McCorkle wasn’t on duty Friday night. He called in sick. He hadn’t been to work since Abby’s Thursday morning front page story. His colleagues didn’t have much of an opinion of him one way or another except they found his CB phone manner and jokes amusing. They used to kid him about his frequent trips to the men’s room, as many as a dozen during a shift. He was washing his hands, his face, his neck. A dispatcher walked in on him once and found McCorkle practically taking a sponge bath.
In the communications men’s room was a dispenser of Borawash soap.
He was an “all-right guy.”
No one who worked with him really knew him well. They assumed he had a woman he was seeing after hours, “a good-looking blonde” named “Christie.”
There was no Christie. The only women he saw after hours were the ones he butchered. No-one who worked with him could believe he was the one, the strangler.
McCorkle, we were considering, may have murdered the three women in the Boston area years ago. He was driving a rig back then. One of his stops was Boston, where he delivered chickens to a packing plant. But we couldn’t be sure. We may never know just how many women he murdered all over the United States. It could be dozens. He probably started out as a peeper, then progressed to a rapist. He had no police record. The most he’d ever gotten was a speeding ticket.
He was only twenty-seven.
According to his resume on file with the police department, he’d worked a number of jobs: trucker, dispatcher for a cement company in Cleveland, mail deliveryman and as a deliveryman for a florist in Philadelphia.
Marino wasn’t able to find him Friday night but he didn’t look very hard. From eleven-thirty Marino was on my property, out of sight behind shrubbery, watching. He was wearing a dark blue police jumpsuit so he would blend with the night. When he switched on the overhead light inside my bedroom, and I saw him standing there in the jumpsuit, the gun in hand, for a paralyzing second I didn’t know who was the killer and who was the cop.
“See,” he was saying,. “I’d been thinking about the Abby Turnbull connection, about the possibility the guy was after her and ended up with the sister by mistake. That worried me. I asked myself, what other lady in the city’s he getting hooked into?”
He looked at me, his face thoughtful.
When Abby was followed from the newspaper late one night and dialed 911, it was McCorkle who answered the call. That was how he knew where she lived. Maybe he’d already thought of killing her, or maybe it didn’t occur to him until he heard her voice and realized who she was. We would never know.
We did know all five women had dialed 911 in the past. Patty Lewis did less than two weeks before she was murdered. She called at 8:23 on a Thursday night, right after a bad rainstorm, to report a traffic light out a mile from her house. She was being a good citizen. She was trying to prevent an accident. She didn’t want anybody to get hurt.
Cecile Tyler hit a nine instead of a four. A wrong number.
I never dialed 911.
I didn’t need to.
My number and address were in the phone directory because medical examiners had to be able to reach me after business hours. Also I talked with several dispatchers on several occasions over the past few weeks when I was trying to find Marino. One of them might have been McCorkle. I’d never know. I don’t think I wanted to know.
“Your picture’s been in the paper and on TV,” Marino went on. “You’ve been working all his cases, he’s been wondering what you know. He’s been thinking about you. Me, I was worried. Then all that shit about his metabolic disorder and your office having something on him.”
He paced as he talked. “Now he’s going to be hot. Now it’s gotten personal. The snooty lady doctor here’s maybe insulting his intelligence, his masculinity.”
The phone calls I was getting at late hours “This pushes his button. He don’t like no broad treating him like he’s a stupid ass. He’s thinking, ‘The bitch thinks she’s smart, better’n me. I’ll show her. I’ll fix her.’