Bogeyman by Steve Jackson

motivations. He didn’t believe Amanda. Not her claim that she couldn’t remember being interviewed by a police detective. Not her denial of having ever accused her brother of any crimes or deviant behavior towards children.
    In Sweet’s opinion, the Doberneck transcript was too detailed with Penton’s personal history that it could have only come from a family member. Nor would it have made sense for the Columbus detective to create a story out of whole cloth and attribute it to a potentially important witness. How would Doberneck have even known enough to make up that Amanda’s husband and brother used to cruise elementary schools to watch children play? Or that Amanda and her husband had moved to Oklahoma to get away from her brother?
    Sweet suspected that Amanda’s denials stemmed from the fact that she was living in Columbus. The transcript made it obvious that she was afraid of her brother and wasn’t going to cross her mother, who believed that her son “could do no wrong.”
    Replacing the interview document in the box, Sweet dug up other papers associated with the Ohio case. He found an assessment created by an FBI profiler, who’d labeled Penton a “sexual sadist” with a high IQ who collected pornography. He was likely “to have been sexually abused before the age of ten. … and lives with his mother, parents, or an older woman.”
    Penton “likes Asians because they are from a submissive society and will go along with bizarre sex acts (and children will). … Intimidates women in relationships by threats of violence, instills fear through bizarre sex.”
    As a killer, Penton would be “neat, methodical, premeditated … who sets up the fantasy in his mind and acts when he finds a victim to fit it. But does not stalk the victim—is opportunist. … He will not risk kidnapping a victim who will resist; will entice and lure them quietly away if others are around. ” He would act alone: “likes violence, would not share.”
    Penton would also engage in anal intercourse and bondage “because his sexual thrill is fear of the victim.” He would not kill the victim after one sex act, but instead “take (the) victim to an area where he would feel secure enough to do it repeatedly.” A killer of this sort would carry out his attacks “in a place very familiar to him, such as a friend’s vacant house that he had a key to, (or) a vacant (abandoned) house that he knew about, not a wooded area unless extremely remote.”
    When through sexually assaulting his victims, he would “use methods that leave the least physical evidence—strangulation and suffocation, as opposed to stabbing or gunshot, will not risk cutting the body up unless the place where it is done involves no risk.” Then he would “dispose of the body in a preplanned place, not haphazardly dump it. … Will carefully, and methodically, get rid of body, evidence, and cover his tracks.”
    There was one piece of evidence Penton might create and keep, according to the profiler. Depending on his finances or access to equipment, he was likely to record or videotape his atrocities in order to re-enact the fantasy.
    A clever, pathological liar, Penton would also volunteer to search for the victim “even to the point of assuming leadership in the search.” He would stay in close contact with the police to monitor the progress of the investigation. “When interviewed he will interrogate the interrogator on the progress.”
    The profiler’s assessment stopped short of calling Penton a serial killer because he did not “strike regularly, such as monthly.”
    Sweet was not surprised that the report concluded that pursuing a killer like Penton would be “one of the most difficult cases to investigate and prove.” But he was convinced that he was working for a higher power and wasn’t about to be deterred.

CHAPTER TEN

    July 24, 2000

    A fter talking to Sheasby and reviewing the documents from the Ohio investigation, Sweet’s next step fell