“Yeah, me neither.” I feel the oxygen in the room dip. Feel us both spinning our wheels. After a while, I say, “Somehow there had to be enough trust built up between them that Cameron agreed to meet him late at night. How did that happen? What would it take for this particular guy not to scare her off but draw her closer? That’s the magic question.”

Will makes a sound of agreement. “Emily said she’d never even had a boyfriend, remember?”

“Exactly. Shannan might have been someone he hooked up with, but I’m starting to wonder if his attraction to Cameron could be something else. If she’s some sort of ideal.”

“Meaning what?”

“I’ve seen this come up a lot in profiling,” I say, reaching for language that will help him understand my line of thinking. “Guys who are outsiders and can’t get close to people sometimes fixate on an innocent as a chance to redeem themselves. Or that’s the story they want to believe.”

“Wait. So he’s not a psychopath?”

Clearly I haven’t succeeded. “Maybe he is,” I try again. “But even the most twisted minds want love and connection. Maybe the reason we haven’t found Cameron’s body yet is because he thinks she can make everything bad inside him feel right again. Fix the ways the world has hurt him.”

“I don’t know,” Will says doubtfully. “That’s a pretty big hypothesis, Anna. Why are you assuming this guy has been wounded?”

I stare at him, feeling frustrated and out of sorts. This day has been too long, and way too hard. This week, and month, and year. “Because that’s how you make a predator.”

(fifty-three)

One year Frank Leary gave everyone at Searchlight a copy of a book called Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives and told us to treat it like the Bible. The writers were two FBI criminalists and a psychiatric nurse specialist who organized and conducted dozens of interviews with convicted killers and torturers, psychopaths, sociopaths, pedophiles, and sexual sadists, trying to understand the criminal mind in a systematized way they could share with professionals as a teaching tool.

It was provocative stuff, to be sure. The agents had gone into maximum-security prisons all over the country to sit across an interview table from Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Edward Kemper, and thirty-three others, hoping to learn from them. Not the facts of their cases or convictions, and not whether they could ever be rehabilitated, but what they were thinking in the moments before, during, and after the murders they committed. How and why they selected certain victims, what their triggers were, where their violent fantasies began, and what the most exciting parts of the crime were—basically how these brutal killers thought and what they felt around all aspects of what they’d done.