“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.”