When she took time to consider it, Ms. Eberlein thought it an odd and even disturbing subject for a social studies report, but she had to admit it qualified as current events. Off and on for three and a half years, the Wicker Man had been reliable front-page news in the city, a recurring nightmare for six million people. He didn’t strike in a regular pattern – at one time there was a nine-month gap between homicides with the killer’s signature – but every time the city relaxed, every time the nightclubs on the West Side filled up with carefree twenty-somethings, every time folks felt safe alone on the El, every time people stopped calling friends and family to let them know they arrived home safely, another body would appear, a lifeless message breaking across the morning news programs.
News of a fresh killing was particularly stressful for young single females like Ms. Eberlein. All but two of the Wicker Man’s eleven victims had been women, and police suspected the men were not intended targets. In both cases they believed the men had responded to cries for help, or had been killed because they witnessed the crime. Like thousands of other young Chicagoans, Ms. Eberlein had taken a self-defense class at her neighborhood gym and armed herself with pepper spray. After four years of living by herself downtown, Ms. Eberlein sold her condo (paid for by her parents when she received her master’s degree) and moved into an apartment with space enough for a roommate and a rottweiler.
So it wasn’t entirely surprising that one of her juniors wanted to do a report on the Wicker Man murders. What concerned her was the student’s age. Justin Finn had skipped three grades before landing in her class, and he was so bright it was unnerving to think he was only fourteen. When he first came into her classroom last semester, she wondered casually if he had a single hair on his body beyond the long, curly blond mess that sprawled across his head, then she banished the thought with a self-reproaching scowl. It was bad enough when she noticed the emerging sexuality of the older boys in the school. She couldn’t deny that Justin would be a good-looking young man someday, however, probably around the time he got his law degree at nineteen.
“What’s amazing about the Wicker Man is that he hasn’t left any physical evidence,” Justin explained to the class. “Nearly all violent criminals leave something behind – blood, hair, semen” – a boy in the back of the room guffawed, and a girl sitting in front of him rolled her eyes and grinned – “but not the Wicker Man. This has given him an almost supernatural aura in the mind of the public. I’d compare him in some ways to the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco, whose cryptic notes and spooky costume compounded the terror of his killings. The Wicker Man is a real-life bogeyman.”
“How do you think he’s been able to avoid leaving evidence?” Ms. Eberlein asked. Students were encouraged to interrupt the speaker at any time with a relevant question. It made the exercise less boring for her, kept the class engaged, and made it difficult for the presenter to learn only fifteen minutes of facts. Usually she had to ask the first question herself, however.
Justin nodded and held up his bound report as if to say the answer was within. “Clearly he spends a lot of time with the bodies after they’re dead. We know this because of the peculiar pose he leaves them in – the details of which police have managed to keep secret. Obviously this also gives him time to clean up. Some police believe he uses a condom” – another muffled snicker – “and that’s certainly possible, but just about every one of the attacks have taken place on nights when it’s raining. I think that’s deliberate. He lets nature wash away any trace of him. Also, people with their heads hunched under an umbrella or a hood are less likely to be aware of other pedestrians or suspicious activity. His victims can’t see him coming, and potential witnesses are less likely to notice.”
Impressive. Ms. Eberlein hadn’t heard that theory before. She mentally added it to the list of street-smart facts that might someday save her life.
A girl named Lydia raised her hand and Justin nodded at her.
“I remember, like, three months ago, the police said they had a suspect and this guy with a bad mustache was all over the TV, but they never arrested him and then I never heard anything more about it. What happened to him?”
Justin grimaced. “That’s been a major embarrassment for the police. The suspect’s name was Armand Gutierrez, and he was connected to two of the female victims. One had been in a ballroom-dancing class with him at the Discovery Center and another was a regular customer at the grocery store where he worked. Investigators thought it was just too big a coincidence, and so everything about him seemed suspicious after that. He had some kind of weird porn collection – nothing illegal, but it piqued the interest of the cops who searched his apartment. He was also a butcher in an Italian deli, and one of the male victims had been carved up brutally with a big knife. The police have been under intense pressure from City Hall to solve the case, and they leaked his name to the press last October in order to get some good news out there before the mayoral election. But Gutierrez had alibis for almost every night a body was found, and they just couldn’t make the case. Some cops still think he’s the killer, but the state’s attorney and the FBI have pretty much written Gutierrez off. He’s suing the city, by the way, and will probably make out with a bundle.”
“You mentioned the FBI.” A popular boy the kids all called Foo didn’t wait for Justin to call on him. “Do they have a, you know, what do you call that, where they look at the crime scenes and they write up what they think the killer is like-”
“A profile, ” Justin said. “Yeah, they believe he’s a white male, between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, highly intelligent, if not educated, probably lives in Wicker Park or Ukrainian Village, or at least on the North or Near West Side. He’s shown incredible restraint – being able to go months, it appears, without killing anyone. The FBI believes this means that he is either in a highly supervised situation – that is, he’s institutionalized in some way, perhaps in a treatment facility or a halfway house, and his opportunities are somehow limited – or that he leaves the city for long stretches of time, or that he’s killed many more people than we know and has just done a better job of hiding their bodies.”
Ms. Eberlein, who was sitting in Justin’s usual chair, raised her hand. “You’ve obviously spent some time with this subject. Which of those scenarios do you think is most likely?”
Justin was standing behind a portable lectern that had been set up on Ms. Eberlein’s metal desk and he ducked his head modestly, as if he were looking for something among the notes in front of him. “None of them, actually.” He smiled. “I think he leads a pretty normal life – he might even be very successful, given that everyone agrees he is intelligent – and that he has another way of blowing off steam. Whatever it is that compels him to kill, he has another way of sublimating” – scoffing from somewhere, as if to say no fourteen-year-old would use that word if they weren’t just showing off – “his desire. Maybe he has an aggressive hobby, like boxing. Or maybe he’s into sadomasochism” – outright laughter – “and he’s able to get his kicks in nonlethal ways. But every once in a while, something just builds up inside him and he can’t help himself. He has to kill.”
Ms. Eberlein raised her eyebrows and whistled. “I think you’d make a pretty good FBI profiler yourself, Justin. It sounds like you’ve really gotten inside this guy’s head.” For better or worse, she thought to herself.
The bell rang and the students offered up lazy applause, and Justin smiled at Ms. Eberlein and switched places with her long enough to retrieve his books from under his chair. As the students bottlenecked at the door, she shouted the names of tomorrow’s presenters after their backs and opened her black vinyl grade book, where she wrote next to Justin’s name, “Creepy. A+.”