فصل 19

19

Contra Costa, 2013

CONCORD

The history of Concord, California, involves Satan and a series of misunderstandings. Legend has it that in 1805 Spanish soldiers in pursuit of a band of reluctantly missionized Native Americans cornered their quarry near a willow thicket in what is present-day Concord. The natives took cover in the dense trees, but when the soldiers charged in to seize them, the natives were gone. The spooked Spaniards dubbed the area Monte del Diablo—thicket of the devil—the archaic definition of the word “monte” translating loosely into “woods.” Over the years, it morphed into the more conventional “mountain” or “mount,” and English-speaking newcomers transferred the name to the nearby 3,848-foot peak that dominates the East Bay landscape, and it became Mount Diablo. Devil Mountain. In 2009 a local man named Arthur Mijares filed federal paperwork to try to change the name to Mount Reagan. He found the Devil name offensive.

“I just happen to be an ordinary man that worships God,” he told the Los Angeles Times. Mijares wasn’t successful, but he needn’t have worried. Concord is thirty-one miles east of San Francisco and feels every mile of it. Whatever sinister wilderness existed has been bulldozed and replaced with enthusiastically bland retail hubs. Across from my hotel is the Willows Shopping Center, a sprawl of worrisomely underattended chain stores and restaurants: Old Navy, Pier One Imports, and Fuddruckers. Nearly everyone I ask about Concord mentions the convenience of its BART stop, East Bay’s subway system. “Twenty minutes to Berkeley,” they say.

Paul Holes and I have agreed that he’ll pick me up outside my hotel at nine a.m. He’s taking me on a tour of the Contra Costa County crime scenes. By morning the temperature is already in the eighties, a blazing day in what will be the hottest month of the year in the East Bay. A silver Taurus pulls up right on time, and a fit, neatly dressed man with short blond hair and a hint of summer tan gets out and calls my name. I’ve never met Holes in person. During our last phone conversation, he cheerfully complained that his family’s golden retriever puppy was keeping him up at night, but he looks as if he’s never had a worry in the world. He’s in his midforties and has a calm, easygoing face and a jock’s gait. He smiles warmly and gives me a firm handshake. We’ll spend the next eight hours talking about rape and murder.

Of course, Holes isn’t technically a cop; he’s a criminalist, chief of the County Sheriff’s crime lab, but I’ve been spending a lot of time with cops, and he reminds me of them. When I say cops I mean specifically detectives. After spending enough hours with them, I’ve noticed a few things about detectives. They all smell vaguely of soap. I’ve never met a detective with greasy hair. They excel at eye contact and have enviable posture. Irony is never their go-to tone. Wordplay makes them uneasy. The good ones create long conversational vacuums that you reflexively fill, an interrogation strategy that proved to me through my own regrettable prattle how easily confessions can be elicited. They lack facial elasticity; or rather, they contain it. I’ve never met a detective who pulled a face. They don’t recoil or go wide-eyed. I’m a face maker. I married a comedian. Many of my friends are in show business. I’m constantly surrounded by big expressions, which is why I immediately noticed the lack of them in detectives. They maintain a pleasant but vigorous blankness that I admire. I’ve tried to imitate it, but I can’t. I came to recognize subtle but discernible shifts in the blankness—a narrowing of the eyes, a jaw squeeze, usually in response to hearing a theory they’ve long since eliminated. A veil comes down. But they’ll never tip their hand. They’ll never tell you, “We already looked into that angle ages ago.” Instead they’ll just absorb it and leave you with a polite “Huh.”

In their reserve and in virtually every other way, detectives differ from show-biz folks. Detectives listen. They’re getting a read. Entertainers get a read only to gauge their influence on a room. Detectives deal in concrete tasks. I once spent an hour listening to an actress friend analyze a three-line text that hurt her feelings. Eventually I’ll see the cracks in a detective’s veneer, but in the beginning their company is an unexpected relief, like fleeing a moodily lit cast party loud with competitive chatter and joining a meeting of determined Eagle Scouts awaiting their next challenge. I wasn’t a native in the land of the literal-minded, but I enjoyed my time there.

The EAR’s first attack in the East Bay took place in Concord and is just a 10-minute drive from my hotel. Holes and I dispense with small talk and dive right into discussing the case. The most obvious first question is, what brought him here? Why did he stop attacking in Sacramento and, in October 1978, embark on a nearly yearlong spree in the East Bay? I know the most common theory. Holes does too. He doesn’t buy it.

“I don’t think he got scared out of Sacramento,” he says.

Proponents of the “scared away” theory point to the fact that on April 16, 1978, two days after the EAR attacked a fifteen-year-old babysitter in Sacramento, police released enhanced composite sketches of two possible suspects in the Maggiore homicide—an unsolved case in which a young couple was mysteriously gunned down while out walking their dog. After the sketches were released, the EAR stopped attacking in Sacramento; only one more rape in Sacramento County would be attributed to him, and it wasn’t until a year later. One of the Maggiore sketches, the thinking goes, must have been uncomfortably accurate.

Holes is unconvinced. He has studied and is well versed in geographic profiling, a type of analytic crime mapping that tries to determine the most likely area of offender residence. In the late seventies, cops might stand around a map with pins stuck in it and idly speculate. Today, geographic profiling is its own specialty, with algorithms and software. In predatory crimes there is usually a “buffer zone” around a criminal’s residence; targets within the zone are less desirable because of the perceived level of risk associated with operating too close to home. In serial crimes, geographic profilers analyze attack locations in an attempt to home in on the buffer zone, the ring around the bull’s-eye where the criminal lives, because offenders, like everyone, move in predictable and routine ways.

“I’ve read a lot of studies about how serial offenders do their victim selection,” Holes says. “It’s during their normal course of living. Say you’re a serial burglar and you drive to work like a normal person every day. You’ve got an anchor point at home and an anchor point at work. But they’re paying attention. They’re sitting like we are here”—Holes gestures at the intersection we’ve stopped at—“and they’re noticing, you know, that might be a good apartment complex over there.”

The geographic distribution of attacks in Sacramento follows a completely different pattern than in the East Bay, Holes says, and that’s significant.

“In Sacramento, he’s crisscrossing but he’s staying within that northeast, east suburban area. Geographic profilers call him a ‘marauder.’ He’s branching out at an anchor point. But once he moves down here, he’s becoming a commuter. It’s obvious he’s traveling up and down the 680 corridor.”

