She. Lori Petersen. Brown. Harvard. Brilliant. Thirty years old. About to have it all realized, her dream. After eight grueling years, at least, of medical training. A physician. All of it destroyed in a few minutes of a stranger’s aberrant pleasure.
Marino touched my elbow.
I turned away from the photographs as he directed my attention to the open doorway just ahead on the left.
“Here’s how he got in,” he said.
It was a small room with a white tile floor and walls papered in Williamsburg blue. There was a toilet and a lavatory, and a straw clothes hamper. The window above the toilet was open wide, a square of blackness through which cool, moist air seeped and stirred the starchy white curtains. Beyond, in the dark, dense trees, cicadas were tensely sawing.
“The screen’s cut.” Marino’s face was expressionless as he glanced at me. “It’s leaning against the back of the house. Right under the window’s a picnic table bench. Appears he pulled it up so he could climb in.”
I was scanning the floor, the sink, the top of the toilet. I didn’t see dirt or smudges or footprints, but it was hard to tell from where I was standing, and I had no intention of running the risk of contaminating anything.
“Was this window locked?” I asked.
“Don’t look like it. All the other windows are locked. Already checked. Seems like she would’ve gone to a lot of trouble to make sure this one was. Of all the windows, it’s the most vulnerable, close to the ground, in back where no one can see what’s going on. Better than coming in through the bedroom window because if the guy’s quiet, she’s not going to hear him cutting the screen and climbing in this far down the hall.”
“And the doors? Were they locked when the husband got home?”
“He says so.”
“Then the killer went out the same way he came in,” I decided.
“Looks that way. Tidy squirrel, don’t you think?”
He was holding on to the door frame, leaning forward without stepping inside. “Don’t see nothing in here, like maybe he wiped up after himself to make sure he didn’t leave footprints on the john or floor. It’s been raining all day.”
His eyes were flat as they fixed on me. “His feet should’ve been wet, maybe muddy.”
I wondered where Marino was going with this. He was hard to read, and I’d never decided if he was a good poker player or simply slow. He was exactly the sort of detective I avoided when given a choice – a cock of the walk and absolutely unreachable. He was pushing fifty, with a face life had chewed on, and long wisps of graying hair parted low on one side and combed over his balding pate. At least six feet tall, he was bay-windowed from decades of bourbon or beer. His unfashionably wide red-and-blue-striped tie was oily around the neck from summers of sweat. Marino was the stuff of tough-guy flicks – a crude, crass gumshoe who probably had a foul-mouthed parrot for a pet and a coffee table littered with Hustler magazines.
I went the length of the hallway and stopped outside the master bedroom. I felt myself go hollow inside.
An ID officer was busy coating every surface with black dusting powder; a second officer was capturing everything on videotape.
Lori Petersen was on top of the bed, the blue-and-white spread hanging off the foot of the bed. The top sheet was kicked down and bunched beneath her feet, the cover sheet pulled free of the top comers, exposing the mattress, the pillows shoved to the right side of her head. The bed was the vortex of a violent storm, surrounded by the undisturbed civility of middle-class bedroom furnishings of polished oak.
She was nude. On the colorful rag rug to the right of the bed was her pale yellow cotton gown. It was slit from collar to hem, and this was consistent with the three previous cases. On the night stand nearest the door was a telephone, the cord ripped out of the wall. The two lamps on either side of the bed were out, the electrical cords severed from them. One cord bound her wrists, which were pinioned at the small of her back. The other cord was tied in a diabolically creative pattern also consistent with the first three cases. Looped once around her neck, it was threaded behind her through the cord around her wrists and tightly lashed around her ankles. As long as her knees were bent, the loop around her neck remained loose. When she straightened her legs, either in a reflex to pain or because of the assailant’s weight on top of her, the ligature around her neck tightened like a noose.