The Euthanist (29 page)

“They moved around a lot.”

“They did.” He got up from his chair and pointed out different areas of the map. “Largely kept to the general region, but here’s them in Stockton, Pleasanton, then over here in Sebastapol, down in San Rafael, then El Cerrito and a few places in Richmond.” On the map, he’d written dates by each location with a marker. “The green tacks are where children went missing.” Each green tack was a knuckle’s distance away from a pair of yellow and blue. “Here’s an example. Over here in Sebastapol, Walter and Helena rented a studio apartment from 1976 to 1978. In 1978, right before they moved, Gayle Nelson was abducted on the way from school to her house. Seven years old. The path from her home to school was about a quarter mile, and she walked it every day.” His finger landed on a crimson pushpin.

“Where did they find her?”

“They didn’t.”

I counted the green tacks. Eleven, just like Cindy Coates told me. “They didn’t find any of them?”

“The only remains that ever turned up belonged to Julie Diehl. She was captive with Cindy and Veda. They buried her in the dirt under the shed where they kept Cindy and Veda, to discourage them from running.” I remembered what Cindy had told me, and as my next thought formed, he amended himself. “Plus, the portion of Cindy’s leg they cut off and buried there as well.” He tapped one of the children’s portraits. “This was Julie.”

Julie Diehl had been a freckle-faced brunette who wouldn’t smile for the camera.

“You think eight other children were abducted by Walter and Helena?”

“They drove a ratty olive green station wagon, pretty distinctive. Tinted windows in the back. They hollowed out the backseat and installed a box long enough to lock up the kids after they took them. That’s how they transported them without being seen. It was a family-friendly vehicle, so people weren’t as likely to suspect it. Witnesses saw their vehicle around these locations. We have security footage of the car popping up at local gas stations and convenience stores.” He pointed to a few printouts tacked to the board, photographs of the car. They seemed staged, probably taken once they’d impounded the vehicle. The station wagon sat on soft tires and was painted an army green; a color no one wanted, so Walter and Helena might have bought it cheap. The tinted windows back then made the glass purple. It looked dingy, but not so bad I’d immediately call the cops. Leland was right—I’d have remembered that car.

A printout of security camera footage, marked with a time stamp in the lower left, showed a grainier version of the car, but it was definitely the car. You could read the plates on one of the video stills. Higher quality photographs had been taken once the car was in custody. The windshield had a hairline crack. For some reason, the cargo space held a red plastic sled, even though it never snowed in the Bay Area. Two photographs showed the backseat—on the surface, it looked like a padded vinyl bench, but when the bench slid to the side, like the top of a coffin, it revealed a hollowed plywood cabinet that could hold a child.

“That’s all you’ve got?”

“That’s all you need in some cases. In addition to the car, witnesses saw both of them wandering around town. Walter and Helena stuck out.”

“This never came up in the trials.”

“For a lot of reasons. They lined the lockbox in the backseat with plastic and bleached it, so we couldn’t pull DNA. We searched, but didn’t have any evidence on the rest of the kids, so we kept a tight case around Veda, Cindy, and Julie.”

“Are you sure that they’re all dead?”

“That’s our educated guess. Walter’s in prison. Helena was in prison for a long time and was just released. If they kept anyone else captive, those kids would have died by now. If the children ran away, they would have been found by now.”

I pointed to the map, dreading his answer to my next question. “You think you’ve accounted for everyone?”

“I hope so, but you never know. What we came up with here is a conservative estimate of all the abductions that are probably tied to Walter Gretsch and Helena Mumm. When we started pulling this together, other families came to us thinking that they’d stolen their kids too. We looked at every case. But these are the ones where the patterns matched up.”

“What do you think happened?”

“We think Walter and Helena killed eight children and transported them, in that olive station wagon, to some central burial ground. Someplace tucked away.” He pointed to the middle of the map, a region what would have been easy to drive to from any of the pins. “That what we’re trying to find. We’re trying to find them.”

When I visited Helena Mumm, she talked fondly about a garden that she and Walter tended. A garden she tended with their kids. I imagined what that might mean now. Then, I remembered Leland’s son emptying his guts in the bathroom. “Why are you doing this? It can’t be healthy for Veda.”

“You think I don’t know my own son? I know it’s hard for him to see this.”

I accused. “Then why the hell do you do it?”

He rubbed his eyes. “Because I get to give those people hope.”

“You’re hunting for dead bodies. How is that hope?”

“It’s the hope that they might have closure. It’s a form of hope. And there’s always the tiniest chance that I’m wrong, and that their kids are alive. And if that happens it will bring me a joy that I can’t describe.”

“Why does it have to be you?”

“Because I never had hope.” He clarified. “Tesmer always held out that Veda was still alive. She always believed it. And I knew I had to fake it, so I’d go along with her and tell her he’d be coming back to us any day. But I knew—I
knew
. I’d worked on enough of these cases to know my son was dead. And it was the loneliest feeling in the world.” He let me sit with that for a moment. “Look—most of those people down there are in the same boat. They’ve lost blood. The last time they saw their child, he or she was a child. If they’d have grown up, they’d be your age or older. But those kids probably died
as
kids, and they’re still children in the minds of their families. When a child gets taken…it’s the worst thing someone can go through. Believe it. Sometimes the parents stick together, but not always. Some friends will stay loyal—but not all of them. You don’t have the community behind you the way you think you would, because the mere fact that your child went missing casts you in a suspicion that you never shake. Your neighbors—even your church—might think you killed them. And even if you didn’t kill them yourself, somehow you screwed up and let them be killed.” He set up a straw man so he could give me a taste of how his network of friends and colleagues had turned against him. “I mean, what kind of parent would let this happen to his own kid? A child’s a responsibility, right? So anyone who is negligent enough to let this happen to his child
deserves
it.” He rocked back on his chair. “If you’d lived through it, you’d know. You can’t
untaint
the taint.”

