by John Philpin
I had eliminated the living room windows as a point of entry. Also, two sliding bolts coated with undisturbed dust secured the back, solid-core door. That left a single small window in Jaycie’s room, and the front door.
If the shooter had climbed through Jaycie’s window, the entire scene would be different. If she was the killer’s only target, his activity might have been confined to that room. Susan and Kelly would still be alive. If she had awakened, there would be evidence of a disturbance in the small area—which there was not.
The scene suggested a linear progression. He arrived knowing that he would kill them all, and moved methodically from one task to another. He was patient, comfortable with his surroundings, unconcerned with the passage of time.
Jaworski had told me that the young women were meticulous about locking the front door. Friends who visited the apartment teased them about it. They tried the door, then waited while one of the roommates unlocked the apartment.
No forced entry. You had a key.
You knew what you were doing. You let yourself in through the front door, then moved to the left, toward the double bedroom, away from Jaycie’s room.
Why?
I found the apartment’s floor plan in the case file and imagined walking through the door in darkness. The double bedroom was immediately to the left. Jaycie’s single was to the right, at the far end of the living room. A sofa and chair were also on the right, effectively dividing the room and creating a natural traffic flow from the front door to the left toward the bedroom.
If I stalked Jaycie, knew who I wanted and where she was, I would move to the right. But this killer did not.
Did you react totally to the space?
It was possible. It was just as possible that he visited earlier and knew the layout, but chose to begin by eliminating the human obstacles who might awaken and come between him and his target.
The stippling that surrounded Susan’s and Kelly’s wounds indicated that the shooter had held the gun approximately six inches from his target each time. I stood and extended my arms as if I were holding a weapon, turned to my left, bang, then turned to my right.
Why turn to the left first? Why not the right, then the left? More reactivity—merely responding to the room’s stimuli?
The medical examiner could not determine which of the two victims in the double room was killed first. I favored Susan Hamilton, on the left, with my havoc, and I would have to trust that for now.
Jaycie emerged from her room.
I prepared a list of questions for Jaworski. Who has access to apartment keys? Who owns the building? What about previous tenants?
I stepped backward, pictured myself in the doorway of the double bedroom, then turned to look across the living room. I estimated the distance. Jaycie would have stood near my fireplace. Hell of a shot. If the room was dark, the shot was even more amazing.
Someone familiar with weapons. A practiced shot.
I skimmed through the case file, and when I did not find the information I wanted, I added to my list: Lights on or off when bodies discovered?
Three down. I know that Susan and Kelly are dead. I walk out to where Jaycie dropped. She is dead.
“This doesn’t make any fucking sense,” I muttered, glancing through the window at windblown sheets of rain.
I grabbed the photograph of Jaycie’s head surrounded by an aura of deep red, and examined the blood with a magnifying glass. There was a disturbance at the outer edge of the pooling on the left side. Ah, yes, the window dressing.
What do I use? What have I brought for this task? A cloth? Too absorbent and retentive. A sponge. Absorb the blood, then squeeze it out in a trail of drops, and a final draining over the pillow.
The executions were flawless, performed by someone who, I was convinced, had killed before. The postmortem behavior, however, still confused me.
He savaged Jaycie’s body, then lingered and created performance art.
He cut Jaycie’s flannel nightgown along the seam, then removed it and placed it over the arm of a chair.
Not torn. Cut. A neat cut. Not cast aside. Placed.
Why not just rip the damn thing off? You carved into her throat like a fucking butcher gone wild with a bone saw.
I found the photograph of the nightgown and examined it with my lens. There was no fraying along the seam where it was cut. I saw a few short, loose fibers.
“That wasn’t cut with a knife,” I said. “He used scissors.”
There is no passion here. He is efficient, relaxed, loving what he’s doing, but he is not driven. His anger is spent.
He anticipates community reaction, prepares Jaycie’s body as a twisted greeting to those who enter the apartment.
I made a note to have my discovery checked microscopically, and added scissors to the list of contents of the killer’s kit. It made no sense that he would prowl through the apartment to find them, and there was no indication at the scene that he had.
You attended to detail, and you anticipated every contingency. You planned well, but you were not flawless in your performance.
None of them are.
The scene suggested fear of the victims.
Three well-placed shots.
A gun is an unusual weapon for a serial killer. I thought of Kai Lin’s question about a Washington case and remembered my response. What does weapon selection mean to the killer?
Death is the absolute controller.
He could not tolerate the thought that his victims might rise up and strike back.
He stabbed Jaycie repeatedly, slit her throat, and attempted to cut off her head.
Brutal. Gruesome.
“No sexual mutilation,” I said.
You were too deliberate. You created a display, a horrifying tableau of savage sexual predation, but you had no carnal intent. Rage, yes, but with a rapid recovery.
“These are executions,” I muttered. “The only rage is directed at Jaycie.”
He enjoys the killing, the game with the cops, horrifying his audience.
I leaned back in my chair, breathed deeply, allowed my eyes to close, and listened as rain rattled on the metal roof, the refrigerator hummed a bass accompaniment, and the kitchen faucet’s staccato drip clicked like a metronome.
