“Go on,” I said. “What happened next?”
He placed the second report on Wesley’s desk and began reading the third one. “Beryl called Reed again, this time on July sixth, a Saturday morning at eleven-fifteen. He responded to her house that afternoon at four o’clock and found the complainant hostile and upset…”
“I guess so,” I said shortly. “She’d been waiting five damn hours for him.”
“On this occasion”–Marino ignored me and read word for word–“Miss Madison stated the same subject called her at eleven A.M. and communicated the following message: ‘Still missing me? Soon, Beryl, soon. I came by last night for you. You weren’t home. Do you bleach your hair? I hope not.’ At this point, Miss Madison, who is blond, said she tried to talk to him. She pleaded with him to leave her alone, asked him who he was and why he was doing this to her. She said he didn’t respond and hung up. She did confirm she was out the night before when the caller claimed to have come by. When this officer asked her where she was, she became evasive and would state only that she was out of town.”
“And what did Officer Reed do this time to help the lady in distress?”
I asked.
Marino looked blandly at me. “He advised her to get a dog, and she stated she was allergic to dogs.”
Wesley opened a file folder. “Kay, you’re looking at this in retrospect, in light of a terrible crime already committed. But Reed was coming at it from the other end.
Look at it through his eyes. Here’s this young woman who lives alone. She’s getting hysterical. Reed does the best he can for her–even gives her his pager number. He responds quickly, at least at first. But she’s evasive when asked pointed questions. She’s got no evidence. Any officer would have been skeptical.”
“If it had been me,” Marino concurred, “I know what I would have thought. I would have been suspicious the lady was lonely, wanted the attention, wanted to feel like someone gave a rat’s ass about her. Or maybe she’d been burned by some guy and was setting the stage to pay him back.”
“Right,” I said before I could stop myself. “And if it had been her husband or boyfriend threatening to kill her, you’d think the same thing. And Beryl would still turn up dead.”
“Maybe,” Marino said testily. “But if it was her husband–saying she had one–at least I would have a damn suspect and could get a damn warrant and the judge could slap the drone with a restraining order.”
“Restraining orders aren’t worth the paper they’re written on,” I retorted, my anger nudging me closer to the limits of self-control. Not a year went by that I didn’t autopsy half a dozen brutalized women whose husbands or boyfriends had been slapped with restraining orders.
After a long silence, I asked Wesley, “Didn’t Reed at any point suggest placing a trap on her line?”
“Wouldn’t have done any good,” he answered. “Pin taps or traps aren’t easy to get. The phone company needs a long list of calls, hard evidence the harassment is occurring.”
“She didn’t have hard evidence?”
Wesley slowly shook his head. “It would take more calls than she was getting, Kay. A lot of them. A pattern of when they were occurring. A solid record of them. Without all that, you can forget a trap.”
“By all appearances,” Marino added, “Beryl was getting only one or two calls a month. And she wasn’t keeping the damn log Reed told her to keep. Or if she was, we haven’t found it. Apparently she didn’t tape any of the calls either.”
“Good God,” I muttered. “Someone threatens your life and it takes a damn act of Congress to get anyone to take it seriously.”
Wesley didn’t reply.
Marino snorted. “It’s like in your place, Doc. No such thing as preventive medicine. We’re nothing but a damn cleanup crew. Can’t do a damn thing until after the fact, when there’s hard evidence. Like a dead body.”
“Beryl’s behavior ought to have been evidence enough,” I answered. “Look over these reports. Everything Officer Reed suggested, she did. He told her to get an alarm system and she did. He told her to start parking her car in the garage and she did, even though she was planning to turn the garage into an office. She asked him about a handgun, then went out and bought one. And whenever she called Reed it was directly after the killer had called and threatened her. In other words, she didn’t wait and call the police hours, days later.”