by John Philpin
“Susan Hamilton, twenty years old,” Herb Jaworski said, placing a folder in my hand.
I sat surrounded by the trace evidence of homicide, and examined the crime scene photos.
“The medical examiner says seven perimortem and postmortem stab wounds,” Jaworski said.
“While she was dying and after her death,” I mused. “The gunshot killed her.”
“Twenty-two caliber, copper jacket.”
I looked at the photo of the small hole in the young woman’s temple, then studied each of the remaining photographs in the series. Even gray and dead, Susan Hamilton appeared younger than her twenty years. Her face wore the expression of someone at rest. There was no paroxysm of pain. There was the small black hole, probably an immediate absence of consciousness, then death.
“He pulled back the blanket and the sheet, then did his cutting,” I said.
“That’s the way we figure it. No holes in the bedclothes.”
“Then he pulled up the blankets, threw them over her.”
“Even covered her face.”
Was the killer ashamed? I wondered. Did he attempt to conceal the evidence of his havoc? If he could not see the dead girl, maybe she was not there. Perhaps he did not want Susan staring up at him.
“What about the blood on the wall?” I asked.
“Don’t make any sense.”
I stared at the wall on my left, at the streaks of dingy red that originated three feet above where Susan’s head would have been and descended downward at a sixty-degree angle.
“No prints apparent in the smear,” I said. “Probably wore latex gloves.”
Like somebody playing with watercolors. Picasso gone wild with the sweep of a single-hued rainbow.
“The bed wasn’t moved?”
“Not that we could determine.”
I reached across the bed to the wall and touched the Sheetrock a foot above the blood trail. Then I looked again at the smear.
“There’s a break here,” I said. “It’s as if his hand twisted or slipped. There’s an imprint that looks like knuckles. Do you have a tape measure?”
Jaworski handed me a six-foot cloth measuring tape.
“It’s an inch and a quarter between the two points,” I said, then measured the distance between the first two joints on the index finger of my left hand. Two inches.
“Probably should photograph these impressions with a crime scene measure,” I suggested.
Jaworski made a note. I looked again at the photos of the dead student and asked if the police had determined what she was doing earlier on the night of her death.
“Susan had a paper due in the morning,” he said. “She logged off her computer a few minutes after midnight. That was late for her.”
Jaworski made a clacking noise with the cinnamon gum he was mawing as he handed me another set of photos. “Kelly Paquette, nineteen,” he said.
I turned to my right and made a cursory examination of the bed and the wall. It was a mirror image of Susan’s side of the room.
There is no interruption in the streak of crimson on the wall.
“Window dressing,” I muttered, staring at the bands of red. “Dead kids don’t smear their own blood.”
“We know she got back from a date around two. The towel on the floor was damp. She showered, then went to bed. Blood alcohol concentration was point-one-three. She was blitzed. The bullet entered behind her right ear. Seven stab wounds.”
Kelly faced the wall, but the intruder covered her anyway. Was this a pathological need to conceal?
I examined the remainder of the photographs, then returned them to Jaworski. “Show me number three.”
I suspected that the murders were Jaworski’s most painful professional experience in all the years that he had been a cop. He struggled to maintain his poise, and he did a decent job of it, but he hurt.
“I heard somewhere that you guys prefer to go through a crime scene alone, that you need to be able to concentrate or something.”
“You’ve been reading too much bad fiction,” I said, following Jaworski into the living room.
A shelf stereo sat on the fireplace mantel, surrounded by stacks of CDs, everything from the Butthole Surfers to Beethoven. I crouched at the coffee table to examine a rental video’s opaque plastic container.
“Who rented the movie?” I asked.
The chief consulted his notes. “I don’t think we checked that.”
“It’s Kiss the Girls,” I said, “an unlikely story about a pair of killers who work in tandem on the two coasts. I’m a Morgan Freeman fan.”
“You watch that stuff?”
“I enjoy catching Hollywood’s psychological inaccuracies,” I said as I glanced at unopened mail, a five-day-old copy of the Ragged Harbor Review, and a pile of orange peels. “Films like this one are today’s morality tales. Who ate the orange?”
Again, Jaworski flipped through his notepad. “I don’t have that, either. State folks figured the kids watched the movie, one of them ate an orange.”
“Any of the victims have finger cuts?”
“No,” he said, pleased to give me a definitive answer.
“There’s blood on the orange peels.”
Jaworski was quick. “After he killed these kids, he sat there and ate a fucking orange?”
“Have the blood checked.”
I walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “No oranges,” I said, distracted by the scent of citrus and a vague notion that it held some significance.
“He brought it with him?”
“That’s one possibility,” I told him, still trying to get a handle on an elusive association to oranges.
I followed Jaworski through the living room and stood at the second bedroom’s doorway. He handed me another stack of photos. The top one showed a once-attractive brunette, nude, splayed on the floor outside her bedroom. I stared at her face, her eyes, the startled expression.
I clenched my teeth and swallowed hard.
“This one’s name was—”
“I know who she is,” I interrupted, tossing the glossy eight-by-tens onto the coffee table, crouching, and touching the carmine blemish with my fingertips.
