Her body was found the next afternoon, Saturday: She was supposed to go shopping with her friend. Cecile’s car was in the drive, and when she didn’t answer the phone or the door, her friend got worried and peered through the slightly parted curtains of the bedroom window. The sight of Cecile’s nude, bound body on top of the disarrayed bed wasn’t something the friend was likely ever to forget.
“Bobbi,” Marino said. “She’s white, you know.”
“Cecile’s friend?”
I’d forgotten her name.
“Yo. Bobbi. The rich bitch who found Cecile’s body. The two of ’em was always together. Bobbi’s got this red Porsche, a dynamite-looking blonde, works as a model. She’s at Cecile’s crib all the time, sometimes don’t leave until early morning. Think the two of ’em were sweet on each other, you want my opinion. Blows my mind. I mean, it’s hard to figure. Both of ’em goodlooking enough to pop your eyes out. You’d think men would be hitting on ’em all the time . . . ”
“Maybe that’s your answer,” I said in annoyance. “If your suspicions about the women are founded.”
Marino smiled slyly. He was baiting me again.
“Well, my point is,” he went on, “maybe the killer’s cruising the neighborhood and sees Bobbi climbing into her red Porsche late one night. Maybe he thinks she lives here. Or maybe he follows her one night when she’s on her way to Cecile’s house.”
“And he murders Cecile by mistake? Because he thought Bobbi lived here?”
“I’m just running it up the pole. Like I said, Bobbi’s white. The other victims are white.”
We sat in silence for a moment, staring at the house.
The racial mix continued to bother me, too. Three white women and one black woman. Why? “One more thing I’ll run up the pole,” Marino said. “I’ve been wondering if the killer’s got several candidates for each of these murders, like he chooses from the menu, ends up getting what he can afford. Sort of strange each time he sets out to kill one of ’em, she just happens to have a window unlocked or open or broke. It’s either, in my opinion, a random situation, where he cruises and looks for anyone who seems to be alone and whose house is insecure, or else he’s got access to a number of women and their addresses, and maybe makes the rounds, maybe cases a lotta residences in one night before finding the one that’ll work for him.”
I didn’t like it.
“I think he stalked each of these women,” I said, “that they were specific targets. I think he may have cased their homes before and either not found them in or found the windows locked. It may be the killer habitually visits the place where his next victim lives and then strikes when the opportunity presents itself.”
He shrugged, playing with the idea. “Patty Lewis was murdered several weeks after Brenda Steppe. And Patty also was out of town visiting a friend the week prior to her murder. So it’s possible he tried the weekend before and didn’t find her home. Sure. Maybe it happened like that. Who’s to say? Then he hits Cecile Tyler three weeks later. But he got to Lori Petersen exactly one week after that-who knows? Maybe he scored right off. A window was unlocked because the husband forgot to lock it. The killer could have had some sort of contact with Lori Petersen as recently as several days before he murdered her, and if her window hadn’t been unlocked last weekend he’d be back this weekend, trying again.
“The weekend,” I said. “That seems to be important to him, important to strike on a late Friday night or in the first hour or so of Saturday morning.”
Marino nodded. “Oh, yeah. It’s calculated. Me, I think it’s because he works Monday through Friday, has the weekend off to chill out after he’s done it. Probably he likes the pattern for another reason, too. It’s a way of jerking us around. Friday comes and he knows the city, people like you and me, are nervous as a cat in the middle of a freeway.”
I hesitated, then broached the subject. “Do you think his pattern is escalating? That the murders are more closely spaced because he’s getting more stressed, perhaps by all the publicity?”