Now as my daughter slept next to me I began with the reports that came after FBI Special Agent Robert Backus had been identified as the suspect. After he had been shot by Rachel Walling and then disappeared.

The summary from the autopsy of a body found by a Department of Water and Power inspector in a storm water tunnel in Laurel Canyon was included here. The body was found almost three months after Backus was shot and had fallen through a window of a cantilevered home near the canyon and disappeared into the darkness and brush below. FBI credentials and a badge belonging to Robert Backus were found on the body. The deterio- rated clothing was also his-a suit hand-tailored for Backus in Italy when he'd been sent over to consult on an investigation of a serial killer in Milan.

However, scientific identification of the body was inconclusive. The remains were badly decomposed, leaving fingerprint analysis impossible. And parts of the body were even missing, initially presumed to have been taken by rats and other animals foraging in the tunnels. The entire lower mandible and upper bridge were missing, precluding a comparison to the dental records belonging to Robert Backus.

Cause of death could not be determined either, though a gunshot wound channel was found in the upper abdomen-the area Agent Walling reported seeing her bullet strike-and a rib was fractured, possibly by the force of a bullet. No bullet fragments were recovered, however, suggesting a through and through wound, and so no comparison to a bullet from Walling's weapon was possible.

No DNA comparison or identification was ever made. After the shooting-when it was thought that Backus might still be alive and on the run-agents descended on the fugitive's home and office. But they were in search of evidence to the crimes he had committed and clues as to why. They did not plan for the possibility that they might one day need to identify his putrefied remains. In a gaffe that would haunt the investigation and leave the bureau open later to charges of malfeasance and cover-up, no potential DNA receptors-hair and skin from the shower drain, saliva from the toothbrush, fingernail clippings from the waste cans, dandruff and hair from the back of the desk chair-were ever collected. And three months later, when the body was found in the storm water tunnel, it was too late. Those receptors were compromised or nonexistent. The building where Backus had owned a condo mysteriously burned to the ground three weeks after the bureau had finished with it. And Backus's office had been taken over and completely renovated and redecorated by an agent named Randal Alpert, who took his place in the Behavioral Sciences unit.

A search for a blood sample from Backus proved futile and once again embarrassing for the bureau. When Agent Walling shot Backus in the house in Los Angeles a small amount of blood had spattered the floor. A sample was collected but then inadvertently destroyed in the lab in Los Angeles when medical waste was disposed of.

A search for blood that Backus may have given during personal medical examinations or as donations to blood banks proved fruitless. Through his own cunning planning, luck, and bureaucratic malfeasance, Backus had disappeared without leaving anything of himself behind.

The search for Backus officially ended with the discovery of the body in the drainage tunnel. Even though scientific confirmation of identity was never made, the credentials, badge and Italian suit were enough for bureau command to act swiftly in announcing closure to a case that had held wide sway in the media and had severely undercut the bureau's already tarnished image.

But meantime a quiet investigation continued into the psychological backgrounding of the killer agent. These were the reports I now read. Led by the Behavioral Sciences section-the very unit in which Backus worked- this investigation seemed more concerned with the ques- tion of why he did what he did than with the question of how he was able to do it under the noses of the top experts in the killing field. This investigative direction was probably a protective measure. They looked at the suspect, not the system. The file was replete with reports of investigations into Agent Backus's early nurturing, adolescence and upbringing. Despite the number of crisply written observations, speculations and summaries, there was very little there. Just a few threads unraveled from the full fabric of personality. Backus remained an enigma, his pathology a secret He was the case that the best and brightest ultimately couldn't crack.

I sorted through the threads. Backus was the son of a perfectionist father-a decorated FBI agent, no less- and a mother he never knew. The father was reported to have been physically brutal to the boy, possibly blaming him for the mother's abandonment of the family, and punished him severely for infractions that included bed-wetting and taunting of neighborhood pets. One report came from a seventh-grade classmate who reported that Robert Backus had once confided that when he was young his father punished him for bed-wetting by handcuffing him to a towel rack in the bathroom shower enclosure. Another former classmate reported that Backus once claimed that he slept each night with a pillow and a blanket in a bathtub because he feared the punishment that wetting the bed might bring. A childhood neighbor reported suspicions that it had been Backus who had killed a pet Dachshund by cutting the dog in half and leaving its parts in a vacant lot.

As an adult Backus exhibited obsessive-compulsive tendencies. He had fixations on cleanliness and order. Many testimonials in this regard came from fellow agents in Behavioral Sciences. Backus was well known in the unit for delaying scheduled meetings for many minutes while he was in the restroom washing his hands. No one ever saw him eat anything for 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.