"If he's been dormant until now, then something just woke him up," I said. I thought of the timber company surveyor, heading into the wilderness to pave the way for the forest's destruction, and what he might have encountered in that forest. I recalled too Mrs. Schneider's story, followed up by a piece in the newspaper, and Willeford's old-style investigation, where you knocked on doors and pinned up notices and put the word around until it filtered down to the person you were trying to reach; and the newspaper story about Billy Purdue's arrest at St. Martha's. If you put out honey, you shouldn't be surprised when the wasps come.

"It's tenuous, but those are the possibilities you have to consider," Rachel continued. "Okay, let's look at the original killings. First, although it may only be a minor point, the location where the bodies were found was important. This Caleb Kyle determined how soon they would be found, where they would be found and by whom. It was his way of controlling and participating in the search. The original killings may have been disorganized-we'll never know for sure, since we don't know where they were killed-but the display of the bodies was very organized. He wanted to be part of some element of the discovery. My guess is that he was watching your grandfather right up to the moment when he found the women.

"As for the killings themselves, then if what the Schneider woman told you is true, which depends in turn on the truth of what Emily Watts told her, Kyle was already killing during their relationship. The extent of decay on each of the five bodies differed: Judy Giffen and Ruth Dickinson were killed first, with a gap of almost one month between them. But Laurel Trulock, Louise Moore and Sarah Raines were killed in rapid succession: the ME's report indicated that Trulock and Moore could have been killed in the same twenty-four-hour period, with Raines killed no more than twenty-four hours later again.

"My guess is that each of these girls-or certainly the last three-were physically similar to Emily Watts. They were slim, delicate girls: more passive than Emily, maybe, who was strong when the need arose, but still of a type. You encountered revenge rapes when you were a policeman, didn't you?"

I nodded.

"A man argues with his wife, or his girlfriend, storms out of the house and takes out his anger on a complete stranger," continued Rachel. "In his mind, all women bear collective responsibility for the perceived faults of one woman, and therefore any woman can be disciplined and punished for the real or imagined slight or the overstepping of whatever boundaries the rapist has established in his mind as acceptable behavior for a woman.

"Well, Caleb Kyle is like those men, but this time it went much further. The ME found no evidence of actual sexual assault on the three later victims, but-and here we're into classic morbid fear of female sexuality territory-there was some damage to the sexual organs, presumably inflicted by the same instrument that was used to make stab wounds to the belly and to destroy the womb of each victim. In fact, what's interesting is that, in the cases of Giffen and Dickinson, he stabbed them after they had been dead for almost one month, probably after he killed the other three girls, or shortly before."

"He went back to them after he thought she had lost the baby."

"Exactly. He was punishing them because Emily Watts's body had betrayed him by losing his child: many women being punished for the faults of one. My guess would be that he had punished other women before, perhaps for different reasons."

She fed herself a piece of muffin and sipped her coffee. "Now, when we go back to the ME's report, we find evidence that each of the girls was tortured before death. There were fingernails missing, toes and fingers broken, teeth removed, cigarette burns, bruising inflicted by what may have been a coat hanger. That might be significant, but not for now. In the case of the last three victims, the torture inflicted is significantly more extreme. These girls suffered a lot before they died, Bird." Rachel looked at me solemnly, and I could see the pain in her eyes, pain for them and the memory of her own pain.

"According to the victim profiles collated by your grandfather, these young women were gentle, from good homes, maybe a little asocial. Most of them were shy, sexually inexperienced. Judy Giffen appeared to have had some sexual experience. My guess is they probably pleaded with him before they died, thinking they could save themselves. But that was what he wanted: he wanted them to cry and to scream. There may be a connection there between aggression and fulfillment. He experienced a sexual excitement from their pleas, but he also hated them for pleading, and so they died."

Her eyes were bright now, her excitement at trying to worm her way into this man's consciousness obvious in the movement of her hands, the speed with which she spoke, her intellectual pleasure in making startling, unexpected connections, yet balanced by her abhorrence of the acts she was discussing. "God," said Rachel, "I can almost see his PET scan: temporal lobe abnormalities associated with sexual deviancy; distortion in the frontal lobe leading to violence; low activity between the limbic system and the frontal lobes, indicating a virtual absence of guilt or conscience." She shook her head, as if she was marveling at the behavior of a particularly nasty bug. "He's not asocial, though. These girls may have been shy, but they weren't stupid. He would have to be skilled enough to gain their trust, so the intelligence fits.

"As for Kyle's social background, if what he told Emily Watts is true, he was abused physically and possibly sexually in childhood by a mother figure who told him that she loved him during or after the abuse, and then punished him afterward. He had little nurture or protection and was probably taught self-sufficiency the hard way. When he was old enough, he turned on his abuser and killed her, before moving on to others. With Emily Watts, something different happened. She was herself a victim of abuse, then she became pregnant. My guess is that he would have killed her anyway, as soon as she had the child. From what she said, he wanted the child."

She took a sip of coffee and I used it as an opportunity to interrupt.

"What about Rita Ferris and Cheryl Lansing? Could he have been responsible for their deaths?"

"It's possible," said Rachel. She regarded me quietly, waiting for me to find a connection.

"I'm missing something," I said at last. "That's why you look like the cat that got the cream."

"You're forgetting the mutilation of the mouths. The damage inflicted on the wombs of those girls in 1965 was meant to convey a message. The mutilations were a signifier. We've seen damage to victims used in that way before, Bird." The smile went away, and I nodded: the Traveling Man.

"So, once again, three decades later, we have mutilations, in this case directed to the mouths of victims and in each case meant to signify something different. Rita Ferris's mouth was sewn shut. What does that mean?"

"That she should have kept her mouth shut?"

"Probably," said Rachel. "It's not subtle, but whoever killed her wasn't interested in subtlety."

I considered what Rachel had said for a moment before I figured out what it might mean. "She called the cops on Billy Purdue and they took him away." That could have meant that he had been watching the house the night Billy was arrested, making him the old man that Billy claimed to have seen the night Rita and Donald were killed, maybe even the same old man who had attacked Rita at the hotel.

"In Cheryl Lansing's case," continued Rachel, "her jaw was broken and her tongue torn out. I'm pushing the envelope a little here, but my guess is that she was being punished for not speaking."