Interstate 680 is a seventy-mile north-south highway that cuts through central Contra Costa County. Most of the EAR’s attacks in the East Bay occurred close to I-680, half of them a mile or less from an exit. On a professionally prepared geo-profile map, I saw the East Bay cases represented by a series of small red circles, almost all just right, or east, of 680, red drops cleaving to a yellow vein.

“You’ll get a feel for it as we drive up and down 680,” says Holes. “I think he’s branching out because he’s got a change in life circumstances. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s still living in Sacramento but now commuting for work and taking advantage of being out of his jurisdiction and attacking.”

At the word “work” I perk up. I’ve sensed from our recent e-mail correspondence that Holes is onto something regarding the EAR’s possible line of work, but he remains oblique about the specifics. Even now, he waves me off, anticipating my question.

“We’ll get to that.”

Holes didn’t grow up here. He was just a kid in 1978. But he’s worked for the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office for twenty-three years and has visited the crime scenes countless times. He’s also dug into what the area looked like back then. He’s pulled permits. Studied aerial photographs. Talked to locals. He possesses a mental map of the area circa October 1978, which he overlays over the current one as we drive. He slows and points to a cul-de-sac. The homes are located just behind the house where the EAR’s first attack in Concord took place.

“These weren’t here then,” says Holes. “It was a vacant field.”

We pull up and park at a corner house in a quiet residential neighborhood. A photo attached to the first East Bay file shows an attractive couple with their one-year-old daughter; the little girl wears a polka-dotted birthday hat and a summer dress, and the parents each have a hand on a ball they’re holding up in front of her, presumably one of her gifts. The baby is smiling at the photographer, the parents at the camera. A month and a half after the photo was taken, on October 7, 1978, the husband was awakened by something touching his feet. He opened his eyes, startled to see a figure in a dark ski mask looming over him.

“I just want money and food, that’s all. I’ll kill you if you don’t do what I say.” The intruder held a flashlight in his left hand and a revolver in his right.

Holes points to the dining room window where thirty-five years ago the EAR slithered in and made his way to the foot of the couple’s bed. The little girl wasn’t bothered and slept through the ordeal.

The house was built in 1972 and is single-story, L-shaped, occupying roughly the same quarter acre as the other houses on the block. I’m struck by how much the house resembles the other crime-scene locations I’ve seen. You could pick it up and drop it in any of the other neighborhoods.

“Definitely the same kind of house,” I say. Holes nods.

“Very few neighborhoods he attacked in had two-story houses,” he says. “Makes a lot of sense if you know your victims are sleeping. In two stories there’s a single way upstairs and single way downstairs. You’re more likely to be cornered in that situation. Also it’s easier to determine what’s going on inside a single-story house, going from window to window. And if you’re prowling, jumping fences, and going through yards, somebody can have a vantage point to see you from a second floor versus downstairs.”

The husband, under hypnosis, remembered that when he and his wife pulled up around eleven fifteen p.m. on the evening of the attack, he saw a young man standing near a parked van on the side street next to their house. The van was box-shaped and two-tone in color, white over aqua green. The young man appeared to be in his twenties and was white with dark hair, of average height and weight, and he was standing near the right back corner of the van, stooped over, as if checking out a tire. A fragment of an image, one of hundreds half-absorbed peripherally every day. I imagine the husband in a chair, summoning and parsing a snapshot made retrospectively crucial. Or not. That was the madness of the case: the uncertain weight of every clue.

“In this case, what’s striking is the sophistication of how he broke in,” Holes says. “It looks like he tried the side door. He’s cutting near the doorknob. He abandons that effort for whatever reason. He comes out front. There’s a window on the dining room. He punches out a small hole in the window so he can push the latch and then gets in that way.”

“I know nothing about burglaries. Was he good?”

“He was good,” says Holes.

We sit in the hot car and list the ways he was strategically good. Bloodhounds, shoe impressions, and tire tracks showed investigators he was canny about the routes he took. If there was a construction site nearby, he’d park there, as the transient vehicle population allowed him to hide in plain view; people would assume he was associated with the job. He’d approach a house one way but take a different route to escape, so that he wasn’t seen coming and going, and was therefore less likely to be remembered.

Dogs that normally barked didn’t bark at him, suggesting he may have been preconditioning them with food. He had the unusual habit of throwing a blanket over a lamp or a muted TV when he brought his female victims into living rooms, which allowed him enough light to see but not so much that it would raise notice from outside. And his preplanning. The corner-house couple said that when they returned home, they noticed the husband’s study door was closed, which was unusual, and the front door wasn’t locked, as they believed they’d left it. They wondered if he was already in the house then, maybe hiding among the coats in the hall closet, waiting for their murmurs to grow softer and the bar of light at his feet to go out.

There’s a pause in my conversation with Holes, one I’ve come to anticipate in discussions about the case. It’s knockdown time. The verbal pivot is akin to the moment when you’ve talked too much about an ex, catch yourself, and stop to emphasize that the ex in question is, of course, a worthless piece of shit.

“He’s very good at committing his crime,” Holes says, “but he’s not rappelling down the side of a building. He’s not doing anything that suggests he has any specialized training.”

Holes’s parents are from Minnesota, and he retains a chipper midwestern rhythm to his speech, but when he says the EAR wasn’t particularly skillful, his voice loses momentum, and he sounds unconvincing and unconvinced. On to the next recognizable stage in case analysis: self-debate.

“It’s ballsy. The EAR. That’s the thing,” Holes says, his jaw uncharacteristically clenched. “What sets him apart from other offenders is going into a house. The Zodiac, for instance. In many ways his crimes were kind of cowardly. Lovers’ lanes. From a distance. You step it up when you go inside. You step it up further when there’s a male in that house.”

We talk about how the male victims are overlooked. He tells me a story about a time when he needed to question a female victim in Stockton who’d been attacked with her husband. Holes decided to contact the husband first, figuring he’d be better able to handle the cold call. The husband politely told Holes he didn’t think his wife wanted to talk about the attack. She’d buried it. She didn’t want to revisit the experience; nevertheless, the husband reluctantly said, he’d pass Holes’s questions on to his wife. Holes didn’t hear anything. He figured it was a lost cause. Several months later, the wife finally got in touch. She answered Holes’s questions. She was willing to help him, she said. She was willing to remember. Her husband wasn’t.

“He’s the one who’s having the problems,” she confided.

