Chapter 25

We all rested Tuesday, though Cecelia and I didn't strictly need a rest since we hadn't been flying. Still, a day off is a day off and we didn't protest, especially since it wasn't likely that by taking it we'd miss something crucial to the case. With an ordinary crime the first 24 or 48 hours are important, because most criminals are idiots who "catch themselves" in that span, but a serial murderer who's been getting away with it isn't in that category. This guy was leaving so few traces behind - essentially nothing but the corpses so far - that it was going to take a while, and a day here or there wasn't going to make much difference.

Come Wednesday we were all up bright and early. Mama and Daddy had the habit from decades of farming "from can see to cain't see," and Cecelia too, for she grew up on that sharecrop farm. I've learned, over the years I've been married, to get to bed at a reasonable hour so that mornings aren't so unbearable, but I will never truly be a morning person. However, having the family together was an excitement, and it got me up earlier than I might have been otherwise.

Cecelia fixed a big breakfast of biscuits and gravy, with omelets for those who wanted one. I had an omelet for a snack, since I don't eat breakfast, and then we all got ourselves ready and headed out to the Blazer.

This time Darlia sat in back with Mama and Daddy, while Cecelia took the passenger seat to act as tour guide. I drove, mostly wherever the notion took me, but sometimes at Cecelia or Darlia's direction when one or the other wanted to point out something.

We were coming down the hill on Central on the west side when I said, "Cecelia, I been missin' a trick."

"How so?" she asked.

I nodded to the right at the motel we were just then passing, and which had provoked my remark. "We been focusin' on downtown an' points east, but they's street people an' cheap motels an' whatnot over here too."

I saw her nod out of what Darlia, when she was small, would have called my "corner eye." "You're right," Cecelia said.

"Yeah. I do so much o' my work on the east side o' the river that almost all my contacts are over there, an' it just never occurred to me. But since we only have an identification on one o' the vics, for all we know the perp snatches 'em mostly over here."

"Excuse me, Son," came Daddy's slow voice from behind me. "I don' know a couple o' them words - 'perp' an' 'vics.'"

"Sorry, Daddy," I said. "It's cop talk." There's only been one very minor "case" that I've dealt with on our visits to Leanna, and that was just a couple of half-baked Klucker wannabes the first time we were there. In consequence Mama and Daddy have never seen or heard me in action, and haven't picked up any of the slang the way Cecelia has. "A 'perp' is a perpetrator - the guy who perpetrates whatever crime is in view. And 'vic' is short for victim."

"You say the guy who does the crime."

"Yeah," I said. "They's women who do crimes, an' sometimes pretty vicious ones. But generally - and the rule of thumb is getting less and less useful as the years go by - men commit more crimes than women, and when women commit crimes they're not as violent as men."

Mama now put an oar in. "So this killer you're hunting for, it's a man?"

"Almost certainly. There have been a few female serial murderers, but they've all used 'gentle' methods - smothering or poison or some such - that don't involve physical violence and blood. This perp's stabbing his victims to death, and doing so very violently - 20 or more wounds - so unless something is very, very strange, we have a man doing it."

"Darvin," Cecelia said, "do you hear how your English improves when you need to speak clearly?"

"So' nuff," I said with a grin.

"And that was a deliberate use of egregiously bad English," she said. "You're driving, so I shan't punish you now."

"An' you leave the implication for the student."

"He know what's comin', Cissy," Mama said from the back seat.

"Indeed he does," Cecelia said. "But I must change the subject. We are now crossing the river," for indeed we were, "and shall be approaching the BioPark soon. Do you wish to visit the aquarium, the garden, and the zoo while we're in this part of town, or shall we leave that excursion for another day?"

"Shoot, we here, so le's do it now," Daddy said. "We can see more o' Albuquerque another day."

It was later that day, while Darlia had led Mama and Daddy ahead to see the polar bear, which was one of her favorites at the zoo, that Cecelia asked me quietly, "What causes someone to be a serial murderer?"

She's a master of timing. During our whole time at the three facilities that Albuquerque calls the BioPark we'd had people around us, but for the moment there was nobody around to hear her soft question.

"If I can ever figure that out," I told her, "I'll be the greatest name in head shrinking since Freud. The short answer is that nobody knows. We know that all such people come out of abusive childhoods. But plenty of people come from such beginnings and never kill anybody - and some of 'em rise above it and become very good people. We know the early symptoms of a serial murderer, but even then it's not a guarantee - someone might torture and kill animals as a kid, for instance, but never 'graduate' to people. We know the general characteristics of a serial murderer - you heard me feed 'em to them Fibbies - but that only tells us the sort of person we're looking for, not why he's doin' it."

"And if I ask you to solve the riddle in theological terms?"

"That's easier, C - such people are evil, period, end of discussion. Some evil expresses itself as rape, some as arson, some as child abuse, some as child molestation, some as lying, some as adultery, some as theft ... and some as serial murder. And the evil that lives in us is the direct result of Adam and Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden."

"So we know the foundation of it, at least in general terms, but the specifics are beyond us."