I went out into the hallway where several uniformed men were leaning against the wall, chatting. I asked one of them to raise Marino on the radio and have him call me right away. I heard Marino’s voice crackle back, “Ten fo’.”
I paced the hard tile floor inside the autopsy suite with its gleaming stainless steel tables and sinks and carts lined with surgical instruments. A faucet was dripping somewhere. Disinfectant smelled sweetly revolting, only smelled pleasant when there were worse smells lurking beneath it. The black telephone on the desk mocked me with its silence. Marino knew I was waiting by the phone. He was having a good time knowing that.
It was idle speculation to go back to the beginning and try to figure out what had gone wrong. Occasionally I thought about it anyway. What it was about me. I had been polite to Marino the first time we met, had offered him a firm and respectful handshake while his eyes went as flat as two tarnished pennies.
Twenty minutes passed before the telephone rang.
Marino was still at the Petersen house, he said, interviewing the husband, who was, in the detective’s words, “as goofy as a shithouse rat.”
I told him about the sparkles. I repeated what I’d explained to him in the past. It was possible they might be from some household substance consistent in all of the homicide scenes, some oddball something the killer looked for and incorporated into his ritual. Baby powder, lotions, cosmetics, cleansers.
So far, we had ruled out many things which, in’ a way, was the point. If the substance wasn’t indigenous to the scenes, and in my heart I didn’t think it was, then the killer was carrying it in with him, perhaps unaware, and this could be important and eventually lead us to where he worked or lived.
“Yeah,” Marino’s voice came over the line, “well, I’ll poke around in the cabinets and so forth. But I got my own thought.”
“Which is?”
“The husband here’s in a play, right? Has practice every Friday night, which is why he gets in so late, right? Correct me if I’m wrong, but actors wear greasepaint.”
“Only during dress rehearsals or performances.”
“Yeah,” he drawled. “Well, according to him, a dress rehearsal’s exactly what he had just before he came home and supposedly found his dead wife. My little bell’s ringing. My little voice is talking to me-” I cut him off. “Have you printed him?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Place his card inside a plastic bag and when you come in bring it straight to me.”
He didn’t get it.
I didn’t elaborate. I was in no mood to explain.
The last thing Marino told me before hanging up was “Don’t know when that will be, Doc. Got a feeling I’m going to be tied up out here most of the day. No pun intended.”
It was unlikely I would see him or the fingerprint card until Monday. Marino had a suspect. He was galloping down the same trail every cop gallops down. A husband could be St. Anthony and in England when his wife is murdered in Seattle, and still the cops are suspicious of him first.
Domestic shootings, poisonings, beatings and stabbings are one thing, but a lust murder is another. Not many husbands would have the stomach for binding, raping and strangling their wives.
I blamed my disconcertedness on fatigue.
I had been up since 2:33 A.M. and it was now almost 6:00 P.M. The police officers who came to the morgue were long gone. Vander went home around lunchtime. Wingo, one of my autopsy technicians, left not long after that, and there was no one inside the building but me.
The quiet I usually craved was unnerving and I could not seem to get warm. My hands were stiff, the fingernails almost blue. Every time the telephone rang in the front office, I started.
The minimal security in my office never seemed to worry anyone but me. Budget requests for an adequate security system were repeatedly refused. The commissioner thought in terms of property loss, and no thief was going to come into the morgue even if we put out welcome mats and left the doors open wide at all hours. Dead bodies are a better deterrent than guard dogs.