Inside the Mind of BTK

294 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
tribes used these as protection against bad dreams. You simply hang
one up over your bed, and the nightmares get caught in the yarn
before reaching your head.
I wondered if Rader’s daughter had ever resorted to using one of
these. When I heard through some sources that she was a cop buff, I’d
written her a letter, letting her know that I wanted to ask her some
questions about her father. I never received a reply.
God knows she could use one of these, I told myself. Maybe I’ll pick
one up for her on the way out and mail it to her.
I made my way over to a large counter where a young woman stood;
I told her why I’d come, and she handed me several sheets of paper.
“You gotta fill these out,” she said.
I took a seat on a wooden bench and went to work on the forms.
All around me, visitors were feeding dollar bills into machines
mounted on the walls, transforming their cash into tokens that could
later be used in the commissary. The room sounded like the slots section
of Las Vegas casino.
A few moments after I returned the visitation forms to her, the
clerk motioned me back to the counter and pointed at them. She had
questions about what I’d written.
“What’s your relationship with the inmate?” she asked.
“Friend,” I told her, feeling ridiculous telling someone I was Dennis
Rader’s friend.
“What’s your occupation?”
“Former FBI agent.”
She wrote the word “investigator” in the blank, read over the form,
then excused herself, disappearing through a door into a back office
with several people in it. A moment later, she returned.
“Seems to be a bit of problem,” she said.
Even though I half expected her to say this, I felt my heart begin
to pound. Doing my best to look utterly unconcerned, I smiled. She
trotted back into her office again, only to reappear thirty seconds later.
“Actually there are two problems,” she said.
I wasn’t interested in hearing what either of them might be. I
wouldn’t be leaving El Dorado without talking to Rader. If he
wanted to shut down the interview, so be it. But I’d waited too long,
traveled too many miles, and jumped through too many hoops to
get here. So I dropped the names of some heavies in the state’s law
enforcement and Department of Corrections world who had either