Page 88 of What Boys Learn

“Thank god, because he wasn’t even born when half this stuff happened.”

I rolled my eyes. “I know that, Robert.”

“Then?”

“Let’s just say my view has expanded. The world’s a more violent place than I thought. It’s the world in which Benjamin will be living and I need to understand it.”

That seemed to satisfy him. I would have told him everything if I had more than just a feeling, too shadowy to pin down.

“Suit yourself. As long as you skip the photos, this stuff is actually pretty dry. Half of it is numbers and tables and stuff.”

Robert started with a simple graph. “This is the first one that got me thinking.”

The graph showed the changing behavior of over fifty known serial killers over time, according to how many victims they had murdered. One line tracked the distance killers had traveled from home in order to kill—never very far. The other line tracked the distance killers had traveled to dump bodies—an average of fourteen miles. The more victims a killer had—the longer he’d killed, in other words—the less he was willing to travel in order to kill or dump.

“It’s like I’ve told you. Killers get lazy,” Robert explained. “And cocky. The longer they’re not caught, the more they become convinced they never will be. And sometimes they seem to take extra chances on purposes, like it’s fun. You know you see serial killers taunting police in stupid movies? It’s not stupid. Many of them do that. They seem to need stimulation, whatever the cost.”

“So, the FBI already has that figured out.”

“Yeah, but we don’t have the same sort of stats and graphs for every part of the country. And we can’t pin down the patterns for the cases where we don’t know the killer—or even if a womanwaskilled. Add in unsolved crimes and missing women, and everything gets a lot more complicated.”

He showed me some maps he’d made on his own for murders from our area, confirming the same general patterns found among well-known serial killers. In cases that seemed connected, even if the killer was not identified and arrested, the pickup and disposal sites got closer and closer over the lifetime of the person assumed to be responsible.

“How about these?”

I pointed to some other associated dot pairs that got farther apart over time.

“Those are cases where the early crimes—especially the very first killings—are haphazard, less planned, carelessly executed.”

“Like Christopher Weber’s.”

“We’ll never know if he would have gained enough selfcontrol to become more careful over time.”

“So some of them do become more careful.”

“A smaller subset, and obviously, we know the least about them, because in many cases, they’re never caught.”

I saw a margin notation for Harper McKibben along with the color-coded dots indicating where she was picked up, not far from her home, and where her body was found.

“You didn’t mention that she was part of some serial killer spree.”

“Not an identified one. But if she was a first, she was a surprisingly clean and disciplined first. If that person kept killing—as a few FBI reports have hypothesized—it just means that particular killer did an even better job later.”

“Better how?”

“Better choice of victim. The person is never missed. Or better choice of disposal site. The victim is reported missing but never found. Either way, it can’t get definitively logged as a homicide.”

A half hour later, I checked the meat. It was still frozen. Screw it, I’d order pizza after all, as long as they would deliver. I got us two more beers.

“Now I understand,” I said to Robert. “You really wanted to be a detective.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I hope you haven’t blown your chance. I didn’t realize how many monsters are out there.”

“Downside of being a cop. You know the worst that people can do. It gets in your head.”

I studied the maps some more.