The male victims were born in the forties and fifties, a generation for whom therapy was mostly an alien concept. In the police files, gender roles are rigid and unambiguous. Detectives ask the women where they shop and the men about the locking mechanisms on the doors and windows. They drape blankets over the women’s shoulders and ferry them to the hospital. The men are asked what they saw, not what they felt. Many of the male victims had military experience. They had toolsheds. They were doers and protectors who’d been robbed of their ability to do and protect. Their rage is in the details: one husband chewed the bindings off his wife’s feet.

“So much trauma exists to this day,” Holes says, starting the car. He pulls away from the curb. The corner house recedes from view. There’s a brief handwritten note in the file from the female victim, the pretty young mother of the darling little birthday girl, to the lead detective, dated five months after their attack.

Rod,

Enclosed please find

a. missing property list and

b. list of checks written for July–August.

All jewelry was taken from either our bedroom chest drawer or the top of dresser. Other items are appropriately indicated.

I do hope this will be all that will be needed as we are desperately trying to get our lives back to normal. I’m sure we both can appreciate each other’s positions.

Good luck in the piecing together!

The tone was reasonable, direct, and resilient. Upbeat even. I found it extraordinary. Some people, I thought when I read it, can endure horrible, traumatic things and move on. A few pages later in the file, there’s another short note, handwritten by a sheriff’s deputy. This family no longer lives in Contra Costa County, the note says. They’ve moved to a city hundreds of miles away.

Good luck in the piecing together!

I’d read the exclamation point as optimism. But what it meant was good-bye.

WE HEAD EAST. THE SECOND ATTACK IN CONCORD OCCURRED A week after the first and is located less than a half mile away. Holes slows for a stop sign. He points to the street perpendicular to us, again consulting his mental map of October 1978. “Right in this area there’s new construction going on. So people, construction workers, delivery trucks, are coming down this road”—he indicates the one we’re on—“or that road, in order to get to the construction location.”

Of the two primary thoroughfares someone could take to the construction site in October 1978, Holes says, one route passes the first attack location, and the other passes the second. I remember that Holes said he believed the EAR came to the area for work.

“Building? Construction?” I ask.

“That’s the avenue I’m pursuing,” he says.

I notice that he says “the” and not “an.”

“Do you know who the developer of that construction site was?”

He doesn’t answer, but his expression says he does.

We pull up to the second Concord crime scene, another single-story, L-shaped home, this one cream with green trim. A giant oak dominates the small front yard. Nothing about the neighborhood suggests that people with a great deal of weekday leisure time live here. No one ambles by with a dog. No one is speed walking with an iPod. Few cars pass.

In this case, the EAR hinted at a possibility, one that flickers intriguingly throughout the series a handful of times. It was Friday the thirteenth, four thirty a.m. The EAR’s psychosexual script that he forced upon his victims with his flashlight and clenched-teeth threats was by now, his thirty-ninth attack, so well established that, reading the police reports, one can be forgiven for missing the clue, the key change of a single word: “I” to “we.”

“All we want is food and money, and then we’ll get the hell out of here,” he ranted at the disoriented couple. “I just want food and money for my girlfriend and me.”

Once the couple was restrained and compliant, he began his frenetic ransacking, slamming kitchen cupboards, rummaging through drawers. The female victim was led to the family room. He laid her on the floor.

“You want to live?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

He blindfolded her with a bathroom towel.

“This had better be the best fuck I’ve ever had, or I’m going to kill you.”

She told investigators she kept flashing on In Cold Blood, on the story of a family annihilated in the middle of the night by fickle killers.

However, what followed, while terrifying for the victim, seemed oddly juvenile and of little interest to her attacker. He quickly and perfunctorily ran his hands over her thighs; she could feel that he was wearing thick leather gloves. He made her masturbate him for a minute, then penetrated her and was done in thirty seconds. He jumped up and began ransacking again. It seemed that the raiding of the house stimulated him more than actual sex.

A door opened and she felt a draft; he was in their attached garage. A trash bag rustled. He seemed to be going back and forth from the house to the garage. She heard him say something, but not to her.

“Here, put this in the car,” he whispered.

There was no reply; she heard no footsteps. A vehicle never started up. She never knew how or when he left, just that at some point he did.

It wasn’t the only time the EAR suggested he had an accomplice. The first victim heard what she thought were two separate voices in her living room whispering heated, overlapping threats. “Shut up,” followed quickly by, “I told you to shut up.”

Another victim heard a car horn honk four times outside, and then someone began ringing the doorbell. There was knocking at the front window. She heard muffled voices, possibly a woman’s. She couldn’t tell if the EAR’s voice was among them. He left, and the voices went away, but the victim, who was bound and face down on her living room floor, couldn’t tell if the events occurred at the same time, or were related at all.

“My buddy is out in the car waiting,” he said once.

Was it a lie, a bolstering tactic when he psychologically felt the need for backup? An attempt to misdirect the police? Most of the investigators believe it was a bluff. Holes isn’t so sure.

“Does he have someone who’s assisting him at times? In the sexual assaults, no, but on the burglary side? Who knows? It happens enough throughout the series, that you go, ‘Maybe.’ Maybe we have to consider that possibility.”

Holes concedes that much of what the EAR said was deflection and misdirection. He ranted about living in his van or at a camp by the river, but he rarely emitted the kind of body odor a transient would. He invented connections to his victims. “I knew when I saw you at the junior prom I had to have you,” he whispered to a blindfolded teenager, but she’d heard tape being pulled from her bedroom wall—her junior prom picture coming down. “I’ve seen you at the lake,” he said to a woman with a ski boat in her driveway.

Some of the lies—about killing people in Bakersfield, about being kicked out of the military—probably played into a tough-guy image he nurtured of himself. The fake connections to victims were possibly part of his fantasy or an attempt to unsettle them with opaque familiarity. Holes and I speculate about his other behavior, like the gasping breaths. They were described as huge, gulping intakes of air, bordering on hyperventilation. A criminal profiler who examined the case in the seventies felt that the breathing was a scare tactic, a way to make his victims think he was a lunatic capable of anything. Holes says a fellow investigator who has asthma wondered if it was legitimately respiratory distress; adrenaline can trigger an attack.

The EAR is a card face down on a table. Our speculation is a cul-de-sac. Round and round we go.

“San Ramon?” asks Holes.

SAN RAMON

We head for 680, which will take us seventeen miles south to the next attack, the third that month. October 1978. Carter was president. Grease had been the huge summer movie, and John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s “Summer Nights” was still a radio mainstay, though the Who’s “Who Are You” was climbing the charts. The fresh-scrubbed face of thirteen-year-old Brooke Shields stared blankly from the cover of Seventeen. The Yankees beat the Dodgers in the World Series. Sid Vicious’s girlfriend Nancy Spungen bled to death from a stab wound on a bathroom floor at the Chelsea Hotel. John Paul II was the new pope. Three days before the San Ramon attack, the movie Halloween was released.

