Dreams in the Key of Blue (6 page)

“Anybody actually open these?” I asked.

“Guess they just looked at the window locks,” he said sheepishly.

I walked back to Susan and Kelly’s room. “I’ll want a set of the photos,” I said. “What about the preliminary reports?”

“I’ve got copies for you of what we have so far. Still a lot of tests to be done, more interviewing. Whenever we get that stuff, I’ll see that you get copies.”

I returned to the two beds and looked again from one side to the other. “This room is balanced,” I said. “See the way the kids set it up? A desk with a bed on either side at this end of the room, and directly opposite, a desk braced by two bureaus. The posters, one on the east wall, one on the west wall, directly opposite each other. I think the killer responded to the balance of the room. Shoot once, pull down the blankets, stab seven times, spread the blood
from the same height, at the same angle, on both sides of the room. Balance.”

“What does it mean?”

The killer arrived with gloves, a gun, a knife—the homicidal predator’s kit. The room’s equilibrium dictated his behavior. Except for Jaycie. Her walls aren’t painted. Her death isn’t balanced. The space around her did not determine any of her killer’s behavior. He was head-tripping, flying through a set of associations that were uniquely his.

“I don’t know what it means, Chief. Something.”

The scene was both simple and complex. The staging in the double room was obvious, and probably reactive. He arrived with his kit and a rudimentary plan, then allowed stimuli in the room to dictate discrete behavior.

I looked at the poster to my left, a movie placard.
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.
Freud meets Sherlock Holmes. The one on the right advertised
The Seven Samurai.

“How many times did he stab Jaycie?”

“It’s a guess right now. Eighteen to twenty puncture wounds, three deep cuts across the throat.”

The influence of balance is transient. He leaves this room and the behavior changes.

“No sexual mutilation,” I said.

Jaworski was silent.

The homicidal psychopath thrives on control, possession of his victims, humiliation, then destruction. All three of these young women were executed, then stabbed.

“What are you estimating for time?”

“A friend of Susan’s found the bodies at six this morning,” Jaworski said. “They were supposed to go hiking. We’re figuring a possible maximum range of about three hours. The medical examiner’s best guess is between three-thirty and five-thirty
A.M.”

“No one heard the shots?”

“No one heard anything. No one saw anything. There
was a bridge game going on at the house across the street until after two. Kids in the upstairs unit got home from a rock concert around three. Nothing. Parking lot’s on the west side of the building. Folks who own the house on the east side winter in Florida.”

I wandered through the apartment. Jaworski followed at a distance.

“I’ll also want a set of the autopsy photographs,” I said.

The pool of dried blood remained where Jaycie had been found. A trail of blood drops led into her room, and two stains were visible on her pillow. There was no pooling anywhere on the bed, as there was with her roommates. Nor were there any drag marks, only drops.

“Stippling around Susan’s and Kelly’s gunshot wounds is apparent,” I said, referring to the pinpoint gunpowder impressions surrounding the wounds. “I didn’t notice it with Jaycie.”

Jaworski shrugged. “We figure the shooter was more than three feet away from her.”

Jaworski was right about that, of course, but Jaycie was not in bed when the killer shot her. The pillow stains and the blood drops on the floor were more window dressing.

Jaycie heard something, probably the shots. She got up, didn’t bother with her bathrobe, walked into the living room. The shooter stepped into the doorway and fired. About twenty feet. A single shot from a .22, through the young woman’s forehead, from across the room. Not an easy shot.

“After I review the material, I’ll have questions,” I told Jaworski.

“That’s it?”

“For now.”

He nodded. “My numbers are on the folder. Appreciate anything you can do to help.”

As we stepped onto the porch, I gazed at the row of houses across the street, each one with a brightly painted door—reds, greens, blues. Beyond the houses, as if it were drifting through their backyards, an incoming lobster boat churned the placid waters of Ragged Harbor. A man and a woman walked red door to green door along Crescent Street.

“You know Karen Jasper?” Jaworski asked.

I shook my head.

“That’s her doing door-to-door. She’s a state police detective. Karen went to that FBI profiling school in Virginia. Helps out with cases around the state. I thought you might’ve run into her.”

Uh-oh. Quantico’s self-styled wizards and their clones had even less time for me than I had for them. Probably derivative of my very open contempt for their half-wit, paint-by-number methods of crime solving. “Not likely,” I said.

As I glanced up the street at the wooden barriers that blocked all but local traffic, Jaworski followed my gaze. “Those are to keep the media sharks out,” he said. “They’re still arriving. One guy with a bunch of cameras tried to sneak back here by boat.”

“News is entertainment. Reporters compete for ratings like any other performer. Violence and sex are the big sellers, and it’s a weightier story when there’s a celebrity involved. The networks abandoned the Pope in Cuba for Monica Lewinsky in Washington.”

I glanced behind me at the crime scene sign and the yellow tape stretched across the lawn from the porch railing to an old maple tree.

“There must not be much happening in the news capitals this week,” I said.

I wondered how many times I had done this, yanked myself alert to the nuances of a murder scene, and how
many of those times the victims had been new and fresh to whatever lives they might have chosen to live. For these three, all choice was gone, snapped away in the night by person or persons unknown.

Experience had taught me to maintain an emotional distance from victims, their families, their friends. As psychically wrenched as I might be, I could not allow surges of feeling to interfere with my task. The only way I knew to catch a human predator was to create a mental space for him, to invite him into my life, and to gaze at the world with his eyes. When I achieved the mindset, there was no room for sympathy, sadness, tears.

