“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.”