My breathing slowed.
Whether from the knife, or from his artwork with the sponge, there should be some contamination. If events played out as I imagined, traces of blood from the double room will show up on Jaycie’s pillow.
He has a design in mind.
I returned in my reverie to the double bedroom. Again, I sensed movement to the left. The determinants of his behavior are mixed, conscious and unconscious, deliberate and reactive.
Susan.
Pull back the blankets, push up her nightgown, stab seven times to the middle abdomen. No sexual mutilation. No slicing.
Seven. Per-Cent Solution. Seven. Samurai.
I can’t react to what I can’t see.
The light is on. I see the room’s balance.
He dipped his sponge in blood, smeared the wall to create his display, but his hand slipped. A frontal stroke by a right-handed person would not cause a problem like that, just as a left-handed person would have no difficulty reaching across Kelly’s bed to the wall and sweeping the sponge downward.
The smears must be identical, beginning and ending at similar locations on their respective walls.
It was a stretch for him to reach that section of the wall. The desk and bed are in the way. My hand extended effortlessly above the smear.
Short reach. Short span between the knuckle impressions. Short killer.
He pulled down Susan’s nightgown and replaced the blankets. Covered her. No display.
Display and no display.
He turned to the right and duplicated his actions. His hand did not slip.
He’s left-handed.
It was a beginning.
He sat on the sofa, held his orange in his right hand, and peeled it w
ith his left. A leisurely set of kills, a frenzy of butchery, an unhurried repast.
As usual, I had more questions than answers.
I opened my eyes and scribbled another note to Jaworski: Did the crime scene technicians find any trace of Susan’s or Kelly’s blood with Jaycie’s blood?
Then I stared again at the rain. “Why a fucking orange?” I muttered.
The narrow white box that contained my students’ gift of scrimshaw rested on the table beside me. As I reached for the piece of whalebone, the telephone rang. I glared at it. I have no tolerance for being summoned by an insistent whine that intrudes in my space whenever somebody has a whim and nothing better to do.
I grabbed the insidious blue plastic device. “What?”
Stu Gilman was my electronic interloper. It figured.
“This whole thing is so unbelievable,” he said. “Just terrible. I came back from Portland Friday night to help with calls from parents and the media. This is just like that business in Gainesville, Florida, several years ago. We’ve got national TV camped at the bottom of the drive. We’re not allowing them on campus. Listen, I called for a couple of reasons. I know you’re working with the police on this. The chief called the college to find out where you’re staying. You probably can’t discuss the murders in any detail, but are you making progress?”
“I can’t discuss the case at all, Stu,” I said, imagining Gilman’s head nodding, his eye twitching. “If you’re concerned about a press release, just say the usual for now: You have confidence in the local and state police.”
“That’s what I’ve written here,” he said. “We’re working closely with the authorities. It doesn’t seem adequate. Is it okay if I say that you’re working on the case?”
“No,” I told him.
“I thought that might reassure people.”
What was this guy thinking? I have never known of anyone who found it encouraging when cops turn for help to the sort of shrink that people view as a 900 phone call away at the psychic hotline.
“It would hurt more than help, Stu,” I said. “Keep it general for now. What else did you want?”
“Oh, right. Yeah, you’re probably busy. We’re having a memorial service for the three girls Tuesday morning. It’ll be in the old chapel. We’re going to have the regular afternoon schedule. I considered clearing the day, but decided to try and get things back to normal as soon as possible.”
Gilman hesitated, cleared his throat, and said, “Jaworski told me that he’d have officers stationed around the chapel. He said it was routine. Is that true?”
“Standard procedure, Stu.”
“Huh. The college hasn’t had police on campus since the sixties. I’m not comfortable with that.”
I hung up and wondered again about Stuart Gilman. What were the president and her four deans doing while Gilman managed the college? His were administrative concerns. Why did it bother him to have police on campus? They were investigating a triple murder, not infringing on anyone’s civil rights.
AFTER THE PHONE CALL FROM GILMAN, I DROVE INTO town and dropped off my list of preliminary questions and suggestions with Herb Jaworski’s dispatcher. I came back home and heated a can of soup for dinner—something I often resort to on Sundays. I had just finished eating and was washing my few dishes when the chief arrived.
“Sorry to drip all over your floor,” he said.
I eyed him and grinned. “You look like you crawled out of the surf. Where’s your Mrs. Paul’s logo?”
“Rainin’ like hell out there.”
He slipped out of his raincoat, settled his bulk into a chair, and popped a stick of cinnamon gum into his mouth. “Chewin’ gum hurts my jaw,” he said, “but it keeps me from smoking. Listen, you’ve already got some of our people rethinking this thing. A couple of us went back to Crescent Street. I think I know what you’re getting at. The rear door wasn’t disturbed. The windows don’t work for a quiet entry. Too noisy and too difficult to manage. We went over every inch of the front door, removed the lock and examined it, and found nothing. So the killer used a key and let himself in.”
