Shooting Deborah Harvey I was sure was a mistake.
Then there was the perpetrator’s past, which was what I was considering now. He didn’t suddenly go from being a law-abiding citizen to becoming an experienced murderer. What sins had he committed before, what acts of evil? For one thing, he may have shot an old man’s dog eight years ago. If I was right, then he had made another mistake, because the incident suggested he was local, not new to the area. It made me wonder if he had killed before.
Immediately after staff meeting the following morning, I had my computer analyst, Margaret, give me a printout of every homicide that had occurred within a fifty-mile radius of Camp Peary over the past ten years. Though I wasn’t necessarily looking for a double homicide, that was exactly what I found. Numbers C0104233 and C0104234. I had never heard of the related cases, which had occurred several years before I moved to Virginia. Returning to my office, I shut the doors and reviewed the files with growing excitement. Jill Harrington and Elizabeth Mott had been murdered eight years ago in September, a month after Mr. Joyce’s dog was shot.
Both women were in their early twenties when they disappeared eight years before on the Friday night of September fourteenth, their bodies found the next morning in a church cemetery. It wasn’t until the following day that the Volkswagen belonging to Elizabeth was located in a motel parking lot off Route 60 in Lightfoot, just outside of Williamsburg. I began studying autopsy reports and body diagrams. Elizabeth Mott had been shot once in the neck, after which, it was conjectured, she was stabbed once in the chest, her throat cut. She was fully clothed, with no evidence of sexual assault, no bullet was recovered, and there were ligature marks around her wrists. There were no defense injuries. Jill’s records, however, told another story. She bore defense cuts to both forearms and hands, and contusions and lacerations to her face and scalp consistent with being “pistol whipped,” and her blouse was torn. Apparently, she had put up one hell of a struggle, ending with her being stabbed eleven times.
According to newspaper clips included in their files, the James City County police said the women were last seen drinking beer in the Anchor Bar and Grill in Williamsburg, where they stayed until approximately ten P.M. It was theorized that it was here they met up with their assailant, a “Mr. Goodbar” situation, in which the two women left with him and followed him to the motel where Elizabeth’s car was later found. At some point he abducted them, perhaps in the parking lot, and forced them to drive him to the cemetery where he murdered them.
There was a lot about the scenario that didn’t make sense to me. The police had found blood in the backseat of the Volkswagen that could not be explained. The blood type did not match up with either woman’s. If the blood was the killer’s, then what happened? Did he struggle with one of the women in the backseat? If so, why wasn’t her blood found as well? If both women were up front and he was in back, then how did he get injured? If he cut himself while struggling with Jill in the cemetery, then that didn’t make sense, either. After the murders, he would have had to drive their car from the cemetery to the motel, and his blood should have been in the driver’s area, not in the backseat. Finally, if the man intended to murder the women after engaging in sexual activity, why didn’t he just kill them inside the motel room? And why were the women’s physical evidence recovery kits negative for sperm? Had they engaged in intercourse with this man and then cleaned up afterward? Two women with one man? A menage a trois? Well, I supposed, there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen in my line of work.
Buzzing the computer analyst’s office, I got Margaret on the line.
“I need you to run something else for me,” I said. ” list of all drug-positive homicide cases worked by James City County Detective R. P. Montana. And I need the information right away, if you can manage it.”