The Narrows

lunch in the cafeteria at Quantico but a simple grilled cheese isandwich. Every day, a grilled cheese sandwich. He also compulsively chewed gum and would take great pains to make sure he was never out of the Juicy Fruit brand he liked. One agent described his chewing as measured, meaning he believed that Backus may have counted the number of times he chewed each stick of gum, and when a specific number was reached he would then remove the gum and start over with a fresh stick.
    There was a report on an interview with a former fiancee. She told the reporting agent that Backus required her to shower often and extensively, particularly before iand after they made love. She said that while house hunting before the nuptials he told her he would want to have his own bedroom and bathroom. She called off the marriage and ended the relationship when one time he called her a slob because she had kicked off her high heels in her own living room.
    The reports were just glimpses of a damaged psyche. They weren't really clues to anything. Whatever Backus's strange habits were, they still didn't fully explain why he began killing people. Thousands of people suffer from mild to severe forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. They don't add killing to their list of personal tics. Thousands were abused as children. They do not then all become abusers.
    McCaleb had acquired far fewer reports on the reappearance four years later of the Poet-Backus-in Amsterdam. All that was in the file was a nine-page summary report in which the facts of the killings and the forensic findings were recounted. I had skimmed this report before but now read it closely and found aspects of it tying in with the theory I was formulating about the town of Clear.
    In Amsterdam the five known victims were men who were tourists traveling alone. This put them in the same profile as the victims known to be buried in Zzyzx, with the exception of one man who was in Las Vegas with his wife but away from her when she spent the day in their hotel's spa. In Amsterdam the men were last seen in the city's Rosse Buurt zone, where legalized prostitution is carried out in small rooms behind the neon-framed windows where women in provocative clothing offer themselves to passersby. In two of the incidents the Dutch investigators located prostitutes who reported being with the victims the night before their bodies were found floating in the nearby Amstel River.
    Though the bodies were found in different locations in the river, the reports indicated that the point of entry into the water for all five victims was believed to have been the area around the Six House. This location was a property owned by an important family in Amsterdam history. I found this of interest, partly because Six House and Zzyzx sounded a bit alike to me. But also because of the question of whether the killer had chosen the Six House randomly or in some attempt to flaunt his crimes at authority by choosing a structure that symbolized it.
    The Dutch detectives never got much further with the investigation. They never found the mechanism by which the killer got to the men, controlled them and killed them. Backus would have never even made a blip on their suspect radar if he hadn't wanted to be noticed. He sent the police the notes that asked for Rachel Walling and led to his identity. The notes, according to the summary report, contained information about the victims and crimes that seemingly only the killer would know. One note contained the passport of the last victim.
    To me the connection between Amsterdam 's Rosse Buurt and Clear, Nevada, was obvious. Both were places where sex was legally exchanged for money. But more important, they were places where I assumed men might go without telling others, where they might even take measures to avoid leaving a trail. In some ways this made them perfect targets for a killer and perfect victims. It added an extra degree of safety to the killer.
    I finished my survey of McCaleb's file on the Poet and started through it once more, hoping that I had missed something, maybe just one detail that would bring the whole picture into focus. Sometimes it happens that way. A missed or misunderstood detail becomes the key to the whole puzzle.
    But I didn't find that detail on the second go-round and soon the reports just seemed repetitive and tedious. I grew tired and somehow I ended up thinking about that kid handcuffed in the shower. I kept picturing that scene and I felt