The Narrows

had been working many cases at once. And it was clear he still had a pipeline into the FBI and the Behavioral Sciences unit at Quantico. I spent a whole hour reading the fat file he had accumulated on the Poet, one of the more notorious if not embarrassing serial killer cases in the FBI annals. The Poet was a killer later revealed to be the FBI agent who had been heading the squad essentially hunting for himself. It was a scandal that had rocked the bureau and its vaunted Behavioral Sciences Section eight years before. The agent, Robert Backus, chose homicide detectives as his victims. He staged the killing scenes as suicides, leaving behind suicide notes containing verses from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. He killed eight men across the country in a period of three years before a reporter discovered the false suicides and the manhunt began. Backus was revealed and shot by another agent in Los Angeles. At the time he was supposedly targeting a detective from the homicide table in the LAPD's Hollywood Division. That was my table. The target, Ed Thomas, was my colleague and that was my connection. I remember taking a very high personal interest in the Poet.
    Now I was reading the inside story. Officially the case was closed by the bureau. But the unofficial word had always been that Backus had gotten away. After being shot Backus initially escaped into the storm-water tunnel system that ranged beneath Los Angeles. Six weeks later a body was found with a bullet hole in the right place but decomposition made a physical identification and fingerprint comparison impossible. Foraging animals-it was reported-had made off with parts of the body, including the lower mandible and the only teeth that could have been used for identification through dental records. Backus had also conveniently disappeared without leaving DNA exemplars behind. So they had the body with the bullet hole but nothing to compare it to. Or so they said. The bureau quickly announced that Backus was presumed dead and the file was closed, if only to bring a speedy end to the agency's humiliation at the hands of one of its own.
    But the records McCaleb had accumulated since then confirmed that the folklore was true. Backus was still alive and out there. Somewhere. Four years earlier he had surfaced in Holland. According to confidential FBI bulletins provided by bureau sources to McCaleb, a killer took the lives of five men over a two-year period in Amsterdam. All the victims were foreign visitors who had disappeared after venturing into the city's red-light district. Each man was found strangled and floating in the Amstel River. What connected the killings to Backus were notes sent to local authorities in which the writer took credit for the killings and asked that the FBI be called into the case. The writer, according to the confidential reports, asked specifically for Agent Rachel Walling, the agent who had shot Robert Backus four years earlier. The police in Holland invited the FBI to take an unofficial look at the case. The sender had signed each letter as simply "The Poet." FBI handwriting analysis of the letter indicated-not conclusively-that the writer was not a killer trying to ride the notorious coattails of Robert Backus, but Backus himself.
    Of course, by the time the bureau, local authorities and even Rachel Walling mobilized in Amsterdam, the killer was long gone. And Robert Backus had not been heard from again-at least as far as Terry McCaleb's sources knew.
    I replaced the thick file in one of the boxes and moved on. I soon learned that McCaleb was not just working old cases. In fact, anything that caught his attention was subject to his focus and skills. There were dozens of files that contained only a single newspaper story and some notes jotted on the file flap. Some cases were high profile, others obscure. He put together a file of newspaper clips on the Laci Peterson case, the disap- pearance of a pregnant woman from Central California on Christmas Eve two years before. The case had garnered long-term media and public attention, particularly after her dismembered body was found in the bay where her husband had earlier told investigators he had been fishing when she disappeared. An entry on the file flap dated before the woman's body was found said, "Definitely Dead-in the water." Another note dated before her husband's arrest said, "There's another woman."
    There was also a file with seemingly prescient notes on Elizabeth Smart, a child