
“Yeah, well, I just want to clear the case,” I said. “I don’t really care if you’re a psychic or Santa Claus; if you’ve got something that will help me I’ll listen.”
“Well, I think maybe I do.”
He turned the page in the file and picked up a stack of crime scene photographs. These were not the photos I had sent him. These were 8x10 blowups of the original crime scene photos. He had made these on his own. It told me that McCaleb had certainly spent some time with the case. It made me think that maybe it had hooked him the way it had hooked me. A woman with no name left dead on the hillside. A woman no one had come forward to claim. A woman no one cared about. The dangerous kind. In my secret heart I cared and I had claimed her. And now maybe McCaleb had, too.
“Let me just start with my overview of what I think you’ve got here,” McCaleb said.
He shuffled through the photos for a moment, ending with a still that had been made off of the news video. It showed an aerial shot of the naked body, arms and legs stretched wide on the hillside. I took out my cigarettes and shook one out of the pack.
“You may have already arrived at these same conclusions. If so, I apologize. I don’t want to waste your time. By the way, you can’t smoke in here.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, putting the smokes away. “What have you got?”
“The crime scene is very important in that it gives us an avenue to the killer’s thinking. What I see here suggests the work of what we call an exhibition killer. In other words, this is a killer who wanted his crime to be seen-to be very public-and by virtue of this to instill horror and fear in the general population. From this reaction by the public he draws his gratification. He is somebody who reads the newspapers and watches the news for any information or update on the investigation. It is a way of keeping score. So when we find him, I think we will find newspaper clippings and maybe even videos containing television reports on the case. These will probably be in his bedroom because they would be useful to him in carrying out masturbatory fantasies.”
