"But whoever he was, he was still out there," I prompted.
"Yeah, he was. Then I read about this other murder, maybe after I was in a year or so. The girl was younger than Annie, but she was taken from her bed, same as Annie, and held for a week or more. No one else connected the two murders because they were so sure I did the first one."
I hadn't known how Annie was abducted and chastised myself for not seeking the details. I had to catch my breath. Was it possible this was the same killer we were tracking, fifteen years later? The odds against the coincidence were astronomical, until I considered the facts. Daniel Brennan had told me the list of true serial killers on the loose at any one time was limited. It was a small but evil cadre. We were engaged in locating all of their victims we could find. If Annie's abductor was still operating, that literally reversed the odds that we'd knock heads with him if he remained active!
I thought Willard Humphries would react to my surprised look but he continued. "There was one guy, different from all the rest. You have to understand; in lockup, there are some who spew bull shit all the time and others who won't open their mouths and some who keep swearing they got framed so you've got to take what you hear in there and sort through the garbage. This one guy, I was his cell mate for a few months about the middle of my stretch; he was plain different. When he bragged, you felt like he was holding back, not exaggerating."
"Was he from the Santa Barbara area?"
"A little north of there, up the coast. I don't remember the name of the town but that didn't matter. See, we tried not to play in our own backyard. We'd go twenty, thirty miles away to do our business, moving to different towns. Back then, the cops didn't have all this computer stuff and DNA and half the time, one jurisdiction didn't have a clue what was happening next door, much less in the next county."
"What made this guy so different from the others?"
"First off, he was an asshole. He thought everyone else was below him and not in the usual way." I looked at Willard for clarification. "All the main line murderers, gangsters and gang bangers looked down on us sex offenders like puke on the sidewalk but the pecking order didn't stop there. You see, guys who just hunted down women looked down on the children snatchers and the scum that took on little girls thought they were a rank better than the little boy snatchers. Stupid, huh? But that's the way it was inside; you always have to find somebody lower than you. But this guy figured he was better than everyone else in the place. He had this funny, prissy way of talking, old fashioned-like . . . using big words when he didn't have to, always trying to impress."