The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall
Nonetheless, somewhere along that three-hundred-yard stretch, she vanished.
Josie’s failure to return home was reported to the police by 12.50 a.m. On receiving what they considered to be a response of insufficient alacrity, her parents turned up in person to fill out the forms. Mr and Mrs Ferris were possessed of forceful demeanours, and the police were soon taking the incident more seriously, at least while the parents were within earshot. Sadly this made no difference. Their daughter was never seen alive again.
Two days later a sweater was left outside their house. The name Josie had been stitched into the front, using what was subsequently demonstrated to be the girl’s own hair. The sweater had been a sixteenth birthday present from the girl’s best friend, who had sewn the letters ‘FFE’ onto the sleeve: Friends For Ever. They had been. Eternity had merely turned out to be short. There was no demand for money with the garment. The police started taking the situation very seriously indeed, regardless of who was around to overhear. A task force was set up, coordinated through the FBI’s local SAC, Charles Monroe. The news of the garment’s delivery was eventually released to the press, but not the way in which it had been altered. A month later, no headway of any kind had been made in tracing the missing teenager.
In late January and early March of 2000, two other girls went missing. Elyse LeBlanc and Annette Mattison failed to return from the cinema and a friend’s house respectively. Both resembled Josie Ferris in trivial ways – they were of a similar age (fifteen and sixteen) and wore their hair long. The LeBlancs and Mattisons were comfortably well-off, and their daughters were attractive and of above-average intelligence. This was not enough to suggest a firm link between the three disappearances, occurring as they did in widely spread parts of the city.
The arrival of two more sweaters was, however. Again, they were delivered to the family homes, in broad daylight, and again they featured the girl’s name embroidered on the front with their own hair. No further communication was received. The seriousness of the situation led the FBI to keep the second and third disappearances quiet. Most serial kidnappers sought to hide the fact of their abductions. The selection of girls whose absence would be spotted immediately, and the further highlighting of the event through the delivery of the parcels, suggested they were dealing with an unusual individual. One who wanted attention right now.
They denied him it.
A week after the disappearance of Annette Mattison, the clothed body of a young woman was found by picnickers in Griffith Park. Though bald, badly burned and deteriorated through the activities of local wildlife, the body was quickly identified through recent dental work and a distinctive piece of jewellery. It was Elyse LeBlanc. It was estimated that she had been dead for approximately half of the period since her abduction, though only recently moved to the location at which she was found. She was discovered to have suffered a number of minor head traumas prior to death, though none had led to her demise. Although the body was immediately forwarded to the federal lab in Washington, no physical evidence of the killer was gained from her clothes or remains. A search of the remainder of the park by local police and the FBI evidence team from Sacramento failed to discover either Josie Ferris’s or Annette Mattison’s body in whole or in part.
The press embargo was dropped. A call for witnesses garnered nothing more than the usual hoaxes, lunatics, and misinformation. Parents arranged for their teenage daughters to travel in groups.
Josie’s body turned up ten days later. It was found lying in bushes by the side of a road in Laurel Canyon, in a similar state to that of the LeBlanc girl. Unlike the previous victim, there was evidence of a period of gross sexual abuse.
By then the killer had a nickname. The media called him The Delivery Boy. This had been suggested unofficially by Special Agent Monroe, who believed that by minimizing him in this way, reducing his status by using the word ‘boy’, some kind of investigative advantage might be gained. That someone who had managed to snatch three bright and worldly young women from busy streets, murder them, and dump their bodies in public places, all without being seen or leaving a single piece of evidence, would be somehow thrown by this taunt.
That he might get all offended, and just go right to pieces.
Nina had disagreed. For this and other reasons she had been discussing the case with John Zandt, despite the fact that he was not involved in the official investigation. They’d worked together well on The Casting Agent case. She wanted to know what he thought.
Zandt proffered his views, but without much enthusiasm. Nina worked these cases with an intensity and zeal that he found he could no longer match. His marriage was back on firm ground, and his daughter had grown, transforming from a child into a young person, consolidating their family. She had her mother’s hair, a rich, almost auburn, dark brown – but her father’s eyes, brown flecked with green. She played music too loud and her room was a mess and she spent too long on the Net and smelled of cigarette smoke every now and then. There were arguments. But she went grocery shopping with her mother, even though it was super-boring, because she knew Jennifer enjoyed having her along. She would mainly listen to her father when he talked, and stifle any yawn that came. Her parents didn’t know she had smoked dope on several occasions, tried coke, and once stolen a pair of quite expensive earrings. If they had, they’d have grounded her ass to kingdom come but otherwise wouldn’t have been too worried. All of this was within the acceptable range of errant behaviour in her place and time.
As much as anything, Zandt had simply grown a little older, and wanted to spend no longer than necessary thinking about the dark things the world could bring into being. He got on with his job, and then he went home and got on with his life. After two earlier investigations into the deeds of multiple murderers, he’d lost interest in the workings of their minds. It was something you could only take so much of before you started feeling sick inside.
Once you got behind the glamour of their celebrity, Zandt knew that serial killers were not the way they were portrayed in the movies: charming geniuses, slick with evil, charismatic crusaders of a bloody art. They were more like drunkards or the slightly mad. Impossible to talk to, or to get sense out of, sealed off from the world behind a viewpoint that could never be expressed or made accessible to those who lived outside it. They came in all shapes, sizes, and types. Some were monstrous, others were fairly decent individuals – aside, that is, from the propensity to kill other people and ruin the lives of those who had loved them. Jeffrey Dahmer had initially made every effort not to yield to urges that he knew placed his desires well outside normal life. He failed, big-time. He did not ask for clemency when caught, did not play games with the police, did nothing except admit his guilt and express sorrow at what he had done. Within the confines of being a murderous sociopath, he behaved as well as he could. The fact remained that he had ended the lives of at least sixteen young men in circumstances almost too horrendous to believe.
Other killers basked in their notoriety, bartered for publicity or privileges through manipulation of the media and police, toying with the grief of the people from whom they had amputated something irreplaceable. They revelled in what they had done, in their rich secrets. They devoured the newspaper coverage of their trials, profoundly content that they had finally achieved the attention they had always felt they deserved. This did not necessarily make them worse. It simply made them different. Ted Bundy. The Casting Agent. John Wayne Gacy. Philippe Gomez. The Yorkshire Ripper. Andrei Chikatilo. Some were better looking, some were more efficient; some intelligent, some border-line or even demonstrably subnormal. Some came across like regular guys; others you would have thought could have been spotted as wackos from across a busy street. None were special humans or touched with evil except in the most superficial sense. All were simply men with a craving to take the lives of other people, to augment their sexual experience with the torture and degradation of others. They were not demons. They were just men – and women, very occasionally – who did unacceptable things, as a factor of neurotic obsession. It was not a binary of good or evil, but a spectrum also inhabited by people who had to check their locks ten times at night, or who could not rest until the kitchen was tidy after each meal. Serial killers were not chilling in and of themselves. The chill was in the realization that it is possible to be human without feeling as other humans do.
Zandt knew the factors that could produce a serial killer. A violent and domineering