The Butterfly Collector

The road to San Quentin narrows the way all roads to prisons do, as if the state itself is trying to funnel you away from the choice. Sam Ihle watched the bay flatten into gray glass beyond the concertina and felt twenty-three again, which was not a feeling he enjoyed.

Jeannie Wright had called him into her office that morning. The Seabrook Viking News had new carpet since Patrick McKean left and the smell still clung to everything, chemical and optimistic. Jeannie was thirty-four, editor-in-chief, McKean's handpicked successor, and she wore her authority like a blazer two sizes too structured.

"Lucian Morales will talk," she said. "Only to you."

Sam had laughed. "He's never talked."

"He says he read your 2003 coverage. Says you were the only one who didn't call him a freak."

"I called him a lot worse than freak," Sam said.

Jeannie slid a folder across the desk. Inside, a prison visitation clearance, a media request form with the CDCR stamp, and a yellowed printout of Sam's own byline from the Los Angeles Daily Ledger, twenty-two years old. SAM IHLE, 23, Staff Writer. Third victim found in Griffith Park. The photo underneath was a blur of white and glass that the city had not been able to unsee.

Los Angeles, 2003. Sam had been a kid with a press pass his father laminated for him, covering night cops because the older reporters didn't want the overtime. Summer had come in hot and stayed. Then the first one: Marisol Reyes, twenty-six, commercial print model, found in Will Rogers Park, in a crystal-clear glass coffin with a hinged lid. White dress, white silk lining, hands folded. A wooden stake through her heart. Not messy. Surgical.

Then Elise Tran in Pan Pacific. Then Jenna Cho in Kenneth Hahn. Then four more. Seven total, over eleven weeks. All women, all models, all between twenty-two and twenty-nine, all staked, all dressed in white, all laid out in parks like offerings. The media, with the delicate restraint of a jackhammer, named him The Vampire Killer. Sam had written the headlines because he was the youngest and the city editor liked the alliteration.

Lucian Morales was arrested on a Tuesday in September, in a studio apartment in Frogtown that smelled of cedar and camphor. He was thirty-one, a former preparator at the Natural History Museum, fired for stealing specimens. Inside his fridge, no blood. Inside his freezer, no heads. Inside his closets, row upon row of shadowboxes, perfect, lit, labeled. Inside one shadowbox, empty, with a human-shaped depression in the cotton. He confessed immediately, calmly, and then stopped talking for twenty-two years.

Now he was sixty-three. Now he would talk to Sam.

The interview room at San Quentin smelled of disinfectant and old coffee. The glass was thick. Lucian Morales shuffled in wearing state blue, his hair gone white and cut close to his skull, his hands thin and spotted. He was smaller than Sam remembered from court sketches. His eyes, though, were the same: pale, patient, absolute.

"Mr. Ihle," he said, sitting. "You got old."

"You didn't," Sam said, though he had. "You wanted to see me?"

Lucian folded his hands. His nails were trimmed to nothing. "I read your book. You self-published it. 'Seven Parks.' You got three things right. That's more than anyone else."

"I got more than three things wrong, then."

"You called me an artist," Lucian said, with a faint disgust. "That was Jeannie Wright's predecessor, McKean, wasn't it? He wrote that editorial. 'The Vampire Artist.' As if I were painting."

Sam flipped his notebook open. The tape recorder blinked red. "You told Jeannie you were incensed by the title. The Vampire Killer."

"The press and the general public totally misunderstood me," Lucian said. The words had been rehearsed for years, polished smooth. "It is not staging them like vampires as though I were a Van Helsing wannabe. That is folklore. That is stupid. I am not superstitious. I consider myself a scientist and a naturalist with a particular obsession with lepidoptera."

Lepidoptera. Sam wrote it down even though he knew.

"Butterflies and moths," Lucian said, as if Sam were a child. "You know what happens when you catch a Morpho menelaus in the field? If you touch its wings, the scales come off. The blue is not pigment. It is structure. It is light breaking on microscopic architecture. To preserve it, you must never touch the wing. You must coax it into the killing jar with ether, gently, so it doesn't thrash. Then, when it is still, you must mount it."

Sam felt his throat close. "So the women—"

"Do not reduce," Lucian snapped, then caught himself. He breathed. "May I explain?"

Jeannie's voice in Sam's head: Let him explain. Get it on tape.

"Yes."

Lucian leaned forward. "I worked in entomology. Six years pinning. You take a specimen. You take a spreading board. Two pieces of balsa with a groove down the middle for the body. You place the insect. You take a pin — not a stake, a pin, entomological, stainless steel, size three — and you go through the thorax, the mesothorax, right between the wings. You position the wings with strips of tracing paper. You wait. Weeks. You are preserving beauty. You are stopping decay."

He tapped the table with his fingertip.

"Those women were being decayed by their work. By men looking at them. By cameras. By the city. Marisol — do you remember Marisol? She told me once at the bus stop outside the museum that she hated that her agency made her smile with her teeth. Her teeth were perfect but her smile was not her own. They were using her beauty incorrectly. They were handling the wings."

