I thanked her again and said next time it was my turn o cook. Then I called Marino.
"Two women were murdered in James City County eight years ago," I went straight to the point. "It's possible there's a connection. Do you know Detective Montana out there?"
"Yeah. I've met him."
"We need to get with him, review the cases. Can he keep his mouth shut?"
"Hell if I know," Marino said.
Montana looked like his name, big, rawboned, with hazy blue eyes set in a rugged, honest face topped by thick gray hair. His accent was that of a native Virginian, his conversation peppered with "yes, ma am's. The following afternoon he, Marino, and I met at my home, where we were ensured privacy and no interruptions.
Montana must have depleted his annual film budget on Jill and Elizabeth's case, for covering my kitchen table were photographs of their bodies at the scene, the Volkswagen abandoned at the Palm Leaf Motel, the Anchor Bar and Grill, and, remarkably, of every room inside the women's apartments, including pantries and closets. He had a briefcase bulging with notes, maps, interview transcriptions, diagrams, evidence inventories, logs of telephone tips. There is something to be said for detectives who rarely have homicides in their jurisdictions. Cases like these come along once or twice in their careers, and they work them meticulously.
"The cemetery is right next to the church."
He moved a photograph closer to me.
"It looks quite old," I said, admiring weathered brick and slate.
"It is and it isn't. Was built in the seventeen-hundreds, did all right until maybe twenty years ago, when bad wiring did it in. I remember seeing the smoke, was on patrol, thought one of my neighbor's farmhouses was burning. Some historical society took an interest. It's supposed to look just like it used to inside and out.
"You get to it by this secondary road right here" - he tapped another photograph - "which is less than two miles west of Route Sixty and about four miles west of the Anchor Bar, where the girls were last seen alive the night before."
"Who discovered the bodies?"
Marino asked, eyes roaming the photograph spread.
"A custodian who worked for the church. He came in Saturday morning to clean up, get things ready for Sunday. Says he had just pulled in when he spotted what looked like two people sleeping in the grass about twenty feet inside the cemetery's front gate. The bodies were visible from the church parking lot. Doesn't seem whoever did it was concerned about anybody finding them."
"Am I to assume there was no activity at the church that Friday night?"
I asked.
"No, ma'am. It was locked up tight, nothing going on."
"Does the church ever have activities scheduled for Friday nights?"
"They do on occasion. Sometimes the youth groups get together on Friday nights. Sometimes there's choir practice, things like that. The point is, if you selected this cemetery in advance to kill someone, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. There's no guarantee the church would be deserted, not on any night of the week. That's one of the reasons I figured from the start that the murders were random, the girls just met up with someone, maybe in the bar. There isn't much about these cases to make me think the homicides were carefully planned."
"The killer was armed," I reminded Montana. "He had a knife and a handgun."
"The world's full of folks carrying knives, guns in their cars or even on their person," he said matter-of-factly.
I collected the photographs of the bodies in situ and began to study them carefully.
The women were less than a yard from each other, lying in the grass between two tilting granite headstones. Elizabeth was facedown, legs slightly spread, left arm under her stomach, right arm straight and by her side. Slender, with short brown hair, she was dressed in jeans and a white pullover sweater stained dark red around the neck. In another photograph, her body had been turned over, the front of her sweater soaked with blood, eyes the dull stare of the dead. The cut to her throat was shallow, the gunshot wound to her neck not immediately incapacitating, I recalled from her autopsy report. It was the stab wound to her chest that had been lethal.
Jill's injuries had been much more mutilating. She was on her back, face so streaked by dried blood that I could not tell what she had looked like in life, except that she had short black hair and a straight, pretty nose. Like her companion, she was slender. She was dressed in jeans and a pale yellow cotton shirt, bloody, un-tucked, and ripped open to her waist, exposing multiple stab wounds, several of which had gone through her brassiere. There were deep cuts to her forearms and hands. The cut to her neck was shallow and probably inflicted when she was already dead or almost dead.
The photographs were invaluable for one critical reason. They revealed something that I had not been able to determine from any of the newspaper clippings or reports I had reviewed in their cases on file in my office.
I glanced at Marino and our eyes met.
I turned to Montana. "What happened to their shoes?"
14
You know, it's interesting you should mention that," Montana replied. "I never have come up with a good explanation for why the girls took their shoes off, unless they were inside the motel, got dressed when it was time to leave, and didn't bother. We found their shoes and socks inside the Volkswagen."
"Was it warm that night?"
Marino asked.
"It was. All the same, I would have expected them to put their shoes back on when they got dressed."
"We don't know for a fact they ever went inside a motel room," I reminded Montana.
"You're right about that," he agreed.
I wondered if Montana had read the series in the Post, which had mentioned that shoes and socks were missing in the other murder cases. If he had, it did not seem he had made the connection yet.
"Did you have much contact with the reporter Abby Turnbull when she was covering Jill's and Elizabeth's murders?"
I asked him.
"The woman followed me like tin cans tied to a dog's tail. Everywhere I went, there she was."
"Do you recall if you told her that Jill and Elizabeth were barefoot? Did you ever show Abby the scene photographs?"
