Inside the Mind of BTK

324 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
make ends meet. So far, people have chosen to respect her privacy and
leave her alone, including me. Ever since her husband’s arrest, she’s
spent most of her time living with her parents and said she had no
interest in ever again stepping foot in the house where she and Dennis
lived for over thirty years.
Shortly before reaching Rader’s house, I decided to take a short
detour and stop by Rader’s place of employment to see if there was
anything I might have missed during my visit there with Landwehr
months before. For fourteen years, Rader’s job in Park City’s city hall
served as his refuge. The freedom his position granted him, not to
mention the ego gratification, was one of the factors that kept Rader
from killing with the frequency that he longed for. I think it would be
safe to say that Rader’s being a compliance officer might actually have
saved a handful of lives in the community because the job allowed
Rader’s imagination plenty of room to breathe. Other than being
incarcerated, there was perhaps no safer way for him to occupy his
time for eight hours each day, five days a week.
The parking lot was empty when I arrived. Waves of heat radiated
up from the vast expanse of black asphalt as though from a skillet. The
only vehicles in the lot were two bone white Chevy pick-up trucks in
which Rader often tooled around the streets of Park City. I pulled up
next to one of the trucks, rolled down the window of my car, and
touched the tiny sticker over the rear quarter-panel; it read CODE
ENFORCEMENT. It felt as though it had been cooked with a blowtorch.
I pressed my hand against it and thought about how Rader used
to crank up classical music on the stereo inside these vehicles and head
off across the community, fantasizing about strangling people, while
talking dirty to the “slick ad” he’d brought with him and placed in the
passenger seat.
I rolled the window up and sat back in my car with the air conditioner
on high, staring out through my windshield, reminding myself
that this was the exact view Rader took in each day as he pulled in and
out of this parking lot. In order to get to his office on the left side of
the squat brick building, Rader had to walk across the parking lot and
follow a little concrete sidewalk around the side of the structure.
But seated there in the sweltering late morning heat, I realized
something. On the far right side of the building, completely opposite
to where Rader’s office was located, sat the headquarters of Park City’s
ten-officer police force. As often as Rader told himself that he loved
his job as a compliance officer, deep down he knew it was an ill-fitting