Sam stared. "You knew them?"

"I observed them," Lucian said. "Like any naturalist. I documented. Elise worked at the botanical garden gift shop before she modeled. She knew the Latin names of ferns. Jenna could hold a pose for nine hours without moving. That is not a human skill. That is diapause. They were rare. Ephemeral. They would not last. So I preserved them."

"The crystal caskets were their shadowboxes," Sam said quietly.

Lucian's face lit up, truly lit, for the first time. "Yes. You understand. I had them made in Vernon. Low-iron glass, starphire, UV-resistant. Cost me almost everything. I lined them with unbleached cotton, acid-free. The crystalline caskets were their shadowboxes. The wooden stakes were my pins. Not oak. Balsa. I sharpened them myself. I went through the sternum, through the heart, to anchor them to the backing so they would not shift. So the presentation would be perfect. White is the only correct background for true color. Every museum knows that."

Sam remembered the way Pat McKean used to edit his copy back at the Viking. McKean would take a red pen and circle every adjective and write in the margin, "Do you need this?" Sam had needed every adjective in 2003 because he was scared. He was twenty-three and he thought the job was to make people feel the horror. McKean taught him later that the job was to make people see clearly.

Jeannie was different. She didn't use red pen. She used questions. "What does this mean, Sam? Why does this matter? Who is this for?" She had taken over when McKean retired to Oregon to restore a boat, and she had inherited not just his desk but his sense that Seabrook deserved more than wire rewrites. That's why she pushed for this interview. San Quentin hadn't allowed press in for Morales in a decade. Jeannie had written three letters, filed two appeals, and finally Morales himself had written back, in careful block printing, that he would speak only to the boy who wrote about the cotton lining.

The cotton lining. Sam had included that detail in 2003 because the coroner's assistant mentioned it. Acid-free cotton, like for jewelry. No one else wrote it down.

In the interview room, Lucian kept talking about ether. He described his killing jar, a mason jar with plaster of Paris soaked in ethyl acetate. He said he used the same method on the women, which Sam knew from the trial was a lie — toxicology showed chloroform, not ether — but Lucian believed his own revision.

"You have to understand the pinning," Lucian said. "People think you just stab. You don't. You have to relax the specimen first. You put it in a relaxing chamber, damp paper towels, a day or two, so the limbs are pliable. Otherwise they snap. I gave them time. I gave Marisol forty-eight hours in my apartment. She was relaxed. She was comfortable. I talked to her about moths. She listened."

Sam wrote the word relaxed and underlined it three times.

Lucian described his collection. He had started at nine with Cabbage Whites in his mother's garden in Boyle Heights. He had a net his uncle made from a broom handle and mosquito netting. He learned to spread wings with glass slides. By sixteen he had three hundred specimens, all perfect, all labeled with date, location, and weather. He told Sam that his mother called them his angels.

"I never liked the word vampire," he said. "Vampires drink. I never took anything. I gave them permanence. A model is photographed a thousand times and each photograph steals a little. The camera flash is UV. It bleaches. My glass filtered UV. My cotton buffered humidity. I was better than any agency."

Sam asked about the white dresses. Lucian said he sewed them himself, after his mother taught him to sew for his sister's quinceañera. White cotton poplin, no dye, no optical brightener, because brighteners fluoresce under blacklight and ruin the true tone. He washed them in distilled water.

"I wanted them to be like the ermine moth," Lucian said. "Spilosoma lubricipeda. White with black dots. But without the dots. Without flaw."

He spoke about each woman like a collector recites a catalog. Marisol Reyes, found near the carousel in Griffith, humidity forty-one percent. Elise Tran, Pan Pacific, near the basketball courts, he had placed her at dawn because the sprinklers would mist the glass. Jenna Cho, Kenneth Hahn, where the wind would keep leaves off the lid. Keisha Williams, Ernest Debs Park, where the view of downtown framed her. Sofia Aguilar, Holmby Park, where the old oaks made dappled light. Priya Desai, Rancho Park, where the golf course kept the grass impossibly green. Last, Danielle Brooks, Echo Park, where the lotus bloomed and people would see her reflected in the lake.

He remembered all their names. He remembered the weather.

Sam remembered something else: when he was twenty-three, he had vomited behind the coroner's van after seeing Priya Desai. He had not put that in the article.

Lucian leaned closer, and Sam could smell the institutional soap.

"You think I am cruel," Lucian whispered. "I am not. Cruelty is leaving a Saturnia pyri in a paper envelope where its abdomen rots. Cruelty is letting a beautiful girl turn thirty in Los Angeles."

Sam thought about Jeannie Wright waiting back in Seabrook, about how she would want a kicker that made readers understand that monsters rarely think they are monsters. They think they are curators. They think they are saving you from decay, from time, from other men's eyes. That is the most dangerous kind of monster, because he will smile while he pins you and call it love.

Sam said, "Tell me about the pins again."

And Lucian did, happily, for another twenty minutes, describing how you must insert at a perfect ninety degrees, how you must not go through the gut, how the thorax holds best, how a size three pin can hold a human if you use balsa and not oak, how you must label underneath with archival ink.