“So nothing changed when you found Veda?”

“I didn’t find Veda,” he said bitterly. I caught his frustration, understandable from an FBI agent who couldn’t find his own child. His shame ran so deep he didn’t want to articulate it, only adding, “It was luck. That and the colossal balls of my son to write that note hanging on the wall.”

“Your church really asked you to leave?”

“The reverend asked us to take some time off.”

“Have you gone back?”

“We switched churches,” he said.

“What happened to you as a family…you’re sure that’s what happens to all those families down there?”

“More or less from what they tell me. Hopefully, what we do makes it less bumpy than it was for Tesmer and me.”

“But this hurts Veda.”

“I’m doing it for Veda as much as anyone else. This isn’t putting him through hell—my son is
in
hell. I’m trying to get him out. I expect him to be uncomfortable, but I’m doing this because I love him.”

I scanned the layers of paper on the walls. “Does Veda ever come up here?”

“Hell no.” He slid out the bottom desk drawer. “That’s why we keep these up here.” I nosed over and saw a bundle of forks. Dinner and salad forks, probably sixteen, enough for eight servings. Leland picked up a salad fork. Twinkling off the prongs, the streetlights gave it the illusion of sharpness. “My boy has a phobia of these. Forks of all things.”

“Why didn’t you just get rid of them?” I asked.

“Because I want him to get over this, eventually. But my son is a fragile young man, Kali. At this point, you’ve seen enough to know that.” I nodded to acknowledge this. “You know, I went to Cal. Got both degrees there—bachelor’s and my JD. In a perfect world, I would let all this go and spend my Saturdays having a few beers with my son at the Cal game. But you know what? Every time there’s a touchdown and that cannon goes off at the stadium, my son almost craps his pants.” He dropped the fork back in the drawer, and it rattled like coinage when it hit the other utensils.

“What’s the FBI’s role in this?”

His tone sharpened. “The FBI doesn’t know I’m doing this. I wouldn’t host a barbecue for victim’s families as part of an FBI investigation—come on. These are cold cases. What we’re doing here is a volunteer effort.”

“So no one in the bureau is working with you?”

“No one would want to touch this.”

I didn’t want to steer the conversation, but this was my first chance to test whether I could be free. “Was the FBI ever investigating me?”

“Of course it was.”

“How did you find me?”

“I’m what they call a squad leader—drug squad. We found the guy who was selling you the thiopental and pancuronium. Haven’t heard from him in a while, have you?”

His name was Dylan, and someone from the network initially found him for me. “I’m not in touch with him that often. I guess it’s been a few months. He gave you my name?”

“Not exactly. He kept a journal—you were the only person he sold those drugs to. No one else made anything of it, but I know those aren’t recreational. I was curious to see who would bulk order chemicals that they use in lethal injections.”

“Is anyone else curious?”

Leland assured me, “The bureau can live with another cold case.”

I bought the conversation back around. “Walter never confessed to any of this.”

“He played the crazy card. He never outright confessed to anything. All that babbling about demons giving him urges—it wasn’t a confession. He never gave us anything useful. Helena played the victim all along. It didn’t work for her at first—she got sent up. But in the end it paid off. The parole board thought of her as a disease-addled woman who wasn’t in her right mind. Because they felt like if a woman was head over heels for her own brother, by definition she couldn’t possibly be in her right mind. I believe they were wrong about her.”

“You think killing Helena Mumm would help you bring Veda to a Cal game?”

He leaned back and fingered his chin. “You keep thinking I wanted you to kill Helena Mumm, but all I asked for was an injection.”

“What are you trying to say? I know what was in that needle.” Some chemical hallucinogen called pharmahuasca. I didn’t know much about it other than what I found through Jeffrey’s lab tech.

“The beauty of working on drug squad, you find out about all kinds of things.”

Leland unlocked his top desk drawer, which might normally store highlighters and binder clamps. “If you know what it was, you know it wasn’t a poison.” He pulled out a ziplock plastic bag full of what looked like vitamin capsules. “Aya,” he said. “Aya, for short. Although this isn’t ayahuasca so much as—”

“Pharmahuasca. A synthetic version.”

“What do you know about it?”

“It’s peyote with an edge.”

He admired what was in his bag. I kept thinking about the moral code that the FBI is reputed to have among its agents. Possibly it was a myth, or Leland Moon may have just strayed from that code to keep illegal narcotics in his desk drawer. “To cook up the organic version, you’d usually need a shaman. He’d mix it up and you’d smoke it during a ritual. You’re right about the synthetic version—this version—being more potent. Sort of like the difference between mushrooms and LSD. You extract the DMT—that’s dimethytryptamine—and refine the drug to a purer form. It’s soluble in water. Mix it with a saline solution and it’s even injectable. It lasts for up to twelve hours or so, and you go through extreme visions. Twelve hours of nightmares so vivid you can touch them.”

“You’ve tried it.”

“Of course I did. I had to find out what it would be like.” So this was something that Leland Moon had in common with Jeffrey Holt. “It was the single most terrifying event of my life, and that includes my own son being taken from me. Because at least Veda’s kidnapping was grounded in the known world. This stuff,” he said as he held it against the window light, “is like being sent to hell.”

“Aren’t FBI agents supposed to be drug free?”

“Don’t tell anyone,” he winked at me, so casual about breaking a bureau commandment.

“How did you get that?”

“We’re in Berkley, California. Throw a rock and you’ll hit someone who’s studied with a shaman.” He tugged his clear plastic tote like a puppeteer. “These goodies came off a bust in Richmond.”