Jaworski consulted his notes. “Let’s see. Martin International owns the building. College maintenance has three copies of the key on campus. They keep all keys to all buildings in a locked cabinet. None are missing. The head of maintenance, Nelson Kiner, has his own set that he keeps at his house in the village. His cabinet isn’t locked, but we’ve accounted for all of those.”
“You might want to check on previous tenants, find out when the locks were changed last.”
Jaworski smiled for the first time since I met him. “We’re doing that. I told you, I read your book. Now, when we first got to the scene, no lights were on. When we were down there an hour ago, we took a closer look at the switchplates. I think we’ve got a smudge, blood, on the plate in the double room. Like he had the light on, then switched it off on his way out.”
You shot from light into darkness, from what you could see, into the forehead of a moving shadow.
“He’s a crack shot,” I said.
“Looks that way,” Jaworski agreed. “But lots of folks around here hunt, target shoot. His skill doesn’t make the pool much smaller. Your question about blood mixture will take a while. I have to get the lab people to come back and take more samples. We should have an answer on the fabric sometime tomorrow. So, what else have you got?”
“Nothing right now,” I said.
“I know you do this stuff kind of step-wise. Put the crime together first, then figure out the sort of killer who fits it. I just wondered if you had any notions that I could work with.”
I understood Jaworski’s impatience. “I have some vague ideas,” I told him, “but I don’t want to set you running in the wrong direction. Two physical details suggested by the scene are that he’s between five-six and five-nine, and left-handed.”
The chief nodded. “I watched you work those smears and measure your hand.”
“As far as what goes on in his head, I need more time.”
“I remember you had a piece in your book about Stanley Markham. You worked that case.”
Stanley Markham was a slice of violence from the past. Markham took his early victims to clearings in remote, wooded areas. Each time, eleven that we knew of, a young woman walked with him to the place where he ended her life.
Then he escalated.
“I worked Markham,” I said warily. “Why?”
“That’s right. I forgot. You definitely need to get a TV in this place. Markham escaped.”
The fucking orange.
I felt like I’d been punched in the gut.
“He’s been on the run for ten days. The U.S. Marshals said he’d head back to the Boston area. That ain’t far from us.”
Stanley Markham was not as bright as some of his brothers in carnage, but he was every bit as destructive, maybe more. After his eleventh victim, Markham killed weekly, and cruised more frequently than that. Risk was irrelevant to him. He exploded into homes, waltzed into schools at noon, breezed through malls at any hour seeking his prey.
And he always signed in at his kills. As he studied his work, he peeled and ate a piece of fruit and neatly piled the rind and seeds.
Now he was free.
According to Jaworski, Markham used a ploy that must have come out of a 1940s James Cagney movie. Assigned to sort laundry, he hid in one of the huge dirty-linen hampers. The laundry service wheeled him from the medium-security institution for the criminally insane.
Medium security. It boggles the mind.
“The last I knew, Markham’s sister lived on Boston’s North Shore,” I said. “The two of them were close. People change, but he always needed a home base.”
“He’s a little guy, right? Like what you’re describing.”
Markham certainly had the time to get to Ragged Harbor and kill. “The orange,” I began.
“That came through on the bulletin we got,” Jaworski said. “The way I hear it, he kille
d in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Dumped his fruit leavings in all the New England states but this one. That may not mean anything to him, but I ain’t comfortable with it.”
Jaworski dropped a package on the table. “More reports and photos,” he said, preparing to leave. “We can talk tomorrow, but I’ve got one more question, Lucas.”
I looked at the worried expression on the cop’s face and knew what was coming.
“Markham or not, we could have more victims, couldn’t we? We’re talkin’ about somebody who’ll go on killing until he’s caught.”
“Yes,” I told him.
AS I SIPPED MY MORNING COFFEE, I SPREAD THE NEW crime scene photographs on the kitchen table, then walked around the table and gazed at them from different angles. I stopped walking long enough to thumb through the most recent reports, then I started pacing again, looking at the graphic portraiture of death.
Something was wrong with the gestalt. The parts remained just fragments; the crimes lacked a sense of completeness.
A murder scene informs. The killer’s droppings wait to be analyzed for hints at thought patterns, pathways into twisted fantasy, descriptors of personality.
I was refusing to see these three women as anything other than vibrant young people with their lives in front of them. Jaycie was a new friend. I was not allowing myself to view her and her roommates as prey, which is what I would have to do if I expected to experience the savagery that intruded in their night.
The education and training that I bring to the analysis of a homicide is less important than the flexibility of mind, the willingness to visit the beast in the wild and to liberate the one inside. If I approached a crime scene with a plan, I’d already conceded defeat. Savagery has its own logic, conforming to no rules but its own.
I could not force the mind-set.
I had other matters to attend to, so I set aside my work and drove into the village.
I APPROACHED THE TURN FOR THE COLLEGE AND SAW the media camp that Jaworski had blocked from Crescent Street and that Stu Gilman had locked off campus. Half a dozen trailers and four large flatbeds decorated with satellite dishes reduced Main Street to two congested lanes. A virtual truck rodeo surrounded the college entrance, directly across from the locked gate to the Screamin’ Demon, Ragged Harbor’s small amusement park and roller coaster.