“What about the crying? Do you think that was real?” I ask Holes.

Nearly a dozen victims reported that he cried. He sobbed, they said. He stumbled and seemed lost. He whimpered in a high-pitched voice like a child. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he wept. “Mommy, please help me. I don’t want to do this, Mommy.”

“I do,” says Holes. “Women have good insight into men’s behaviors. There are times when the victims say his anger is a put-on, he’s acting, but other times, when he’s in a corner sobbing uncontrollably, it feels real to them. He’s conflicted. The crying is always after the sexual attack. That’s when he’s sobbing.”

There’s an exception among the victims who believed the tears were real. The Stockton woman, the one whose husband struggled to come to terms with their attack, didn’t buy the crying, Holes tells me.

“She heard those sounds. But she wouldn’t attribute them to crying,” says Holes.

“What did she think it was?” I ask.

“High-pitched hysteria,” Holes says. “Like laughter.”

For years no one seems to have noticed that the 911 emergency number didn’t work in unincorporated San Ramon, even though the phone company charged residents for the service. A woman who lived at the end of a quiet court discovered the discrepancy. The discordant squawk her receiver emitted indicating a failed call was a jolt she didn’t need after two hours of sexual violence at the hands of a stranger. The woman, using the pseudonym Kathy, is quoted in an Oakland Tribune article that ran on December 10, 1978, six weeks after her attack. When Kathy awoke the night of her rape, her eyes frantically sought to adjust to the darkness. She could make out only one thing in the pitch-black: a disembodied wild gaze, his “‘little eyes, just staring.’”

“‘I just really hate that guy,’” Kathy says matter-of-factly of her unidentified rapist. She explains she’s also angry with the phone company for not providing emergency service when they said they did. Of this outrage, Kathy tells the reporter, she can exact some quantifiable justice: she has the 911 charge deducted from her bill now, a savings of twenty-eight cents a month.

Help came after Kathy dialed the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office directly.

In the wake of the two rapes in Concord the Sheriff’s Office had issued an alert to its deputies. Sacramento’s warning had proved prescient: The EAR was pressing his ski mask against their windows now. Everyone needed to be vigilant. A strike force began identifying neighborhoods where the EAR might hit. License numbers of vehicles parked next to open areas, or otherwise deemed suspicious, were quietly recorded.

Bug-eyed attentive wasn’t the San Ramon beat’s usual mode. From 1970 to 1980, the city more than quadrupled its population, but it was, and still is, ringed by rolling grasslands studded with oak trees, vast swaths of undeveloped country that suggest space and impose quiet. Police radios lulled with extended silences. Patrol headlights swept over the same detached garages, the same darkened windows on ranch homes occupied by young families. Suspicious figures rarely peeled off from San Ramon’s unvarying suburban silhouette; the fence lines were unbroken, the shrubs never shook. Deputies were trained for action but accustomed to stillness.

That changed on October 28 just after five a.m., when dispatch delivered to the graveyard shift a blast of static followed by scant but alarming details. Home-invasion rape and robbery. Montclair Place. A one-man unit was the first to respond to the scene. The victims, Kathy and her husband, David, calmly met the deputy at the front door. After confirming that the couple didn’t need immediate medical care, the deputy’s interest was absorbed by the odd scene behind them. The house was almost completely empty. Drawers of the few pieces of furniture were haphazardly pulled open and bare. Closet doors stood open, revealing hanging rods and nothing else. Had they been completely cleaned out by the intruder? No, Kathy and David explained, they were in the process of moving out.

He’d come for them during their last few hours in the house.

There was the real estate factor again. And the canny timing that suggested inside knowledge. Kathy and David had a three-year-old son; they pointed out to investigators that the EAR never opened or even approached their son’s bedroom door. Other victims with small children noticed the same thing. How he zeroed in on victims and gained knowledge about their lives and the layouts of their homes was a question of endless speculation.

Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, called the preattack time he spent casing for victims “patrolling.” Banality was his camouflage. He’d back his truck into a 7-Eleven on Pacific Highway South, the gritty stretch around the Seattle-Tacoma airport known for prostitution. Sometimes he’d pop the hood. He was a slight man with a putty-colored face who was preoccupied with engine trouble. His presence never registered. The washed-out gray landscape absorbed him seamlessly. Only a close, patient observer could have picked up on the detail that signaled something was wrong: time didn’t concern the man. His pupils flicked like a pendulum, fixing on everything but his engine, a quick-change of hungry considerations tracking as forcefully as a planchette on a Ouija board.

Clank. It was a sound so routine it was lost in the urban noise, in the whoosh of wet tires in light rain and door chimes at the convenience store. It’s the scariest sound no one heard—Ridgway closing his hood. Patrolling was over; a new phase had begun.

Initially I felt that the EAR, like Ridgway, must have hidden in plain sight. He seemed to possess information that could only have been gleaned from careful, prolonged observation. But he clearly wasn’t an obvious lurker: despite thousands of pages of police reports, including victim statements and neighborhood interviews, no consistent physical description of a suspect emerges. Over the course of fifty rapes, a face should start to cohere, I thought, at the very least an agreed-upon hair color. But none did. Therein lay the puzzle. Chance wins eventually. Luck is unreliable. How did he survey so long without being surveyed?

My mind kept circling back to the image of a man in a uniform, a telephone lineman or a postal worker, an everyday worker bee straight out of Richard Scarry’s Busytown, the kind of person whose presence signals that everything is running smoothly. No one fastened on him. He was in a state of constant dissolve. What people bounced past, what they missed in the blur of beige was the devouring force in his angry eyes.

A retired investigator who worked the Irvine homicides tried to dissuade me from my image of a master reconnoiterer. The attacks didn’t require a lot of preplanning or inside information in his opinion. He and his partner conducted an experiment one night when they were working the case. They dressed in all black, laced up soft-soled shoes, and prowled the Irvine neighborhoods, following the paths they believed the killer took. They crept along cinder-block walls, peeped over backyard fences, and concealed themselves against tree trunks in the dark.