“I knew her,” I said.
I SAT WITH MY FACE BURIED IN MY HANDS.
“One of your students?” Jaworski asked.
“And a friend,” I said, pushing myself up and pacing the room.
I stared at the neat stack of orange peels.
I had met Jaycie Waylon only days ago. She had wanted me to feel at ease in my new surroundings, introduced me to her friends, invited me to lunch. Now she was dead.
The heat in the apartment was oppressive. I pulled off my jacket and slung it over my shoulder. A persistent scratching noise cracked the room’s silence and yanked my attention from the orange peels to the old plaster wall.
“Mice,” the chief said.
Intruders, I thought, concealed behind a wall creased with fissures from every shift in the old building’s frame.
“I had lunch with Jaycie yesterday,” I said.
“We figure she was his primary target,” the chief said. “State investigators say they think she was in bed when he shot her. Then he dragged her out here. The cutting came after.”
Jaworski’s breathing sounded labored. Sweat beaded on his forehead. Each time he spoke, he took a half-step back, wiped his forehead with a red bandanna, then stuffed it in his pocket and stepped forward.
“Sexual assault?” I asked him.
“The preliminary report says no.”
“Why is she the suspected target?”
Jaworski shrugged. “He did more cutting. Looks like he wanted to cut off her head. He didn’t cover her.”
“You okay?” I asked, watching what looked to me like a pre-coronary two-step.
“Just quit smokin’.”
I nodded. “Herb, do you think he stalked Jaycie, picked her out ahead of time, followed her?”
“Then waited un
til the lights were off, let himself in through one of the living room windows. None of them were locked. State folks say he probably went out the same way. Closed the window behind him.”
The display makes this one different. He concealed Susan and Kelly, then hacked at Jaycie and posed her corpse in grotesque sexual mimicry to assault the eyes of anyone who walked through the door.
Jaycie Waylon was the target, but he could have killed her without killing the other two. “This guy has a taste for it,” I said. “What about Jaycie’s movements earlier in the evening?”
“She was here, studying, listening to music. We’ve got four different kids at four different times telling us that.”
“She dropped me off at one-fifteen in the afternoon. She had a one-thirty class.”
Jaworski flipped through a small notebook. “The class ended at three. She and a friend walked to the village. Jaycie bought a lamp and a hairbrush at Cash Mart at three-forty. The time was printed on the sales slip. They ate at Pizza Garden, then Jaycie walked home. She was here from just after five.”
“The friend didn’t notice anyone watching them, following them?” I asked.
Jaworski shook his head. “They ran into a few girls from the college. Waved, said hi, kept on going. Nothing. We checked it out.”
I walked to the living room’s trio of windows. The first one clattered when I opened it, wobbling in its tracks. The second refused to stay up. The third was painted shut. It didn’t seem likely that the killer had made his entry through any of the windows.
Under most other circumstances I would not have shared my thoughts with the chief. Over the years, I learned the hard way to never contradict a seasoned cop, at least not until she or he recognized that even as a civilian, I might have something worthwhile to contribute. This case was different. Jaworski came after me because he and his people were stymied. There was no time to waste on politic niceties.
“Anybody actually open these?” I asked.
“Guess they just looked at the window locks,” he said sheepishly.
I walked back to Susan and Kelly’s room. “I’ll want a set of the photos,” I said. “What about the preliminary reports?”
“I’ve got copies for you of what we have so far. Still a lot of tests to be done, more interviewing. Whenever we get that stuff, I’ll see that you get copies.”
I returned to the two beds and looked again from one side to the other. “This room is balanced,” I said. “See the way the kids set it up? A desk with a bed on either side at this end of the room, and directly opposite, a desk braced by two bureaus. The posters, one on the east wall, one on the west wall, directly opposite each other. I think the killer responded to the balance of the room. Shoot once, pull down the blankets, stab seven times, spread the blood from the same height, at the same angle, on both sides of the room. Balance.”
“What does it mean?”
The killer arrived with gloves, a gun, a knife—the homicidal predator’s kit. The room’s equilibrium dictated his behavior. Except for Jaycie. Her walls aren’t painted. Her death isn’t balanced. The space around her did not determine any of her killer’s behavior. He was head-tripping, flying through a set of associations that were uniquely his.
“I don’t know what it means, Chief. Something.”
The scene was both simple and complex. The staging in the double room was obvious, and probably reactive. He arrived with his kit and a rudimentary plan, then allowed stimuli in the room to dictate discrete behavior.
I looked at the poster to my left, a movie placard. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. Freud meets Sherlock Holmes. The one on the right advertised The Seven Samurai.
“How many times did he stab Jaycie?”
“It’s a guess right now. Eighteen to twenty puncture wounds, three deep cuts across the throat.”
The influence of balance is transient. He leaves this room and the behavior changes.
“No sexual mutilation,” I said.
Jaworski was silent.
The homicidal psychopath thrives on control, possession of his victims, humiliation, then destruction. All three of these young women were executed, then stabbed.
“What are you estimating for time?”
