Inside the Mind of BTK

336 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
it go so dark in the middle of the afternoon. I climbed back into the
car and switched on the radio.
Further on down the road, I began to see jagged veins of lightning
flashing, causing the radio to crackle. According to a news report, flash
floods had just torn through several nearby towns. Looking out the
passenger window, I noticed the vague outline of tiny shadowy funnels
dangling beneath a ceiling of roiling clouds on the horizon.
Tornado, I thought to myself.
There was nothing to do but sit there and watch the shapes forming
overhead. From out of nowhere, a thought swirled inside my
brain, and I found myself thinking about a dream Rader had recited
to Casarona a few days before my arrival.
The first portion was blurry in my memory, but what I remembered
most was the tornado. According to Rader, a twister had just
ripped through Wichita, and afterwards he found himself walking
through the wreckage, picking his way through the debris strewn
across the ground. Everywhere he looked, houses, cars, and trailers
had been smashed into millions of tiny splintered pieces. And every
few feet he walked, he stopped to pick up a tattered photograph or
what had once been a child’s toy from the rubble. He held the torn,
ripped bits of life in his fingers, inspecting each piece, wondering . . .
If any single image summed up the devastation Rader inflicted on
the community of Wichita, and on his own family, this was it. He was
that dark, dirty, swirling twister, dropping out of the sky, destroying
whatever he touched.
The thought of it made me tired. I wished I could be done with
Rader and put him behind me completely, although I knew that would
never happen. He and those like him were my calling. Like it or not,
I’ll be attempting to understand how their minds work for as long as
blood and air flow through my body.
The rain had come; it poured down in thick sheets. The highway
was empty. I sat there on the side of the road, thinking about nothing
and everything at the same time. A tiny ribbon of blue sky and golden
sunlight shimmered on the horizon, just below the curtain of black
clouds. So I twisted the ignition, stomped on the accelerator, and drove
like hell straight toward it, straight for the light.