The Narrows - Michael Connelly [32]
But I could tell each profile had taken a good amount of his time and attention. I was beginning to understand more and more what Graciela had said had become a problem in their marriage. Terry couldn’t draw a line. He couldn’t let it go. This profile work was a testament not only to his dedication to his mission as an investigator but also to his blind spot as a husband and father.
The six profiles came from cases in Scottsdale, Arizona; Henderson, Nevada; and the four California cities of La Jolla, Laguna Beach, Salinas and San Mateo. Two were child murders and the other four were sex slayings involving three women and one male victim. McCaleb drew no links between them. It was clear they were simply separate cases that had drawn his attention in the last two years. There was no indication in any of the files that Terry’s work had been helpful or if any of the cases had been cleared. I wrote down the basics from each in my notebook with the idea that I would follow up with the departments to check the status of each investigation. It was a long shot but it was still possible that one of these profiles could have triggered McCaleb’s death. It wasn’t a priority but I would need to check it out.
Finished with the computer for the time being, I directed my attention to the file boxes stored on the top bunk. One by one I pulled them down until there was no room on the floor of the forward room. I found that they contained a mix of files from both solved and unsolved cases. I spent the first hour just sorting them and pulling out the open-unsolveds, thinking that it was more likely than not that if Terry’s death was related to a case, then it was one with a suspect still at large. There was no reason for him to be working or reworking a closed case.
The reading was fascinating. Many of the files were on cases I was familiar with or had even had a part in. They were not files that had gathered dust. I got the distinct impression that the open cases were in endless rotation. From time to time McCaleb pulled them out and rethought the investigations, the suspects, the crime scenes, the possibilities. He made calls to investigators and lab people and even witnesses. All of this was clear because McCaleb’s practice was to use the inside front flap of the file to write notes on the moves he made, meticulously dating these entries as well.
From these dates I could tell that McCaleb had been working many cases at once. And it was clear he still had a pipeline into the FBI and the Behavioral Sciences squad at Quantico. I spent a whole hour reading the fat file he had accumulated on the Poet, one of the more notorious if not embarrassing serial killer cases in the FBI annals. The Poet was a killer later revealed to be the FBI agent who had been heading the squad essentially hunting for himself. It was a scandal that had rocked the bureau and its vaunted Behavioral Sciences Section eight years before. The agent, Robert Backus, chose homicide detectives as his victims. He staged the killing scenes as suicides, leaving behind suicide notes containing verses from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. He killed eight men across the country in a period of three years before a reporter discovered the false suicides and the manhunt began. Backus was revealed and shot by another agent in Los Angeles. At the time he was supposedly targeting a detective from the homicide table in the LAPD’s Hollywood Division. That was my table. The target, Ed Thomas, was my colleague and that was my connection. I remember taking a very high personal interest in the Poet.
Now I was reading the inside story. Officially the case was closed by the bureau. But the unofficial word had always been that Backus had gotten away. After being shot Backus initially escaped into the storm-water tunnel system that ranged beneath Los Angeles. Six weeks later a body was found with a bullet hole in the right place but decomposition made