“Matt? Think about it. Could a husband rape and bind his wife? Could he fracture her ribs and break her fingers? Could he slowly strangle her to death? This is someone he loves or once loved. Someone he sleeps with, eats with, talks to, lives with. A person, Sergeant. Not a stranger or depersonalized object of lust and violence. How are you going to connect a husband murdering his wife with the first three stranglings?”
Clearly, he’d already thought about this. “They occurred after midnight, on early Saturday mornings. Right about the time Matt was getting home from Charlottesville. Maybe his wife got suspicious about him for some reason and he decides he’s got to whack her. Maybe he does her like the others to make us think the serial killer did her. Or maybe the wife’s who he was after all along, and he does the other three first to make it look like his wife was done by this anonymous and same killer.”
“A wonderful plot for Agatha Christie.” I was pushing back my chair and getting up. “But as you know in real life murder is usually depressingly simple. I think these murders are simple. They are exactly what they appear to be, impersonal random murders committed by someone who stalks his victims long enough to figure out when to strike.”
Marino got up, too. “Yeah, well in real life, Doctor Scarpetta, bodies don’t have freaky little sparkles all over ’em that match the same freaky sparkles found on the hands of the husband who discovers the body and leaves his prints all over the damn place. And the victims don’t have pretty-boy actors for husbands, squirrels writing dissertations on sex and violence and cannibals and faggots.”
I calmly asked him, “The odor Petersen mentioned. Did you smell anything like that when you arrived on the scene?”
“Naw. Didn’t smell a damn thing. So maybe he was smelling seminal fluid, if he’s telling the truth.”
“I should think he would know what that smells like.”
“But he wouldn’t be expecting to smell it. No reason it should come to mind at first. Now me, when I went in the bedroom, I didn’t smell nothing like he was describing.”
“Do you recall smelling anything peculiar at the other strangling scenes?”
“No, ma’am. Which just further corroborates my suspicion that either Matt imagined it or is making it up, to throw us off track.”
Then it came to me. “In the three previous cases, the women weren’t found until the next day, after they’d been dead at least twelve hours.”
Marino paused in the doorway, his face incredulous. “You suggesting Matt got home just after the killer left, that the killer’s got some weird case of B.O.?”
“I’m suggesting it’s possible.”
His face tightened with anger, and as he stalked down the hall I heard him mutter, “Goddam women . . .”
Chapter 5
THE SIXTH STREET MARKETPLACE IS A BAYSIDE without the water, one of these open, sunny malls built of steel and glass, on the north edge of the banking district in the heart of downtown. It wasn’t often I went out for lunch, and I certainly didn’t have time for the luxury this afternoon. I had an appointment in less than an hour, and there were two sudden deaths and one suicide in transport, but I needed to unwind.
Marino bothered me. His attitude toward me reminded me of medical school.
I was one of four women in my class at Hopkins. I was too nai¨ve in the beginning to realize what was happening. The sudden creaking of chairs and loud shuffling of papers when a professor would call on me were not coincidence. It was not chance when old tests made the rounds but were never available to me. The excuses—“You wouldn’t be able to read my writing” or “Someone else is borrowing them right now”— were too universal when I went from student to student on the few occasions I missed a lecture and needed to copy someone else’s notes. I was a small insect faced with a formidable male network web in which I might be ensnared but never a part.
Isolation is the cruelest of punishments, and it had never occurred to me that I was something less than human because I wasn’t a man. One of my female classmates eventually quit, another suffered a complete nervous breakdown. Survival was my only hope, success my only revenge.
I’d thought those days were behind me, but Marino brought all of it back. I was more vulnerable now because these murders were affecting me in a way others had not. I did not want to be alone in this; but Marino seemed to have his mind made up, not only about Matt Petersen, but also about me.
The midday stroll was soothing, the sun bright and winking on windshields of the passing traffic. The double glass doors leading inside the Marketplace were open to let the spring breeze in, and the food court was as crowded as I knew it would be. Waiting my turn at the carry-out salad counter, I watched people go by, young couples laughing and talking and lounging at small tables. I was aware of women who seemed alone, preoccupied professional women wearing expensive suits and sipping diet colas or nibbling on pita bread sandwiches.