The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall

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СКАЧАТЬ already acquainted with drugs and street prostitution. The first two deaths were largely ignored by the general population, dismissed as part of society’s tidal culling of the underclass. It was only with repetition that the murders began to fight their way up out of random noise into story. The videotapes left with the bodies contained between one and two hours of roughly edited camcorder footage that made it clear how unpleasant the victims’ last days had been. Each tape had a cover that featured a picture of the boy, his name, and the word ‘Showreel’.

      The papers dubbed the killer ‘The Casting Agent’, which everyone agreed was very droll. Everyone apart from the parents, that is, but as their grief was embarrassing evidence of the underlying reality of these theatrical events, it was ignored except when required to hype public interest. The relatives were merely the audience to these deeds, not actors, and it’s the actor we like best. Someone we can get to know, a face back-lit through the papers and television. We want a personality. A star.

      Zandt worked the case of the first boy, and after the second victim the FBI became involved. Nina was a young agent with experience, having worked a long bad case in Texas and Louisiana the year before. Between them, through a combination of Zandt’s intuition and legwork, Nina’s analysis of the placings of the bodies, and a break relating to the fact that the perpetrator had registered the camcorder used to make the videos, the killer was found. He was a thirty-one-year-old white male, employed as a graphic designer on the fringes of the music video industry, previously a child extra in long-forgotten movies. In a series of interviews with Zandt he admitted the crimes, providing corollary information and revealing the whereabouts of his talismans, the right hand of each of the victims – which had been squeezed into jars previously holding the product of a prominent instant coffee manufacturer. He eventually led the police to the bodies of two earlier victims, experiments in killing during which he had developed his technique. He placed the blame for his behaviour on having been molested on set as a child, an allegation which fit nicely with the public’s desire for a beginning and a middle for every tale. The truth of the claim proved impossible to establish, and the end of the story was provided when the killer was sliced across the throat with a sharpened spoon by another inmate while awaiting trial. The food chain has victims at both ends: even rapists and murderers need someone to look down on, and kid killers will do nicely. Ultimately The Casting Agent’s story became immortal and endless, celebrated in one moderately successful hack book and innumerable Web sites. A piece of buggy video editing shareware called CastingAgent enjoyed a brief notoriety, as did a store in Atlanta that offered a couch, in a deep splotchy red, which it called The Casting Couch.

      The investigation lasted thirteen weeks. For the last eight of those, John and Nina were sleeping with each other. The affair ended soon after the apprehension of the suspect. Nina had done much of the initial encouragement. Then she stopped doing so, and it came to an end. Zandt never spoke of it to his wife, with whom he had a relationship that was in general cordial and successful, but that had been going through an arid patch. He wanted to lose neither her nor their daughter, and was largely relieved when the affair ended.

      He and Nina met occasionally for lunch over the next five years, while Zandt worked the usual slate of gang slayings, family feuds, and bullet-holed John Does found in alleyways gasping like landed fish and pronounced DOA to general apathy. Some he solved; some he didn’t. So it goes. Nina worked a well-publicized double murder in Yellowstone, a series of disappearances upstate and one more in Oregon, all of which remained unsolved and ongoing. Out in the real world, beyond the curtain of death and misdemeanour that law enforcers live behind, business continued as usual. Bosnia imploded; the President got in trouble with his cigars; we discovered the joys of email and Frasier, of Playstations and Sheryl Crow.

      Then, on December 12th 1999, a teenage girl disappeared in Los Angeles. Josie Ferris, age sixteen, had been celebrating a friend’s birthday over a burger at the Hard Rock Café on Beverly Boulevard. At 9.45 p.m., having said goodbye on the pavement outside the restaurant, she walked alone down toward Ma Maison. She was intending to catch a cab from outside the hotel. Beverly Boulevard is not a back road or an alley. It is a wide and well-travelled street, and on this evening both the forecourt of the hotel and the foyer of the Beverly Center Mall opposite were busy. Nonetheless, somewhere along that three-hundred-yard stretch, she vanished.

      Josie’s failure to return home was reported to the police by 12.50 a.m. On receiving what they considered to be a response of insufficient alacrity, her parents turned up in person to fill out the forms. Mr and Mrs Ferris were possessed of forceful demeanours, and the police were soon taking the incident more seriously, at least while the parents were within earshot. Sadly this made no difference. Their daughter was never seen alive again.

      Two days later a sweater was left outside their house. The name Josie had been stitched into the front, using what was subsequently demonstrated to be the girl’s own hair. The sweater had been a sixteenth birthday present from the girl’s best friend, who had sewn the letters ‘FFE’ onto the sleeve: Friends For Ever. They had been. Eternity had merely turned out to be short. There was no demand for money with the garment. The police started taking the situation very seriously indeed, regardless of who was around to overhear. A task force was set up, coordinated through the FBI’s local SAC, Charles Monroe. The news of the garment’s delivery was eventually released to the press, but not the way in which it had been altered. A month later, no headway of any kind had been made in tracing the missing teenager.

      In late January and early March of 2000, two other girls went missing. Elyse LeBlanc and Annette Mattison failed to return from the cinema and a friend’s house respectively. Both resembled Josie Ferris in trivial ways – they were of a similar age (fifteen and sixteen) and wore their hair long. The LeBlancs and Mattisons were comfortably well-off, and their daughters were attractive and of above-average intelligence. This was not enough to suggest a firm link between the three disappearances, occurring as they did in widely spread parts of the city.

      The arrival of two more sweaters was, however. Again, they were delivered to the family homes, in broad daylight, and again they featured the girl’s name embroidered on the front with their own hair. No further communication was received. The seriousness of the situation led the FBI to keep the second and third disappearances quiet. Most serial kidnappers sought to hide the fact of their abductions. The selection of girls whose absence would be spotted immediately, and the further highlighting of the event through the delivery of the parcels, suggested they were dealing with an unusual individual. One who wanted attention right now.

      They denied him it.

      A week after the disappearance of Annette Mattison, the clothed body of a young woman was found by picnickers in Griffith Park. Though bald, badly burned and deteriorated through the activities of local wildlife, the body was quickly identified through recent dental work and a distinctive piece of jewellery. It was Elyse LeBlanc. It was estimated that she had been dead for approximately half of the period since her abduction, though only recently moved to the location at which she was found. She was discovered to have suffered a number of minor head traumas prior to death, though none had led to her demise. Although the body was immediately forwarded to the federal lab in Washington, no physical evidence of the killer was gained from her clothes or remains. A search of the remainder of the park by local police and the FBI evidence team from Sacramento failed to discover either Josie Ferris’s or Annette Mattison’s body in whole or in part.

      The press embargo was dropped. A call for witnesses garnered nothing more than the usual hoaxes, lunatics, and misinformation. Parents arranged for their teenage daughters to travel in groups.

      Josie’s body turned up ten days later. It was found lying in bushes by the side of a road in Laurel Canyon, in a similar state to that of the LeBlanc girl. Unlike the previous victim, there was evidence of a period of gross sexual abuse.

      By then the killer had a nickname. The media called him The Delivery Boy. This had been suggested unofficially by Special Agent Monroe, who believed that by minimizing him in СКАЧАТЬ