Rectangles of light drew them closer. Rear windows offered access into dozens of strangers’ lives. Sometimes there was only a sliver through a curtain, enough to see the blank face of a woman rinsing and rerinsing a single glass at her kitchen sink. Mostly it was quiet, but occasionally there was a shower of laughter from a TV. A teenager’s shoulders inched to her ears as her boyfriend lifted her skirt.

The investigator shook his head at the memory.

“You’d be amazed at what you can see,” he told me.

In fact, I asked every investigator I talked to about prowling and got the same response, a succession of head shakes and expressions that all said it’s the easiest thing in the world to do.

A compulsive prowler is a quick study of body language, the way a woman home alone might glance out her living room’s rear window before turning out the light, or how a teenager moves more quietly when her parents are asleep. After a while, it’s pattern recognition. Operation time is cut down considerably.

I ask Holes how methodical he thought the EAR was in selecting victims.

“I think there’s evidence of both ways. There are times I think he’s done a fair amount of surveillance. He sees somebody. Focuses on them. Follows them. And there are times he’s attacking them the first time he sees them.”

No one knows how long he was watching Kathy, but they have a good idea from where. The house backed up on a Christmas tree farm. The criminalist noted “zigzag jogging type” shoe impressions on the board fence in the backyard.

Holes turns right and points out where the tree farm used to be behind the house. We go a block or two more and he takes another right, to the 7400 block of Sedgefield Avenue.

“The next day there’s a vehicle parked here on the side. There’s blood inside.”

The car was a Ford Galaxie 500. It had been reported stolen.

“Somebody obviously bleeding, probably with a bloody nose. Then you see the trail of blood as they take off. Evidence from that is long gone, but I’ve speculated that if you’ve got somebody escaping through a Christmas tree farm in the middle of the night, what’s the likelihood he ran into a tree? And then got into this car that he stole and abandoned? I had a case where somebody was escaping a shooting and ran into a telephone pole. Left a blood trail just like that.”

The trail of blood traveled east and over the curb. Some tissues were crumpled up in the gutter. The blood drops grew smaller and disappeared. Like every trail in the case, this one eventually led to a series of blank walls. Nothing ever led to a front door. Every object found in a search could or could not be his and always lacked firm, traceable information. It was a case whose wheels spun endlessly in possibility.

“Everything is a half clue,” says Holes.

“What about construction at the time in San Ramon?” I ask.

Holes tells me that Kathy provided them with helpful information.

“She was able to recount multiple active construction sites for new subdivisions going on around her neighborhood at the time of her attack.”

It takes me a moment to realize that he means he talked to Kathy personally.

“You talked to her?”

He knows why I’m shocked.

In his book about the case, Sudden Terror, Larry Crompton disparages Kathy. He describes her demeanor during the police interview as almost seeming as if she’s reliving “the ultimate turn-on.” He discloses unflattering details about her life after the attack. He says he feels sorry for her husband and son. I like Crompton but thought he was wrong here. Seriously wrong. He even rates her looks against other victims—favorably, but it’s still wrong. His treatment of Kathy is at best wildly tone-deaf and at worst victim blaming. His portrayal assumes that there’s only one way to respond to a violent sexual attack. It lacks compassion and understanding. For example, he describes derisively how she told police that she asked for a glass of water first when the EAR demanded that she fellate him, without considering that for a terrified victim a plea for water could be a stalling tactic. And the pseudonym Crompton chose for her, “Sunny,” while probably not deliberately malicious, seemed a particularly cruel choice in light of how he depicted her.

Shortly after Crompton’s book came out, the Sheriff’s Office received an e-mail from Kathy. She was furious about how she was portrayed. They didn’t have the authority to put her in touch with Crompton, who was retired, but Holes and a female colleague invited Kathy to meet with them in person at the office.

“She was shaking like a leaf,” Holes recalled, in a voice that said he didn’t blame her. Kathy barely made eye contact with him in the meeting, something he attributed to her residual trauma. The relationship between victims and cold-case investigators is an odd combination of intimate and remote. Holes was ten years old when a man in a mask put a knife to Kathy’s neck and pushed her down on the cold linoleum kitchen floor. Nineteen years later, Holes pulled a Ziploc bag with her case number on it from Property and withdrew a swab from a plastic tube. Kathy was a stranger to him. He’d studied her rapist’s sperm cells in a microscope, but he’d never looked her in the eye or shaken her hand.

He asked very few questions in the meeting and let his female colleague take the lead. Then Kathy said something that focused his attention.

She and her husband, David, had long since divorced. Like many couples who were victims of the EAR, their relationship didn’t survive. Kathy said that David told her after the attack that he thought he recognized the EAR’s voice, but he couldn’t quite place it.

What Kathy said was important for two reasons. First, she’d never seen the geo-profile. She didn’t know that, while Contra Costa County didn’t provide the same obvious living pattern as Sacramento, the geo-profiler had determined that the most likely area of the offender’s residence was there anyway: San Ramon. It was central to the East Bay series, and one of the few places he hit only once. As the distance from an offender’s residence increases, so do the number of potential targets. But occasionally a predatory offender, either because he’s drawn to a particular victim or confident he won’t be caught, attacks closer to home.

On the geo-profile map, a blade of red, indicating the peak area for the EAR’s likely home base, runs east to west just north of Kathy’s house.

Kathy also didn’t know that an FBI profiler had presented new findings at a recent EAR Task Force meeting. Something the profiler said resonated with Holes. She said they should consider that in some of the cases the male victim had been the target. In some instances, the EAR may have been exacting revenge on the male for some perceived wrongdoing.

What Kathy told them raised the possibility of a link, a previously overlooked close degree of separation that could lead to the suspect. Many well-known serial cases turn out to possess at least one such connection. An old roommate of Lynda Healy’s, a victim of Ted Bundy, was a cousin of Ted’s, and investigators later unearthed rosters that showed that Ted and Lynda shared at least three classes. Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, lived six doors down from Marine Hedge, his eighth victim. John Wayne Gacy talked publicly in a store with Robert Piest about hiring him for a construction job shortly before Piest disappeared.

The EAR went to great lengths to hide his identity. He covered his face and suppressed his voice. He blinded his victims with a flashlight and threatened to kill them if they looked at him. But he was also brazen. Barking dogs didn’t deter him. Two joggers, a college-age brother and sister, were out running on a foggy night in December 1977 when they spotted a man in a dark ski mask emerging from the hedged walkway of a house on the 3200 block of American River Drive. The man stopped abruptly when he saw the joggers. They continued running. They looked back and saw him quickly climb into an older model step-side pickup truck. Something about the way the man had paused and then moved quickly into the truck made them run faster. They heard the noisy rattle of the truck’s engine as the truck sped toward them. They sprinted around the corner; the truck screeched to a stop and backed up haphazardly to where they were. They ran to another house and hid, watching as the truck followed, turning in circles in the street until the man gave up and sped off.

