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.”
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.”