I asked, for Abby was too smart to have forgotten a detail like that, especially since it was so important now.
Montana said without pause, "I talked to her, but no, ma'am. I never did show her these pictures. Was right careful what I said, too. You read what was in the papers, didn't you?"
"I've seen some of the articles."
"Nothing in there about the way the girls were dressed, about Jill's shirt being torn, their shoes and socks off."
So Abby didn't know, I thought, relieved.
"I notice from the autopsy photographs that both women had ligature marks around their wrists," I said. "Did you recover whatever might have been used to bind them?"
"No, ma'am."
"Then apparently he removed the ligatures after killing them," I said.
"He was right careful. We didn't find any cartridge cases, no weapon, nothing he might have used to tie them up. No seminal fluid. So it doesn't appear he got around to raping them, or if he did, no way to tell. And both were fully clothed. Now, as far as this girl's blouse being ripped" - he reached for a photograph of Jill "that might have happened when he was struggling with her."
"Did you recover any buttons at the scene?"
"Several. In the grass near her body."
"What about cigarette butts?"
Montana began calmly looking through his paperwork. "No cigarette butts."
He paused, pulling out a report. "Tell you what we did find, though. A lighter, a nice silver one."
"Where?"
Marino asked.
"Maybe fifteen feet from where the bodies were. As you can see, an iron fence surrounds the cemetery. You enter through this gate."
He was showing us another photograph. "The lighter was in the grass, five, six feet inside the gate. One of these expensive, slim lighte
rs shaped like an ink pen, the kind people use to light pipes."
"Was it in working order?"
Marino asked.
"Worked just fine, polished up real nice," Montana recalled. "I'm pretty sure it didn't belong to either of the girls. They didn't smoke, and no one I talked to remembered seeing either one of them with a lighter like that. Maybe it fell out of the killer's pocket, no way to know. Could have been anybody who lost it, maybe someone out there a day or two earlier sightseeing. You know how folks like to wander in old cemeteries looking at the graves."
"Was this lighter checked for prints?"
Marino asked.
"The surface wasn't good for that. The silver's engraved with these crisscrosses, like you see with some of these fancy silver fountain pens."
He stared off thoughtfully. "The thing probably cost a hundred bucks."
"Do you still have the lighter and the buttons you found out there?"
I asked.
"I've got all the evidence from these cases. Always hoped we might solve them someday."
Montana didn't hope it half as much as I did, and it wasn't until after he left some time later that Marino and I began to discuss what was really on our minds.
"It's the same damn bastard," Marino said, his expression incredulous. "The damn squirrel made them take their shoes off just like he done with the other couples. To slow them down when he led them off to wherever it was he planned to kill them."
"Which wasn't the cemetery," I said. "I don't believe that was the spot he had selected."
"Yo. I think he took on more than he could handle with those two. They weren't cooperating or something went down that freaked him out - maybe having to do with the blood in the back of the Volkswagen. So he made them pull over at the earliest opportunity, which just happened to be a dark, deserted church with a cemetery. You got a map of Virginia handy?"
I went back to my office and found one. Marino spread it open on the kitchen table and studied it for a long moment.
"Take a look," he said, his face intense. "The turnoff for the church is right here on Route Sixty, about two miles before you get to the road leading to the wooded area where Jim Freeman and Bonnie Smyth were killed five, six years later. I'm saying we drove right past the damn road leading to the church where the two women was whacked when we went to see Mr. Joyce the other day."
"Good God," I muttered. "I wonder - "
"Yeah, I'm wondering, too," Marino interrupted. "Maybe the squirrel was out there casing the woods, selecting the right spot when Dammit surprised him. He shoots the dog. About a month later, he's abducted his first set of victims, Jill and Elizabeth. He intends to force them to drive him to this wooded area, but things get out of control. He ends the trip early. Or maybe he's confused, rattled, and tells Jill or Elizabeth the wrong road to turn off on. Next thing, he sees this church and now he's really freaked, realizes they didn't turn where they were supposed to. He may not have even known where the hell they were."
I tried to envision it. One of the women was driving and the other was in the front passenger's seat, the killer in the back holding a gun on them. What had happened to cause him to lose so much blood? Had he accidentally shot himself? That was highly unlikely. Had he cut himself with his knife? Maybe, but again, it was hard for me to imagine. The blood inside the car, I had noted from Montana's photographs, seemed to begin with drips on the back of the passenger's headrest. There were also drips on the back of the seat with a lot of. blood on the floor mat. This placed the killer directly behind the passenger's seat, leaning forward. Was his head or face bleeding? A nosebleed? I proposed this to Marino.
"Must'ave been one hell of a one. There was a lot of blood."
He thought for a moment. "So maybe one of the women threw back an elbow and hit him in the nose."
"How would you have responded if one of the women had done that to you?"
I said. "Provided you were a killer."
"She wouldn't have done it again. I probably wouldn't have shot her inside the car, but I might have punched her, hit her in the head with the gun."
"There was no blood in the front seat," I reminded him, "Absolutely no evidence that either of the women was injured inside the car."
