Postmortem(29)

“I’ll tell you what the hell my point is!” His chin was jutted out, the veins in his neck standing out like cords. “This goddam crap about who profiles right and who don’t. It frosts me. What I got here is a guy writing his friggin’ dissertation on sex and violence, cannibals, queers. He’s got glitter crap on his hands that looks like the same stuff found on all the bodies. His prints are on his dead wife’s skin and on the knife stashed in one of his drawers—a knife that also has this glitter crap on the handle. He gets home every weekend right about the time the women get whacked. But no. Hell, no. He can’t be the guy, right? And why? ’Cause he ain’t blue collar. He ain’t trashy enough.”

Wesley was staring off again. My eyes fell to the photographs spread out before us, full-blown color shots of women who never in their worst nightmares would have believed anything like this could happen to them.

“Well, let me just lay this one on you.” The tirade wasn’t about to end. “Pretty-boy Matt, here—it just so happens he ain’t exactly pure as the driven snow. While I was upstairs checking with serology, I buzzed by Vander’s office again to see if he’d turned up anything else. Petersen’s prints are on file, right? You know why?” He stared hard at me. “I’ll tell you why. Vander looked into it, did his thing with his gizmos. Pretty-boy Matt got arrested six years ago in New Orleans. This was the summer before he went off to college, long before he met his surgeon lady. She probably never even knew about it.”

“Knew about what?” Wesley asked. “Knew her lover-boy actor was charged with rape, that’s what.”

No one said anything for a very long time.

Wesley was slowly turning his Mont Blanc pen end over end on the tabletop, his jaw firmly set. Marino wasn’t playing by the rules. He wasn’t sharing information. He was ambushing us with it as if this were court and Wesley and I were opposing counsel.

I finally proposed, “If Petersen was, in fact, charged with rape, then he was acquitted. Or else the charges were dropped.”

Those eyes of his fixed on me like two gun barrels. “You know that, do you? I ain’t run a record check on him yet.”

“A university like Harvard, Sergeant Marino, doesn’t make it a practice to accept convicted felons.”

“If they know.”

“True,” I agreed. “If they know. It’s hard to believe they wouldn’t know, if the charge stuck.”

“We’d better run it down” was all Wesley had to say about the matter.

With that, Marino abruptly excused himself.

I assumed he was going to the men’s room.

Wesley acted as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about Marino’s outburst or anything else. He casually asked, “What’s the word from New York, Kay? Anything back from the lab yet?”

“DNA testing takes a while,” I abstractedly replied. “We didn’t send them anything until the second case. I should be getting those results soon. As for the second two, Cecile Tyler and Lori Petersen, we’re talking next month at the earliest.”

He persisted in his “nothing’s wrong” mode. “In all four cases the guy’s a nonsecreter. That much we know.”

“Yes. We know that much.”

“There’s really no doubt in my mind it’s the same killer.”

“Nor in mine,” I concurred.

Nothing more was said for a while.

We sat tensely, waiting for Marino’s return, his angry words still ringing in our ears. I was perspiring and could feel my heart beating.

I think Wesley must have been able to read the look on my face that I wanted nothing more to do with Marino, that I had relegated him to the oblivion I reserve for people who are impossible and unpleasant and professionally dangerous.

He said, “You have to understand him, Kay.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“He’s a good detective, a very fine one.”

I didn’t comment.

We sat silently.

My anger began to rise. I knew better, but there was no stopping the words from boiling out. “Damn it, Benton! These women deserve our best effort. We screw it up and someone else may die. I don’t want him screwing it up because he’s got some problem!”

“He won’t.”

“He already is.” I lowered my voice. “He’s got a noose around Matt Petersen’s neck. It means he’s not looking at anybody else.”

Marino, thank God, was taking his sweet time coming back.

Wesley’s jaw muscles were flexing and he wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I haven’t dismissed Petersen yet either. I can’t. I know killing his wife doesn’t fit with the other three. But he’s an unusual case. Take Gacy. We’ve got no idea how many people he murdered. Thirty-three kids. Possibly it was hundreds. Strangers, all of them strangers to him. Then he does his mother and stuffs pieces of her down the garbage disposal . . .”