He once looked into her bedroom window at night, hoping to catch a glimpse of her in her underwear, or maybe even with no clothes on at all. He found she had pulled down all the shades. He rapped softly on the window, thinking she might come out and join him, or maybe even ask him into her bed. But, suddenly, the lights went on and he heard the front door of her house open and the sound of heavy footsteps. Her father raced around the house and almost caught him. He managed to run home just in time.

Once, while he was alone with a younger girl cousin, he enticed her into the woods by giving her a nickel. There, he put his hand up her skirt and touched her between her legs. But she tattled and he was punished.

Sex occupied his thoughts, but he had no outlet. He became a frotteur, cleverly brushing himself against girls, or so he thought. His hands would drift across girls’ and women’s breasts as if accidentally. Sometimes, they stared hard at him as if they knew what he was up to. He had to be careful not to touch the same girls too many times and make them suspicious.

He was way behind his class, and now he even had trouble keeping up with kids who were younger. He was angry a lot of the time, but you couldn’t tell it by looking at him. He didn’t have any friends outside of school and he considered himself a “loner.” Nobody even cared enough about what he was doing to punish him. He could pretty much do what he wanted, and nobody told him not to—because they didn’t know.

He enjoyed hurting things, killing birds in the fruit trees in his backyard. But, then, so did his brothers. They shot at birds with their BB guns and laughed when they dropped to the ground. Sometimes they hit their targets and the birds flew away, but they flew crooked.

One day he was alone at home and he felt mad at everyone. One of their cats came up to him, wanting to be petted. But he was mad at the cat, too. He got an idea. His family camped out quite often and they had picnic coolers that shut down tight to keep the food inside cold as long as possible.

He grabbed the cat and forced it into the cooler, and then he shut the lid tightly. He made himself wait until the next day to look inside again. The cat was stiff, dead. It had clawed the inside of the cooler in its fight to get out, but someone would have to look closely at the hard white surface to see the scratches. He was pleased that it hadn’t been able to escape suffocation.

His anger sated, at least for the moment, he got rid of the cat’s body, although he claimed a long time later that he really couldn’t remember what he did with it. They lived on a busy road and cats were always getting killed. Maybe he threw it out there and figured nobody would know the difference. Maybe he buried it someplace or put it under a bush where the lower branches would hide it. After he got over his anger by hurting or killing something, he was always scared and hurried to cover up what he’d done so no one would know.

He washed out the cooler and put it back where he’d found it. He didn’t tell anyone about the cat, not even his brothers. He figured they had so many cats around that no one would ever notice.

He was thirteen or fourteen when he discovered that killing something made him feel strong and important. What more power could anyone have than deciding what was going to live and what was going to die? When people laughed at him, he had secrets now that they couldn’t guess.

He had carried a knife with him everywhere he went ever since he was in the sixth grade. It was black and had four blades that folded out of it. He liked the feel of it in his pocket.

Did he plan what he did? No, he was sure he hadn’t. He hadn’t planned to break all those windows at his school; it “just happened” when he picked up the first rock. He sometimes wondered why he did “bad things.”

Either the school or his mother made him see a psychologist after they found out that he’d broken so many windows again. He himself wasn’t sure why he had done it. One minute he wasn’t thinking about it, and the next minute he’d had a rock in his hand. And it felt good watching the glass shatter and fall to the ground. The psychologist tried to hypnotize him, but it didn’t work. He had too much control over his mind for that. His parents had to pay for what he’d done, and they were angry.

He was sure he wasn’t expecting to do anything to the little boy either. He was walking toward a dance at his junior high school that evening, and found himself in a lot where there were trees and bushes. When the six-year-old boy came by, he said he was surprised to find himself reaching out to pull him into the bushes. And then he had the knife out and open, or maybe he’d already had the blade exposed.

He stabbed the little boy just once, a quick jab that pierced the child’s kidney. When he pulled the knife out, there were gushes of blood. He felt ashamed for just a moment, but he walked away as if everything was normal.

And then he ran and hid in the basement again. He wasn’t afraid the boy was going to die; he was much more worried that he was going to live and be able to identify him. He stayed around his house for quite a while after that. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself.

Sometimes he wondered which bad things were worse. It almost seemed that they were worse when he got caught. If he didn’t get caught and wasn’t punished, he could make them go away in his head more easily. The kids at school knew that he was the one who broke the windows, and he suspected that some of them admired him for doing it, that they might have wanted to do it themselves sometimes.

But it might be different if they knew he was the one who stabbed the little boy, because they could think that it was a cowardly thing to do. What would people think of him for hurting a little kid? He might even have to go to reform school if people knew it was him. In the end, he was kind of proud that he didn’t get caught. But he was scared, too, of how much trouble he would be in if anyone found out. A teacher had found the little boy and carried him to a safe place where an ambulance and police were called. The boy lived but didn’t tell who had stabbed him because the child didn’t know. So no one found out and he didn’t get punished.

Bad things happening to people excited him. A little boy drowned in the public swimming area at Angle Lake while he was swimming there, and he thought about that a lot. He was really fascinated when a woman who lived near them was murdered, and he worked the details of what might have happened to her over and over in his head. It was on a hot summer night and she went for a walk around the block with only her bathrobe on—just to cool off. Somebody strangled her with the cord of her bathrobe.

He talked about that mystery a lot with his father. He thought she got raped, too, and he kept going over different scenarios. Maybe she had a fight with her husband because she spent too much or she was cheating on him. Maybe it was a neighbor or the woman’s secret lover or even two guys working together. There were many “maybes” to think about, and he was so clever at coming up with different motives and methods and suspects that he thought he would make a good detective.

15

THE PATTERN of abduction was moving south—down to S. 216th and Pac HiWay. Both Debra Bonner and Marie Malvar had vanished near the Three Bears, albeit months apart. And those of us who lived in Des Moines didn’t feel nearly as distanced from criminal violence as we once had, perhaps smugly sheltered in our little town that curved around Puget Sound.

Keli Kay McGinness was a striking blonde, a buxom eighteen-year-old with a heart-shaped face and blue eyes with a thick fringe of dark lashes. She divided her time between the Camp in Portland and the Strip in Seattle, sometimes even traveling to southern California. In the early summer of 1983, she and her boyfriend had left Portland to see how things were going in Seattle, hometown to both of them.