“A friend of Susan’s found the bodies at six this morning,” Jaworski said. “They were supposed to go hiking. We’re figuring a possible maximum range of about three hours. The medical examiner’s best guess is between three-thirty and five-thirty A.M.”
“No one heard the shots?”
“No one heard anything. No one saw anything. There was a bridge game going on at the house across the street until after two. Kids in the upstairs unit got home from a rock concert around three. Nothing. Parking lot’s on the west side of the building. Folks who own the house on the east side winter in Florida.”
I wandered through the apartment. Jaworski followed at a distance.
“I’ll also want a set of the autopsy photographs,” I said.
The pool of dried blood remained where Jaycie had been found. A trail of blood drops led into her room, and two stains were visible on her pillow. There was no pooling anywhere on the bed, as there was with her roommates. Nor were there any drag marks, only drops.
“Stippling around Susan’s and Kelly’s gunshot wounds is apparent,” I said, referring to the pinpoint gunpowder impressions surrounding the wounds. “I didn’t notice it with Jaycie.”
Jaworski shrugged. “We figure the shooter was more than three feet away from her.”
Jaworski was right about that, of course, but Jaycie was not in bed when the killer shot her. The pillow stains and the blood drops on the floor were more window dressing.
Jaycie heard something, probably the shots. She got up, didn’t bother with her bathrobe, walked into the living room. The shooter stepped into the doorway and fired. About twenty feet. A single shot from a .22, through the young woman’s forehead, from across the room. Not an easy shot.
“After I review the material, I’ll have questions,” I told Jaworski.
“That’s it?”
“For now.”
He nodded. “My numbers are on the folder. Appreciate anything you can do to help.”
As we stepped onto the porch, I gazed at the row of houses across the street, each one with a brightly painted door—reds, greens, blues. Beyond the houses, as if it were drifting through their backyards, an incoming lobster boat churned the placid waters of Ragged Harbor. A man and a woman walked red door to green door along Crescent Street.
“You know Karen Jasper?” Jaworski asked.
I shook my head.
“That’s her doing door-to-door. She’s a state police detective. Karen went to that FBI profiling school in Virginia. Helps out with cases around the state. I thought you might’ve run into her.”
Uh-oh. Quantico’s self-styled wizards and their clones had even less time for me than I had for them. Probably derivative of my very open contempt for their half-wit, paint-by-number methods of crime solving. “Not likely,” I said.
As I glanced up the street at the wooden barriers that blocked all but local traffic, Jaworski followed my gaze. “Those are to keep the media sharks out,” he said. “They’re still arriving. One guy with a bunch of cameras tried to sneak back here by boat.”
“News is entertainment. Reporters compete for ratings like any other performer. Violence and sex are the big sellers, and it’s a weightier story when there’s a celebrity involved. The networks abandoned the Pope in Cuba for Monica Lewinsky in Washington.”
I glanced behind me at the crime scene sign and the yellow tape stretched across the lawn from the porch railing to an old maple tree.
“There must not be much happening in the news capitals this week,” I said.
I wondered how many times I had done this, yanked myself alert to the nuances of a murder scene, and how many of those times the victims had been new and fresh to whatever lives they might have chosen to live. For these three, all choice was gone, snapped
away in the night by person or persons unknown.
Experience had taught me to maintain an emotional distance from victims, their families, their friends. As psychically wrenched as I might be, I could not allow surges of feeling to interfere with my task. The only way I knew to catch a human predator was to create a mental space for him, to invite him into my life, and to gaze at the world with his eyes. When I achieved the mindset, there was no room for sympathy, sadness, tears.
Never having learned to grieve well was an asset. I wanted only to bring down a killer.
Herb Jaworski did not have the luxury of dispassionate inquiry. “Folks in town pretty shaken?” I asked.
“Doors locked and guns loaded,” he said, removing his cap and running his hand through his hair. “We ain’t had a murder in Ragged Harbor in nine years. Last one was Joe Pinelou. He got himself tanked at the cafe, went home and shot his wife, then turned the gun on himself. That upset a few people, but when they thought about it, most folks decided they could see it coming. Joe and Shirley had been going at each other for fifteen years. If he hadn’t done it, she would have. Maybe Joe Pinelou was crazy, but what we got here goes off the scale.”
I nodded. “No one ever sees this coming. We don’t know what happened in there, Chief. Even at the end, when you’ve got the bastard locked up, we still won’t know. Not all of it.”
JAWORSKI DROVE ME BACK TO THE HOUSE. I TOLD HIM that I would stop at his office later with questions, and walked inside.
I stood at the fireplace and surveyed the small area where I’d sat with Jaycie Waylon and her three friends.
“I know he likes the ale,” Jaycie said. “Must be he doesn’t like smiley faces.”
I glanced at the slate hearth where I had discarded the sticker. The orange circle leered back at me.
“Shit,” I muttered, and moved to the kitchen, where I spread the crime scene photos on the table, glanced at them, and scanned the preliminary reports.
Rain again began its tap dance on the roof.
The first step in understanding a mind that designs and delivers butchery is to reconstruct the discrete events of the crime, to discard the least likely scenarios, and retain all probable choreographs.