Jack McEvoy is a very successful reporter for the Los Angeles Times but he has become one of the 100 staff who are being terminated due to the decline in newspaper sales. Naturally he is a little bitter at being pushed out after his seven years of loyal service. The thing that really rankles though is that he has been given two weeks notice and during that time he is assigned to train his replacement to take over the crime beat. She is a young newly minted reporter eager to impress and she proceeds to undermine Jack and put her name on stories that he worked. The latest is the murder of a young woman whose body was stuffed in the trunk of her car. Alozno Winslow, a sixteen year old drug dealer from the projects was arrested for the crime and questioned for hours. The police claimed he confessed to the crime. Case closed.
But Jack was suspicious. He looked into it and after reading the lengthy interrogation discovered that Alonzo only confessed to stealing her car and taking her money; that he did not know the body was in the trunk and that he did not kill her. When Jack’s young trainee’s research turns up another “Trunk Murder” out in Nevada that is almost identical to the one for which Winslow was arrested Jack calls his FBI girlfriend and meets with her. She agrees that Alonzo is not guilty and that the two crimes were committed by someone else.
Connelly gives us a parallel story from the killer’s point of view. The man is a brilliant graduate of MIT and holds a very powerful computer security position with a large data storage company. As a young boy he was made to follow his mother from stage to stage. She was a stripper and Jack had other women babysitting and sometimes molesting him backstage. His mother developed a crippling illness that caused her to have to wear leg braces when she was not on stage and Jack had to help her strap her braces onto her legs. For some reason Jacks traumatic early years led to mental fixation on tall women and leg braces. His method was to kidnap the women, force them to wear leg braces and molest them with foreign objects then tie a plastic bag over their heads and let them slowly suffocate to death. This bag over the head became his signature in more than six murders. Jack connected the “Scarecrow” from the Wizard of Oz with an alias name the man used that was the creator of some of the effects in the Wizard of Oz. He then noticed that all of the many different depictions of scarecrows shows them with a burlap bag tied with a cord around the neck, very similar to the plastic bag tied around the necks of the young lady victims.
When Jack realizes who the murderer is he is shocked to realize that his girlfriend is currently out at the data storage company trying to track down a different person that is suspected with the real murderer right by her side. He rushes out to try to help her and the two of them become involved in a very active concluding chase and fight scene giving this Connelly tale an exciting conclusion.
I give “Scarecrow” a 7 of 10 on the Weaver scale. It is a fine work.