The tape hissed.

Sam had been twenty-three when he saw Marisol Reyes in that glass box. He had not been able to eat for a day. He remembered the white dress, how it had not been a costume but a shift, simple, like a first instar. He remembered thinking she looked asleep, and then hating himself for thinking it because that was exactly what Lucian wanted people to think.

"Why parks?" Sam asked. His voice was rougher than he wanted.

"Habitat," Lucian said. "A specimen means nothing without location data. Park, date, time, weather, floral context. Griffith Park, chaparral, Santa Ana conditions. Pan Pacific, lawn, overwatered, municipal. I placed them where they would be found quickly. Where light would hit the glass. Preservation is not hoarding. It is display. For education."

"Education."

"To show people how to look without touching," Lucian said. "You all thought it was about death. It was about stopping death from making them ugly. Have you seen what age does to a model? Have you seen what a year does to a Morpho if you leave it in sun?"

Sam closed his notebook. "Lucian, you killed seven women."

"I euthanized seven specimens that were going to be destroyed anyway," Lucian said, not angry, factual. "I preserved their beauty. That is more respect than any photographer ever showed them."

"You staked them through the heart."

"I pinned them through the heart so they would remain perfect."

For a long time the room was only the hum of fluorescents. Outside, a gull cried and Sam thought of the parks again, of the glass catching the morning, of joggers stopping and screaming. Of the city deciding this was a vampire because a vampire was easier than a man who thought he was being kind.

Sam opened the notebook again. "Why talk now?"

Lucian looked at his hands. "They are going to move me. Medical. Pancreas. I have months. I wanted someone to correct the record. Not Vampire Killer. Naturalist. I wanted the young man who wrote that first piece to know that I am not a monster."

Sam laughed before he could stop it, a short, wet sound. "You are. You know that, right? You are a misunderstood monster, but you are still a monster. The misunderstanding does not make it less monstrous. It makes it worse."

Lucian frowned, genuinely confused. "How?"

"Because if you were a vampire hunter, you'd be crazy. Crazy I can explain to a reader in Long Beach. If you're a scientist who thought he was saving something beautiful — then I have to explain that beauty can make a man murder, that love for a thing can be the exact thing that kills it. That's harder."

"It is not murder if it is preservation."

"It is," Sam said. "That is the whole point of a shadowbox, Lucian. The butterfly is dead. You just get to keep looking at it."

Lucian stared at the glass, at his own faint reflection behind Sam's. For the first time his certainty flickered.

"Will you write that I am not The Vampire Killer?" he asked.

Sam pressed stop on the recorder. The red light died.

"I will write that you think the wooden stakes were pins. That the caskets were cases. That you thought you were preserving them because you loved lepidoptera more than you loved people. I will write that you were incensed at being called a vampire because vampires are fiction and you think you are real. I will write that you are wrong."

He stood. His knees popped.

Lucian stood too. "Do you ever go to the parks?"

"Sometimes," Sam said.

"Do you ever see them? When the light is right?"

Sam did not answer. The guard knocked.

Sam listened and felt the old nausea return, not for the victims now but for Lucian's hands, which kept shaping the air into boxes and boards. He thought about his own age now, forty-five, and how at twenty-three he had believed evil was theatrical. Now he knew evil was meticulous. It measured.

The guard shifted outside the door. Time was ending. Lucian noticed and his composure slipped.

"Wait," he said. "You have to tell them I am not The Vampire Killer. Tell them I am a naturalist. Tell them the crystalline caskets were their shadowboxes and the wooden stakes were my pins. Tell them I was preserving beauty, not destroying it. Please."

Sam looked at him. Really looked. He saw not a scientist, not Dracula, but a small man who had mistaken possession for appreciation, who had spent his life trying to stop time by killing what moved through it. A misunderstood monster who misunderstood himself most of all.

"I will tell them what you said," Sam said. "I won't tell them you were right."

Lucian sat back. The flicker in his eyes went out, like a lamp behind frosted glass.

Outside, the prison yard bell rang.

Outside, the bay was still gray glass. Sam sat in his Subaru in the San Quentin lot and did not start the engine. He called Jeannie.

"How'd it go?" she asked.

"He's exactly what we thought, but more articulate," Sam said. "He wants to be remembered as a naturalist."

"Are you going to give it to him?"

Sam watched a raven land on the razor wire and take off again, its wings impossibly blue-black in the flat light.

"I'm going to give him exactly what he gave them," Sam said. "A white background. And a pin right through the center so he doesn't move."

Sam's hands shook as he packed his recorder. He thought of Marisol, Elise, Jenna, Keisha, Sofia, Priya, Danielle — not as specimens, but as women who had once laughed at a joke, missed a bus, loved something briefly.

He remembered the parks would still be there tomorrow, and the light would fall, and people would walk past the spots where glass had once caught the sun.

He hung up, opened his laptop on the passenger seat, and began to type, while behind him the prison settled deeper into the hill, a shadowbox of its own, holding all its terrible, preserved beauties perfectly still.