Wesley began spreading out the photocopies of Beryl’s letters from Key West, the scene sketches and report, and a series of Polaroid photographs of her yard, the inside of her house, and finally of her body in the bedroom upstairs. He perused the items in silence, his face hard. He was sending the clear signal it was time to move on, we had argued and complained enough. What the police did or didn’t do wasn’t important. Finding the killer was.
“What’s bothering me,” Wesley began, “is there’s an inconsistency in the MO. The history of threats she was receiving are in keeping with a psychopathic mentality. Someone who stalked and threatened Beryl for months, someone who seemed to know her only from a distance. Unquestionably, he derived most of his pleasure from fantasy, the antecedent phase. He drew it out. He may have finally struck when he did because she’d frustrated him by leaving town. Maybe he feared she was going to move altogether, and he murdered her the moment she got back.”
“She finally pissed him off big time,” Marino interjected.
Wesley continued looking at the photographs. “I’m seeing a lot of rage, and this is where the inconsistency comes in. His rage seems personally directed at her. The mutilation of her face, specifically.”
He tapped a photograph with an index finger. “The face is the person. In the typical homicide committed by a sexual sadist, the victim’s face isn’t touched. She’s depersonalized, a symbol. In a sense, she has no face to the killer because she’s a nobody to him. Areas of the body he mutilates, if he’s into mutilation, are the breasts, the genitalia …”
He paused, his eyes perplexed. “There are personal elements in Beryl’s murder. The cutting of her face, the overkill, fit with the killer’s being someone she knew, perhaps even well. Someone who had a private, intense obsession with her. But watching her from a distance, stalking her, don’t fit with that at all. These are acts more in keeping with a stranger killer.”
Marino was toying with Wesley’s .357 door prize again. Idly spinning the cylinder, he said, “Want my opinion? I think the squirrel’s got a God complex. You know, as long as you play by his rules he don’t whack you. Beryl broke the rules by leaving town and sticking a FOR SALE sign in her yard. No fun anymore. You break the rules, you get punished.”
“How are you profiling him?” I asked Wesley.
“White, mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Bright, from a broken home in which he was deprived of a father figure. He may also have been abused as a child, physically, psychologically, or both. He’s a loner. This doesn’t mean he lives alone, however. He could be married because he’s skilled at maintaining a public persona. He leads a double life. There is the one man the world sees, then this darker side. He’s obsessive-compulsive, and he’s a voyeur.”
“Yo,” Marino muttered sardonically. “Sounds like half the drones I work with.”
Wesley shrugged. “Maybe I’m shooting blanks, Pete. I haven’t sorted through it yet. He could be some loser still living at home with his mother, could have priors, been in and out of institutions, prisons. Hell, he could work downtown in a big securities firm and have no criminal or psychiatric history at all. It seems he usually called Beryl at night. The one call we know about that he made during the day was on a Saturday. She worked out of her home, was there most of the time. He called when it was convenient for him versus when he was likely to find her in. I’m leaning toward thinking he has a regular nine to five job and is off on the weekends.”
“Unless he was calling her while he was at work,” Marino said.
“There’s always that possibility,” Wesley conceded.
“What about his age?” I asked. “You don’t think it’s possible he might be older than you just proposed?”
“It would be unusual,” Wesley said. “But anything’s possible.”
Sipping my coffee, which was cool by now, I got around to telling them what Mark had told me about Beryl’s contract conflicts and her enigmatic relationship with Gary Harper. When I was finished, Wesley and Marino were staring curiously at me. For one thing, this Chicago lawyer’s impromptu visit late at night did sound a little odd. For another, I had thrown them a curve. The thought probably had not occurred to Marino or Wesley and, before last night, certainly not to me, that there actually might be a motive in Beryl’s slaying. The most common motive in sexual homicides is no motive at all. The perpetrators do it because they enjoy it and because the opportunity is there.