“The marks are too symmetrical to be from traditional bindings. Plus, if these were ligature marks we would see them around the ankles. If you were going to tie someone up to control them or to prevent escape, you would tie their ankles. Yet we have no ligature marks in these areas. The wrists, yes, but not on the ankles.”

She was right. I just hadn’t seen it until she explained it.

“So what made those marks on the legs?”

“Well, I can’t say for sure, but when I was in Behavioral, we came upon new paraphilias on almost every case. We started categorizing them.”

“You’re talking about sexual perversions?”

“Well, we didn’t call them that.”

“Why, you had to be politically correct around serial killers?”

“It may be very nuanced, but there is a difference between being perverted and abnormal. We call the behaviors paraphilias.”

“Okay, and these marks, they’re part of a paraphilia?”

“They could be. I think they are marks left by straps.”

“Straps from what?”

“Leg braces.”

I almost laughed.

“You’ve got to be kidding. People get off on leg braces?”

Rachel nodded.

“It even has a name. It’s called abasiophilia. A psychosexual fascination with leg braces. Yes, people get off on it. There are even websites and chat rooms dedicated to it. They call them irons and calipers. Women who wear braces are sometimes called iron maidens.”

I was reminded by how thoroughly intoxicating Rachel’s skill as a profiler had been when we were chasing the Poet. She had been dead-on about the case in many ways. Damn near prescient. And I had been captivated by her ability to take small pieces of information and obscure details and then draw telling conclusions. She was doing it again and I was along for the ride.

“And you had a case with this?”

“Yes, we had a case in Louisiana. A man abducted a woman off a bus bench and held her for a week in a fishing shack out in a bayou. She managed to escape and make her way through the swamp. She was lucky because the four women he grabbed before her didn’t escape. We found their partial remains in the swamp.”

“And it was a basophilia case?”

“Abasiophilia,” she corrected. “Yes, the woman who escaped told us the subject made her wear leg braces that strapped around the legs and had side irons and joints running from her ankles to her hips and several leather straps.”

“This is so creepy,” I said. “Not that there is anything like a normal serial killer, but leg braces? Where does an addiction like this come from?”

“It’s unknown. But most paraphilias are embedded in early childhood. A paraphilia is like a recipe for an individual’s sexual fulfillment. It’s what they need to get off. Why someone would need to wear leg braces or have their partner wear them is anybody’s guess, but it starts young. That is a given.”

“Do you think the guy from your case back then could be—”