"Hmmmm."
"Perplexing, isn't it?"
"Yeah."
He frowned. "He's in the backseat, leaning forward, and suddenly starts bleeding? Perplexing as shit."
I put on a fresh pot of coffee while we began to toss around more ideas. For starters, there continued to be the problem of how one individual subdues two people.
"The car belonged to Elizabeth," I said. "Let's assume she was driving. Obviously, her hands were not tied at this point."
"But Jill's might have been. He might have tied her hands during the drive, made her hold them up behind her head so he could tie them from the backseat."
"Or he could have forced her to turn around and place her arms over the headrest," I proposed. "This might have been when she struck him in the face, if that's what happened."
"Maybe."
"In any event," I went on, "we'll assume that by the time they stopped the car, Jill was already bound and barefoot. Next he orders Elizabeth to remove her shoes and binds her. Then he forces them at gunpoint into the cemetery."
"Jill had a lot of cuts on her hands and forearms," Marino said. "Are they consistent with her warding off a knife with her hands tied?"
"As long as her hands were tied in front of her and not behind her back."
"It would have been smarter to tie their hands behind their backs."
"He probably found that out the hard way and improved his techniques," I said.
"Elizabeth didn't have any defense injuries?"
"None."
"The squirrel killed Elizabeth first," Marino decided.
"How would you have done it? Remember, you've got two hostages to handle."
"I would have made both of them lie facedown in the grass. I would have put the gun to the back of Elizabeth's head to make her behave as I get ready to use the knife on her. If she surprised me by resisting, I might have pulled the trigger, shot her when I wasn't really intending to."
"That might explain why she was shot in the neck," I said. "If he had the gun to the back of her head and she resisted, the muzzle may have slipped. The scenario is reminiscent of what happened to Deborah Harvey, except that I seriously doubt she was lying down when she was shot."
"This guy likes to use a blade," Marino replied. "He uses his gun when things don't go down the way he planned. And so far, that's only happened twice that we know of. With Elizabeth and Deborah."
"Elizabeth was shot, then what, Marino?"
"He finishes her off and takes care of Jill."
"He fought with Jill," I reminded him.
"You can bet she struggled. Her friend's just been killed. Jill knows she don't got a chance, may as well fight like hell."
"Or else she was already fighting with him," I ventured.
Marino's eyes narrowed the way they did when he was skeptical.
Jill was a lawyer. I doubted she was naive about the cruel deeds people perpetrate upon one another. When she and her friend were being forced into the cemetery late at night, I suspected Jill knew both of them were going to die. One or both women may have begun resisting as he opened the iron gate. If the silver lighter did belong to the killer, it may have fallen out of his pocket at this point. Then, and perhaps Marino was right, the killer forced both women to lie facedown, but when he started on Elizabeth, Jill panicked, tried to protect her friend. The gun discharged, shooting Elizabeth in the neck.
"The pattern of Jill's injuries sends a message of frenzy, someone who is angry, frightened, because he's lost control," I said. "He may have hit her in the head with the gun, gotten on top of her and ripped open her shirt and started stabbing. As a parting gesture, he cuts their throats. Then he leaves in the Volkswagen, ditches it at the motel, and heads out on foot, perhaps back to wherever his c
ar was."
"He should have had blood on him," Marino considered. "Interesting there wasn't any blood found in the driver's area, only in the backseat."
"There hasn't been any blood found in the driver's areas of any of the couples' vehicles," I said. "This killer is very careful. He may bring a change of clothing, towels, who knows what, when he's planning to commit his murders."
Marino dug into his pocket and produced his Swiss army knife. He began to trim his fingernails over a napkin. Lord knows what Doris had put up with all these years, I thought. Marino probably never bothered to empty an ashtray, place a dish in the sink, or pick his dirty clothes off the floor. I hated to think what the bathroom looked like after he had been in it.
"Abby Turncoat still trying to get hold of you?" he asked without looking up.
"I wish you wouldn't call her that."
He didn't respond.
"She hasn't tried in the last few days, at least not that I'm aware of."
"Thought you might be interested in knowing that she and Clifford Ring have more than a professional relationship, Doc."
"What do you mean?"
I asked uneasily.
"I mean that this story about the couples Abby's been working on has nothing to do with why she was taken off the police beat." He was working on his left thumb, fingernail shavings falling on the napkin. "Apparently, she was getting so squirrelly no one in the newsroom could deal with her anymore. Things reached a head last fall, right before she came to Richmond and saw you."
"What happened?"
I asked, staring hard at him.
"Way I heard it, she made a little scene right in the middle of the newsroom. Dumped a cup of coffee in Ring's lap and then stormed out, didn't tell her editors where the hell she was going or when she'd be back. That's when she got reassigned to features."
"Who told you this?"
"Benton."
"How would Benton know what goes on in the Post's newsroom? " "I didn't ask."
Marino folded the knife and slipped it back into his pocket. Getting up, he wadded the napkin and put it in the trash.
"One last thing," he said, standing in the middle of my kitchen. "That Lincoln you was interested in?"
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