The EAR was extremely careful about self-preservation, but success and the arrogance it breeds punctures holes in master plans. It whispers grandiose persuasions. He’d already defeated a series of mental barriers that would have stopped most of us: rape, breaking into a stranger’s home, taking control of a couple rather than a lone female. After dozens of uninterrupted successes, his self-confidence might have adrenalized him to the point where he broke his own rule about targeting only victims to whom he had no connection. A guttural whisper heard in the middle of the night thirty-six years ago may be a clue.

After San Ramon, the EAR hit twice in San Jose, forty miles south. Holes and I decide to skip San Jose to save time.

“I want to show you Davis,” he says. “I think Davis is important.”

But first we have two more stops. After San Jose, the EAR returned to Contra Costa County, attacking for the first of what would be three times in Danville. Holes and I head north on 680 toward Danville, to the site of the December 9, 1978, attack, which gave him his most promising lead.

DANVILLE

A hundred years ago, the steady drumming of steam trains was the sound of boom time in the broad green valley adjacent to Mount Diablo. Starting in 1891, the Southern Pacific Railroad ferried passengers up and down a twenty-mile route from San Ramon to just north of Concord. Enterprising visitors disembarked, blueprints and dreams in hand. Land was abundant. Parceling and developing commenced. Passenger service eventually disappeared with the invention of the automobile, but the San Ramon Branch Line continued hauling freight—Bartlett pears, gravel, sheep. The railroad tunneled indistinguishably into the landscape. Train whistles marked time. The depots were all painted the same dandelion yellow with brown trim. The tracks ran past Murwood Elementary in Walnut Creek, and at recess the kids, hearing a rumble and feeling the ground vibrate, stopped their hopscotch or dodgeball and waved at the passing crews, receiving a horn blow in reply.

Southern Pacific helped transform the rural valley, but not in a way that kept its trains running. Industrial hubs never materialized. Single-family homes were developed instead. Central Contra Costa County became “the outer East Bay.” The completion of I-680 in 1964 represented speed, efficiency, and death for the railway. Moving freight was cheaper by truck. The number of train cars dwindled. And kept dwindling. The sprawling orchards were gone now, and crowds of roofs advanced on either side of the tracks. Southern Pacific finally petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to abandon the line. In September 1978, nearly a century after the first track was laid, the line closed for good.

Debate ensued about what to do with the right-of-way. Until a decision was made, the twenty-foot-wide strip of land remained vacant, a shadow corridor bisecting neighborhoods of warmly lit houses. The dead zone didn’t inspire dread as much as inattention. This was especially true of the five-mile stretch that ran through Danville, the town just north of San Ramon. Danville lots were larger, the homes older, its residents wealthier and quieter. The deserted tracks lay beyond tidily cordoned-off backyards. The fence lines were essentially drapes. Shorn of its usefulness, the right-of-way was blotted out. Nothing moved. Nothing was heard. That is, until one December morning when a peculiar noise disturbed the silence. The casual listener may not have been concerned at first. The sound was steady, rhythmic, but to the sensitive ear it signaled an evident urgency: a bloodhound galloping, gripped with purpose.

BY EARLY DECEMBER 1978, THERE EXISTED AMONG CONTRA COSTA County residents the hopeful but mostly unspoken feeling that maybe they could relax. In October the East Area Rapist hadn’t merely surfaced in their area; he’d inflicted on them something that, in its swiftness and ability to shock, resembled a spree: three attacks in twenty-one days. After the third attack, people spent nights locked inside brightly lit homes, fighting sleep and blinking against muzzy visions of ski masks. But weeks passed without incident. Fresh horrors distracted. News anchors interrupted regular programming on November 18 to announce that more than nine hundred Americans, a third of them children, lay dead in a jungle commune in Guyana after drinking Flavor Aid laced with cyanide at the behest of cult leader Jim Jones. The Peoples Temple, Jones’s church, had had its headquarters in San Francisco before relocating to Guyana. The dead included Northern California congressman Leo Ryan, who’d flown there to investigate alleged abuses and was gunned down at an airstrip just before takeoff. The Jonestown Massacre absorbed much of the country’s horrified attention, if not the world’s, but it particularly rocked the Bay Area.

Thanksgiving weekend came and went peacefully. A new moon lacquered the sky the night of November 30, extinguishing light that shone on even the most desolate hiding spots. The determined concealer was presented with ideal conditions. But December dawned without news of another EAR attack. No one was neglecting to lock up just yet, but reflexes spring-coiled with panicky anticipation slowly began to ease.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the EAR stole clock radios from five homes, even when more valuable items were there for the taking. Time was important to him—controlling it, manipulating it. He possessed uncanny instincts about how much time had to pass before precautions weakened. Keeping communities and victims uncertain about his presence gave him a strategic advantage, of course. The blindfolded victim tied up in the dark develops the feral senses of a savannah animal. The sliding glass door quietly shutting registers as a loud, mechanical click. She calculates the distance of ever fainter footsteps. Hope flickers. Still, she waits. Time passes in tense perception. She strains to hear breathing other than her own. Fifteen minutes go by. The dread sense of being watched, of being pinned down by a possessing gaze she can’t see, is gone. Thirty minutes. Forty-five. She allows her body to slacken almost imperceptibly. Her shoulders fall. It’s then, at the precipice of an exhale, that the nightmare snaps into action again—the knife grazes the skin, and the labored breathing resumes, grows closer, until she feels him settling in next to her, an animal waiting patiently for its half-dying quarry to still.

The illusion of being gone was a cruel and effective trick. The victim on whom the trick was played would wait much longer the next time she thought the EAR left; some victims, catatonic with dread, waited hours, waited until birds chirped and weak sunlight flickered at the edges of their blindfolds. The extra time before the police were called allowed the EAR to put greater distance between him and the crime scene.

By early December, it had been six weeks since the EAR had struck in Contra Costa County. The community was the equivalent of the cautiously hopeful victim who believes he’s left her home for good. No one from Sacramento or the East Bay, neither the public nor the investigators, knew at the time that during the EAR’s absence from their area he’d committed two rapes forty miles south in San Jose, one in early November and another on December 2. Even if they had known about the San Jose rapes, the EAR’s route might have relieved them. He appeared to be following a steady southerly course: first Concord, then eighteen miles down I-680 to San Ramon, and next San Jose, in another county altogether.

