Page 89 of What Boys Learn

“Willa mentioned to me that we seemed to have an increase in murders of women during her lifetime. I was a kid, so this was maybe twenty-five or thirty years ago at most. Late ’90s onward.”

“Not a lot of people pick up on that. I think it’s one of those tunnel vision things. For a long time, people assumed your average quiet white guy wasn’t the kind of person who would murder. But then we had the golden age of serial killers—’70s through about 2000—and the thinking reversed. The quiet white guy became the prime suspect.”

“Right. So?”

“And in our area, it wasn’t just the quiet white guy. It was the gay loser who targeted vulnerable young men. We had John Wayne Gacy, doing his clown thing in the ’70s—that was the Chicago area. We had Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal, in the ’80s up until ’91. These guys were weird as hell and dumb as stumps. Only people dumber were the cops who didn’t catch them.

“Both men died in ’94. Two terrifying murderers, out of everyone’s hair. Before, detectives didn’t understand about men preying on men. But after Gacy and Dahmer, that’s what they started looking for, if they looked for anything at all. Like I said, a lot of people thought the age of serial killers was over.”

“So now there was a new kind of tunnel vision?”

“Yeah, and a lot of self-congratulation—like police and FBI finally knew what they were dealing with. Which only continued in the 2000s. Like Willa told you, there seemed to be more killings of local women in the late ’90s, but then that wave passed, too. Supposedly.”

“I get the sense you don’t think it really passed.”

“I think we started finding fewer bodies. And the ones we found didn’t seem connected in ways anyone could figure. But maybe that’s because we weren’t dealing with killers who were as dumb as Gacy and Dahmer.”

“That sounds ominous.”

I turned over the pizza flyer to use the blank side on the back for scribbling notes. “Where’s that table that shows the dates victims disappeared?”

He dug through a folder and pulled out several photocopied pieces of paper. “Which counties you want?”

“For Illinois, Lake, and McHenry. For Wisconsin, whatever is just north of there.”

He pulled out three tables: Kenosha, Racine, and Walworth. “And I’ll give you a couple extra counties farther west. Not a lot of disappearances, because the populations are smaller, but an increasing number of disposal sites, starting in . . .” He flipped through loose pages until he’d found the right one. “Maybe twenty years ago.”

It was going to be a bigger job than I thought. I fetched my laptop and opened a spreadsheet.

I said, “These were disposals of bodies from . . . ?”

“Closer to us. North Shore and north to the border. Some from Kenosha-Racine.”

“And where did the disposals cluster, before then?”

“Closer to where the girls and women were picked up.”

“So over time, bodies were being disposed farther away, which isn’t part of the national trend or anything like that graph you first showed me.”

Robert laughed. “Maybe gas prices were going down.”

“Well, were they?”

A minute later he looked away from his phone and back at the papers spread across the table. “No, they were going up. At least until 2009, gas was a little cheaper, but then it started climbing again.”

The maps were a confusing mess of multicolored dots, the margins crowded with names and codes. I needed to see it all chronologically, organized in a way I could re-sort each time new data was added, until the patterns became clearer.

It took longer than I’d expected, the two of us busy using Google Maps and paper maps, me telling Robert to pause as I sorted rows and made room for another girl last seen at a highway rest stop, a girl gone missing from a party held on a farm, a girl who’d gone canoeing with someone she met in a campground, a girl who’d called a rideshare service but was gone by the time the driver arrived. And those were just the ones who’d later be found dead. We had to consider the ones who had never been found, whether the cops considered their cases open or closed.

Robert put the ground beef back in the fridge and called for pizza. The pizza came. Benjamin ate in his room, watching YouTube videos, and I didn’t dissuade him because I didn’t want him to ask what we were doing.

Over the next hour, I made additional spreadsheets, focusing on the few cases in which the killers were known.

“Let’s add Veronica Lovell, too.”

“That seems like bad luck.”

I added her hometown and the place from which she’d disappeared: twenty-eight miles apart.