“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 lighters 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.”