Never having learned to grieve well was an asset. I wanted only to bring down a killer.

Herb Jaworski did not have the luxury of dispassionate inquiry. “Folks in town pretty shaken?” I asked.

“Doors locked and guns loaded,” he said, removing his cap and running his hand through his hair. “We ain’t had a murder in Ragged Harbor in nine years. Last one was Joe Pinelou. He got himself tanked at the cafe, went home and shot his wife, then turned the gun on himself. That upset a few people, but when they thought about it, most folks decided they could see it coming. Joe and Shirley had been going at each other for fifteen years. If he hadn’t done it, she would have. Maybe Joe Pinelou was crazy, but what we got here goes off the scale.”

I nodded. “No one ever sees this coming. We don’t know what happened in there, Chief. Even at the end, when you’ve got the bastard locked up, we still won’t know. Not all of it.”

JAWORSKI DROVE ME BACK TO THE HOUSE. I TOLD HIM
that I would stop at his office later with questions, and walked inside.

I stood at the fireplace and surveyed the small area where I’d sat with Jaycie Waylon and her three friends.

“
I know he likes the ale,” Jaycie said. “Must be he doesn’t like smiley faces.”

I glanced at the slate hearth where I had discarded the sticker. The orange circle leered back at me.

“Shit,” I muttered, and moved to the kitchen, where I spread the crime scene photos on the table, glanced at them, and scanned the preliminary reports.

Rain again began its tap dance on the roof.

The first step in understanding a mind that designs and delivers butchery is to reconstruct the discrete events of the crime, to discard the least likely scenarios, and retain all probable choreographs.

I had eliminated the living room windows as a point of entry. Also, two sliding bolts coated with undisturbed dust secured the back, solid-core door. That left a single small window in Jaycie’s room, and the front door.

If the shooter had climbed through Jaycie’s window,
the entire scene would be different. If she was the killer’s only target, his activity might have been confined to that room. Susan and Kelly would still be alive. If she had awakened, there would be evidence of a disturbance in the small area—which there was not.

The scene suggested a linear progression. He arrived knowing that he would kill them all, and moved methodically from one task to another. He was patient, comfortable with his surroundings, unconcerned with the passage of time.

Jaworski had told me that the young women were meticulous about locking the front door. Friends who visited the apartment teased them about it. They tried the door, then waited while one of the roommates unlocked the apartment.

No forced entry. You had a key.

You knew what you were doing. You let yourself in through the front door, then moved to the left, toward the double bedroom, away from Jaycie’s room.

Why?

I found the apartment’s floor plan in the case file and imagined walking through the door in darkness. The double bedroom was immediately to the left. Jaycie’s single was to the right, at the far end of the living room. A sofa and chair were also on the right, effectively dividing the room and creating a natural traffic flow from the front door to the left toward the bedroom.

If I stalked Jaycie, knew who I wanted and where she was, I would move to the right. But this killer did not.

Did you react totally to the space?

It was possible. It was just as possible that he visited earlier and knew the layout, but chose to begin by eliminating the human obstacles who might awaken and come between him and his target.

The stippling that surrounded Susan’s and Kelly’s
wounds indicated that the shooter had held the gun approximately six inches from his target each time. I stood and extended my arms as if I were holding a weapon, turned to my left,
bang,
then turned to my right.

Why turn to the left first? Why not the right, then the left? More reactivity—merely responding to the room’s stimuli?

The medical examiner could not determine which of the two victims in the double room was killed first. I favored Susan Hamilton, on the left, with my havoc, and I would have to trust that for now.

Jaycie emerged from her room.

I prepared a list of questions for Jaworski. Who has access to apartment keys? Who owns the building? What about previous tenants?

I stepped backward, pictured myself in the doorway of the double bedroom, then turned to look across the living room. I estimated the distance. Jaycie would have stood near my fireplace. Hell of a shot. If the room was dark, the shot was even more amazing.

Someone familiar with weapons. A practiced shot.

I skimmed through the case file, and when I did not find the information I wanted, I added to my list: Lights on or off when bodies discovered?

Three down. I know that Susan and Kelly are dead. I walk out to where Jaycie dropped. She is dead.

“This doesn’t make any fucking sense,” I muttered, glancing through the window at windblown sheets of rain.

I grabbed the photograph of Jaycie’s head surrounded by an aura of deep red, and examined the blood with a magnifying glass. There was a disturbance at the outer edge of the pooling on the left side. Ah, yes, the window dressing.

What do I use? What have I brought for this task? A cloth? Too absorbent and retentive. A sponge. Absorb the
blood, then squeeze it out in a trail of drops, and a final draining over the pillow.

The executions were flawless, performed by someone who, I was convinced, had killed before. The postmortem behavior, however, still confused me.

He savaged Jaycie’s body, then lingered and created performance art.

He cut Jaycie’s flannel nightgown along the seam, then removed it and placed it over the arm of a chair.

Not torn. Cut. A neat cut. Not cast aside. Placed.

Why not just rip the damn thing off? You carved into her throat like a fucking butcher gone wild with a bone saw.

I found the photograph of the nightgown and examined it with my lens. There was no fraying along the seam where it was cut. I saw a few short, loose fibers.

“That wasn’t cut with a knife,” I said. “He used scissors.”

There is no passion here. He is efficient, relaxed, loving what he’s doing, but he is not driven. His anger is spent.

He anticipates community reaction, prepares Jaycie’s body as a twisted greeting to those who enter the apartment.