As night fell on Friday, December 8, residents of the bedroom communities nestled at the base of Mount Diablo, outer East Bay towns like Concord, Walnut Creek, Danville, and San Ramon, went to bed feeling spared. Common sense suggested that he’d keep moving south and hit in Santa Cruz or Monterey. They were in his rearview mirror, receding targets. The worst was over. Midnight turned to one a.m. Refrigerators hummed in darkened houses. A car occasionally whooshed by, punctuating the quiet. The collective circadian rhythm was in rest mode.

Not everywhere. In Danville, just east of the abandoned railroad tracks, a six-foot wooden fence concealed by large trees buckled under the weight of someone scaling it.

No outdoor lights illuminated the ranch-style house that lay behind the fence. Nighttime was ideal for the fence hopper. Shrouds lured him. He roved in dark clothes, searching for the rare blot among the luminous houses. His black pupils sought shadows.

He crossed the backyard to the patio. No lights were on inside. A woman’s purse lay on the kitchen counter. Prying the sliding glass doors required only a small amount of pressure and resulted in little noise. He stepped into the kitchen. Somewhere a radio was playing softly. The 2,100-square-foot house was mostly empty of furniture or personal effects because it was for sale. Friendly Realtors had been welcoming strangers inside for the last two months. Had he been one of the forgettable looky-loos? He would have murmured, if he spoke at all. While other potential buyers asked questions, implying interest, he would have registered as faintly critical, his absorption suggesting possible disapproval. Memorization misinterpreted as judgment.

He bypassed rooms with closed doors and headed directly for the master bedroom, in the northwest corner of the house. Standing in the doorway, he faced the bed from a distance of about ten feet. A woman lay there alone. She was sleeping, positioned on her stomach, face to pillow, the kind of “flung off the cliff of consciousness” sleep that anchors rather than drifts. Who was she in the moment before he wrenched her awake from unburdened sleep? Esther McDonald was small, what the generation when her name was popular might have called “a slip of a thing.” Back home in a cold midwestern state, a marriage at nineteen had lasted a decade with no kids or staying power. Suddenly she was thirty, which is older in Middle America than on the coasts. “California Dreamin’” wasn’t a song but a siren call for a sunnier future. She and a girlfriend moved to San Francisco. The Summer of Love was over, but the Bay Area retained its reputation for improvisation, a place where you could shed your past and debut a new life.

There were jobs: a wholesale florist and an electric motor repair company. A pawnbroker twenty years her senior wooed her with jewelry and invited her to live with him in Danville. The house was five miles from the Calaveras Fault, a major branch of the San Andreas. Six months later, they split amicably. He moved out, put the house on the market, and told her she was welcome to stay until it sold. A romance was bubbling with a co-worker; the pawnbroker was still around. Matters of the heart were bidirectional and unresolved.

That’s who she was as she slept around two a.m. on a cold night in December: a woman starting over in a state where the covered wagons stopped and storied reinventions began, a woman navigating an unremarkably complicated love life, a woman about to be irrevocably changed. What is the lasting damage when you believe the warm spot you were just sleeping in will be your grave? Time sands the edges of the injuries, but they never lose their hold. A nameless syndrome circulates permanently through the body, sometimes long dormant, other times radiating powerful waves of pain and fear.

A hand gripped her neck. A blunt-tipped weapon dug into the side of her throat. At least a dozen investigators in Northern California could have correctly predicted the first words whispered in the dark.

“Don’t move.”

“Don’t scream.”

He was back. Or, more accurately, he had doubled back. The uncertainty of his course, the randomness of his strikes made him an unpredictable dark force, a one-man crime wave.

The first deputies alerted by dispatch arrived at 5:19 a.m. Tension ratcheted at the telltale signs. Knotted white shoelaces. Torn strips of orange towel. Cut phone lines. The house was bracingly cold. He’d turned off the thermostat, along with the radio, apparently for optimal hearing. Radio calls went out. Phones rang. People began arriving in the blue-black light of dawn. Crime-scene investigator Larry Crompton pulled up. The search for meaningful details focused him, made him alert despite the early hour. He noted the Realtor’s sign in the front yard, the vacant property next door, and the railroad tracks out back—all ideal conditions that stoked the EAR’s compulsions and telescoped his roving to a single target.

In a few weeks, Crompton would be promoted to sergeant and join the urgently formed EAR Task Force. He was unaware as he entered the house, the door shutting behind him, that this case would be the one he would carry for the rest of his life. It would become like a game of hangman he refused to lose, all the guesses wrong, the stick figure nearly fatally hung; Crompton kept the last move open, staving off defeat by waiting until he, or one of his successors, could reverse the momentum and fill in the blanks. Only then, the final letter correct, would the long, bruising chase in the dark end in the simplest but long-sought-after prize: a man’s name.

The first of three bloodhounds, Pita, arrived. She exhibited excitement immediately, her nose wrenching the air. Who knows what goes through the minds of tracking dogs, whether they absorb the hopes of the solemn people milling around them. Pita’s job was enviably clear-cut. Find the scent and follow it. A small group of handlers and cops, including Crompton, watched Pita exit the house through the back patio and head confidently to the southwest corner of the backyard. She agitated at the fence, wanting over. She was led out the yard and around the other side, to the abandoned railroad tracks. She raised her nose.

They were sifting once again through the fresh wreckage of the faceless wrecker. Foam still clung to a bottle of Schlitz Malt Liquor he’d taken from the refrigerator and set down in the backyard. Scuff marks on the fence were photographed. The group at the railroad tracks huddled in the cold, waiting for Pita to make her next move. Their hope lay in a dog’s nostrils connecting with a molecule.

Then a jerk of movement. Pita caught it; she smelled him. She surged forth, galloping south down the left path alongside the tracks. She was, as police K-9 units say, “in odor.” Her stride was controlled but accelerating, relentless drive her genetic gift. She was, in every sense of the word, unleashed. Crompton and Pita’s handlers chased after her. The sudden commotion on the tracks, with its whiff of danger and unrest, was unusual for a Saturday morning in Danville. It was an unwelcome disruption, one that would repeat in the coming months.

