She paused, thinking. “Jill and Elizabeth also exercised, were very fit. Running, I think, but they didn’t always do this together.”
“Where did they run?”
“I believe there was a park near where they lived.”
“Anything else? Theaters, shops, malls they may have frequented?”
“Nothing comes to mind.”
“What does your intuition tell you? What did it tell you at the time?”
“I felt that Jill and Elizabeth were having a stressful conversation in the bar. They probably wanted to be left alone and would have resented an intrusion.”
“Then what?”
“Clearly they encountered their killer at some point that evening.”
“Can you imagine how that might have happened?”
“It has always been my opinion it was someone they knew, or at least were well enough acquainted with so that they had no reason not to trust him. Unless they were abducted at gunpoint by one or more persons, either in the bar’s parking lot or somewhere else they might have gone.”
“What if a stranger had approached them in the bar’s parking lot, asked them for a lift somewhere, claimed to have car trouble… ?”
She was already shaking her head. “It is inconsistent with my impressions of them. Again, unless it was someone with whom they were acquainted.”
“And if the killer was impersonating a police officer, perhaps pulled them over for a routine traffic stop?”
“That’s another matter. I suppose even you and I might be vulnerable to that.”
Anna was looking tired, so I thanked her for dinner and her time. I knew our conversation was difficult for her. I wondered how I would feel were I in her position.
Minutes after I walked through my front door, the phone rang.
“One last thing that I remember but probably does not matter,” Anna said. “Jill mentioned something about the two of them working crossword puzzles when they wanted to stay in, just the two of them, on Sunday mornings, for example. Insignificant, perhaps. But a routine, something they did together.”
“A book of puzzles? Or the ones in the newspapers?”
“I don’t know. But Jill did read a variety of newspapers, Kay. She usually had something with her to read while waiting for her appointment. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post.”
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.”