigned a number and instructed not to put his or her name on the narrative. The subject number on this narrative was 251. I flipped back to Anne's intake form and found the same designation, confirming that this was her dream narrative.

The handwriting was neat, filling each line margin to margin with delicate looping letters and curlicues, a schoolgirl's cursive.

My father died when I was three. My mother remarried when I was five and my stepfather started abusing me when I was twelve. I still have nightmares about him abusing me. In my dreams, he finds me no matter where I am. Sometimes I am in my old bedroom in my mother's house. Sometimes I am in my bedroom at my apartment where I live with my fiance. Other times, I am at work or in the parking garage or even in a store or on the street. No matter where I am he finds me. I turn around and there he is. At first he acts real nice. He asks me how I'm doing. I can't see his face but I recognize his voice and I smell his aftershave and it makes me sick at my stomach. He takes me by the hand and I try to pull away but he won't let me. He tells me how pretty I am and he rubs my face and undresses me.

I try to run away but my arms and legs won't move. I'm completely paralyzed. I try to scream but nothing comes out. He rapes me over and over and when he's done he sticks something in my vagina and leaves me naked on the ground where everyone can see me. I wake up and can feel him on me. I take a shower to get rid of the smell but it doesn't go away. I can't tell my fiance about this because I'm afraid he won't want to marry me. He sees what happens when I wake up in the middle of the night and asks me what's going on. I lie to him and he doesn't believe me and we end up having horrible fights. I take antianxiety and antidepressant medications that get me through the day. Everyone sees me as perky little Anne from HR but I don't know how much longer I can pretend that everything is okay when every night before I go to sleep I pray that I won't wake up in the morning.

I put her file down. All I could do was shake.

Chapter Fifty-one

Anne Kendall's description of her nightmare turned my theory of a serial killer whose crimes had grown progressively more violent on its head, replaced by a theory that better matched the facts. The killer had staged each murder to mimic the victims' nightmares. Regina Blair dreamt that she would fall to her death. Tom Delaney dreamt that he would commit suicide. Walter Enoch dreamt that he would suffocate. Anne Kendall dreamt that her stepfather raped her, leaving her naked, violated, and exposed. Though she didn't die in her dream, the killer added his own ending to her nightmare.

Had Anne been the first victim, I would have struggled to explain why the level of violence decreased rather than increased with the subsequent murders. That fact alone may even have been sufficient reason to exclude Anne's murder from the others.

The brain, Kate had once explained to me, organizes information into patterns based on the sequence in which it receives the information so that it can understand and process similar data in the future. She called this reliance on the order in which we learn things sequential or vertical thinking. When we encounter information that doesn't fit the pattern, we need to blow it up, start over, and build a new one that fits all the information using what she described as lateral thinking and I understood as thinking outside the box.

I had pictured a serial killer gradually losing control, taunting us with our failure to recognize what was happening or stop him once we figured it out. But this killer was in control, taking his victims from the dream project pipeline. That meant the killer had to have access to the volunteers and their files, which excluded Anne's boyfriend, Michael Lacey. It also excluded Leonard Nagel because he was a stranger to three out of four of the victims. While he could have stalked and harassed Anne Kendall, neither Tom Delaney nor Walter Enoch would have opened their doors for him. All of which brought me back to Anthony Corliss. I may have misunderstood his methodology but that didn't mean I was wrong about his guilt.

There was still the question of why Corliss chose these victims, whether they shared something in common besides their participation in the dream project. I found the answer in Delaney's and Blair's files. Maggie Brennan had written reports analyzing their test data and interviews she had conducted with them, noting that both had admitted being sexually abused when they were children, Delaney by a Boy Scout leader and Blair by a summer camp counselor. Walter Enoch's mother had abused him, though not sexually, and Anne Kendall's stepfather had repeatedly raped her.

It wasn't a leap of faith to conclude that the killer had probably also been abused as a child, his rage fueling these murders. Maggie Brennan had told me that she had spent her life studying victims and perpetrators of violent crime. I wanted her take on my theory and I wanted to know whether Corliss had confided in her that he had been abused as a child, questions I needed answered before someone else's dreams came true.

I took my time going over the rest of his office, no longer caring whether I made it to the retired cops' lunch or whether Corliss knew about my search. I would catch up to Tom Goodell and his cold case as soon as I could. It was more important to find the evidence that would close the book on Anthony Corliss. Short of a confession, the best evidence was the souvenirs the killer took from his victims.

I combed the office, pulled books off shelves one at a time, removed desk drawers looking for anything that might be taped to the inside of the desk frame. I put a chair on Corliss's desk, stood on it and popped open ceiling tiles scanning the hidden crawl space, finishing my search an hour later without finding Tom Delaney's bullet punctured books, Regina Blair's jewelry, Anne Kendall's severed finger, or Wendy's letter.

I called Quincy Carter again and left another message, hoping his unavailability meant that he was closing in on Corliss faster than me. That would be both good news and bad news. I wanted Corliss off the streets but I also wanted Wendy's letter so I could deal with Dolan and Kent on my own terms. Corliss's house was the best place to look.

Corliss didn't have a phone directory in his office. I did a search on his desktop computer, finding his address on Cherry between Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth, and entered his phone number in my cell phone. I tucked the Delaney, Blair, Enoch, and Kendall files under my arm and turned off the light. Looking around his office, I had no doubt he would realize that someone had tossed it; any concerns I had about that long since passed.

Crestwood, where Corliss lived, was an area I had considered when I moved in from the suburbs. Its borders were Fifty-third on the north, Fifty-sixth on the south, Oak on the west, and Holmes on the east. Built beginning in 1919 by Kansas City's visionary and legendary residential developer, J. C. Nichols, it was known for its Colonial and Tudor homes. Beyond the architecture, it was another of Kansas City's many long-established neighborhoods of well-kept homes and welcoming families, young, old, and now ethnically diverse.

After Corliss was arrested and when the inevitable television crews showed up, its residents would shake their heads and say that Crestwood was the last place on earth they would expect to find a serial killer. The greater surprise would be if they said it wasn't one of those singular, secure last places.