Postmortem(107)

“Check it,” Wesley said. “Get a couple of guys to go around to the various pizza delivery places pronto.”

Tomorrow was Friday!

“See if there’s any one pizza place all five women called from time to time. It should be in the computer, easy to track.”

Marino left for a moment, returning with the Yellow Pages. He found the pizza section and started scribbling down names and addresses.

We kept coming up with more and more possible occupations. Switchboard operators for hospitals and telephone companies were up all hours answering calls. Fund-raisers didn’t hesitate to interrupt your favorite television program as late as ten P.M. Then there was always the possibility of someone playing roulette with the city directory or telephone book—a security guard with nothing better to do while he’s sitting inside the lobby of the Federal Reserve, or a gas station attendant bored late at night during the slow hours.

I was getting more confused. I couldn’t sort through it all.

Yet there was something bothering me.

You’re making it too complicated, my inner voice was telling me. You’re getting farther and farther removed from what you actually know.

I looked at Marino’s damp, meaty face, at his eyes shifting here and there. He was tired, stressed. He was still nursing a deep-seated anger. Why was he so touchy? What was it he said about the way the killer would think, something about him not liking professional women because they’re snooty?

Every time I tried to get hold of him, he was “on the street.” He’d been to every strangling scene.

At Lori Petersen’s scene he was wide-awake. Had he even been to bed that night? Wasn’t it a little odd he was so rabid in trying to pin the murders on Matt Petersen?

Marino’s age doesn’t profile right, I told myself.

He spends most of his time in his car and doesn’t answer the phone for a living, so I can’t see the connection between him and the women.

Most important, he doesn’t have a peculiar body odor, and if the jumpsuit found in the Dumpster was his, why would he bring it in to the lab?

Unless, I thought, he’s turning the system inside out, playing it against itself because he knows so much. He is, after all, an expert, in charge of the investigation and experienced enough to be a savior or a satan.

I suppose all along I’d been harboring the fear that the killer might be a cop.

Marino didn’t fit. But the killer might be someone he’d worked around for months, someone who bought navy blue jumpsuits at the various uniform stores around the city, someone who washed his hands with the Borawash soap dispensed in the department’s men’s rooms, someone who knew enough about forensics and criminal investigation to be able to outsmart his brothers and me. A cop gone bad. Or someone drawn to law enforcement because this is often a very attractive profession to psychopaths.

We’d tracked down the squads that responded to the homicide scenes. What we’d never thought to do was to track down the uniformed men who responded when the bodies were discovered.

Maybe some cop was thumbing through the telephone or city directory during his shift or after hours. Maybe his first contact with the victims was voice. Their voices set him off. He murdered them and made sure he was on the street or near a scanner when each body was found.

“Our best bet is Matt Petersen,” Wesley was saying to Marino. “He still in town?”

“Yeah. Last I heard.”

“I think you’d better go see him, find out if his wife ever mentioned anything about telephone soliciting, about someone calling up to say she’d won a contest, someone taking a poll. Anything involving the phone.”

Marino pushed back his chair.

I hedged. I didn’t come right out and say what I was thinking.

Instead, I asked, “How tough would it be to get printouts or tape recordings of the calls made to the police when the bodies were found? I want to see the exact times the homicides were called in, what time the police arrived, especially in Lori Petersen’s case. Time of death may be very important in helping us determine what time the killer gets off work, assuming he works at night.”

“No problem,” Marino replied abstractedly. “You can come along with me. After we hit Petersen, we’ll swing by the radio room.”


We didn’t find Matt Petersen at home. Marino left his card under the brass knocker of his apartment.

“I don’t expect him to return my call,” he mumbled as he crept back out into traffic.

“Why not?”

“When I dropped by the other day he didn’t invite me in. Just stood in the doorway like a damn barricade. Was big enough to sniff the jumpsuit before basically telling me to buzz off, practically slammed the door in my face, said in the future to talk to his lawyer. Petersen said the polygraph cleared him, said I was harassing him.”