Pita stopped abruptly about a half mile from where she started, at the point the railroad tracks intersected a residential street. Two other bloodhounds, Betsey and Eli, were also brought in to work the crime scene. Pita’s handler, Judy Robb, noted in her follow-up report that time and even minute changes to wind velocity can alter scent pools. However, the three handlers were in agreement on several points. The dogs had sniffed along many fences and darted down numerous side yards. Their behavior suggested that the suspect had spent a lot of time prowling the area. He entered the victim’s backyard by the north-side fence. He left by crossing over the southwest corner of the back fence and headed south along the tracks until at the cross street he likely entered a vehicle.

The victim had been taken to the hospital by a sergeant. He drove her back home after her exam was finished, but when he parked his county vehicle outside her house, she didn’t move. Raw anguish pinned her to the seat. Daylight provided no comfort. She didn’t want to go back inside. It was tricky. The investigators sympathized, but they needed her. The importance of walking the crime scene with them was gently stressed. She consented to a quick walk-through, then left. Friends came and retrieved her belongings later. She never entered the house again.

There’s always the question of what to call an unknown perpetrator in police reports. The choice is often “the suspect,” occasionally “the offender,” or sometimes simply “the man.” Whoever wrote the Danville reports elected to use a term that was stark and unambiguous in its charge, its tone of reproach as if a finger were pointing from the very page. The term affected me the moment I read it. It became my private shorthand for the EAR, the simple term I returned to when I lay awake at three a.m. cycling through a hoarder’s collection of murky half clues and indistinct facial features. I admired the plainness of its unblinking claim.

The responsible.

HOLES PARKS ON A RESIDENTIAL STREET IN DANVILLE THAT’S ADJACENT to the Iron Horse Regional Trail, a path for bikers, horses, and hikers that meanders for forty miles through central Contra Costa: the old Southern Pacific Railroad right-of-way paved over and made pedestrian friendly.

“We’ll get out here and walk,” he says.

We head south down the trail. We’ve walked maybe ten feet before Holes directs my attention to a backyard.

“The bloodhounds tracked the EAR’s escape to the corner of the victim’s yard,” he says. He steps forward. A row of agave plants shields the backside of the fence, hindering any attempt at getting closer.

“He jumps the fence here,” says Holes, pointing. He stares for a long moment at the thick, sword-shaped leaves of the agave plants.

“I bet this homeowner got so freaked out about the attack, they planted this cactus,” he says.

We continue walking. We’re following the path that criminalist John Patty took thirty-five years ago when he scoured the area for evidence after the bloodhounds established the EAR’s exit route. Patty found something during his search. He labeled what he found and sealed the items in a plastic bag; the bag went into a box that was taken to the Property Room and slid in tight against hundreds of identical boxes on a steel shelf. There it remained untouched for thirty-three years. On March 31, 2011, Holes called Property to inquire about the ski cap of an EAR suspect from the 1970s whom he was resurrecting. The director of Property had a box ready when Holes arrived. The ski cap was there. Then Holes noticed a Ziploc bag with a tag that read, “Collected from RR Right of Way.” What he found inside changed the course of his investigation.

Evidence collection, like everything else in police work, requires a paper trail. John Patty’s Scene Evidence Inventory form is hand-scrawled, the answers brief—“1 a) 2 sheets of spiral, 3-hole binder paper bearing pencil writing; b) 1 sheet of spiral, 3-hole binder paper bearing a pencil drawn map; c) 1 length of purple yarn 41 inches in length; d) fragment of paper with typewriting.”

Were the items found together? Scattered across the ground? No photograph or sketch of the scene exists to orient Holes. Patty left a brief notation explaining where along the tracks he found the evidence. That’s it. Holes is able to subject the paper to touch-DNA technology and high-resolution scanning, have multiple experts parse and analyze every aspect of the map, but he lacks one crucial authority who’d give him context: John Patty. He died of cancer in 1991. The bane of cold cases: knowledge disregarded as irrelevant but later deemed critical has died with the knower.

At first, Holes didn’t know what to make of “the homework evidence.” One page appeared to be the start of a poorly written school-assigned essay on General Custer. The content of the second page was more intriguing. “Mad is the word,” it begins. The author rants about sixth grade and the teacher who humiliated him by forcing him to write sentences repeatedly as punishment. “I never hated anyone as much as I did him,” the writer says of the unnamed teacher.

The third page is a hand-drawn map of a residential community, depicting a business area, cul-de-sacs, trails, and a lake. Holes noticed some random doodling on the back of the map.

The evidence puzzled Holes and drew him in fast. Unexpected flashes of clarity kept him pursuing the lead. He cold-called experts for input. An offhand observation by a real estate developer shifted his conception of who the EAR could be. Clues were reconsidered in a new light. Holes knew his theories diverged from his fellow investigators’. He decided not to care too much. He carved out a place for himself as the guy whose views were, as he puts it, “left field.” He asked more questions. He was given several compelling explanations for the curious mix of juvenile writing and obvious design skill exhibited in the evidence. Insights accumulated. The danger of taking a wrong turn in the catacombs always looms in this case. Possibilities extend seductively to the horizon. Individual compasses have built-in design flaws of bias and the need to believe. Still, though no specific bull’s-eye had emerged, a larger target began inching laterally into Holes’s view.

Unexpected discovery is rare in an investigation. It thrills. Deciphering the code that might identify a criminal like the EAR is the turnstile click in the roller-coaster line for a detective. Synapses crackle. The once even-keeled multitasker is officially gripped. The obsessive always remembers the inciting moment. After Holes was finished in Property, he took the pages he found to the nearest photocopier. He was in his lab examining a copy of the hand-drawn map when his clerk spoke up.

“Paul?”

“Hmm?”

“Paul.”

Holes lowered the map and raised his eyebrows. The clerk gestured that he should turn the map over. Holes did. He’d noticed doodling on the back earlier but hadn’t paid close attention. Now he saw what his clerk meant.

There were several illegible words, open to interpretation. Two words had been scribbled out, one vigorously so. The name Melanie could be faintly made out. But there was something else. The word was so incompatible with the rest of the nonsensical doodling that it took a second to absorb its meaning; that, and the fact that the construction of the letters was different, too— outsize, combining cursive with print, the last letter, a T, repeated unnecessarily, taking on a hard, triangular shape. The word’s letters were darker than the others on the page, as if the writer had been pressing down angrily. The rest of the doodles had been scribbled in standard linear fashion, but not this. The word was scrawled diagonally. It took up most of the bottom half of the page. The first letter, a P, was bigger than the other letters and, most disconcertingly, it was backward.

The overall impression was of an unbalanced mind at work.

“PUNISHMENT.”

Holes was hooked.