“Did the murders stop after Petersen graduated and moved here?”
“Not exactly,” he replied. “There was one more later that summer which Petersen couldn’t have committed because he was living here, his wife just starting at VMC. But there were a few differences in the third case. The victim was a teenager and lived about fifteen miles from where the other two homicides occurred. She didn’t live alone, was shacked up with a guy who was out of town at the time. The cops speculated her murder was a copycat—some squirrel read about the first two in the papers and got the idea. She wasn’t found for about a week, was so decomposed there wasn’t a hope in hell of finding seminal fluid. Typing the killer wasn’t possible.”
“What about typing the first two cases?”
“Nonsecreter,” he slowly said, staring straight ahead. Silence. I reminded myself there are millions of men in the country who are nonsecreters and sex slayings happen every year in almost every major city. But the parallels were jolting.
We had turned onto a narrow, tree-lined street in a recently developed subdivision where all of the ranch-style houses looked alike and hinted of cramped space and low-budget building materials. There were realtor signs scattered about, and some of the homes were still under construction. Most of the lawns were newly seeded and landscaped with small dogwoods and fruit trees.
Two blocks down on the left was the small gray house where Brenda Steppe had been slain not quite two months ago. The house had not been rented or sold. Most people in the market for a new home aren’t keen on the idea of moving into a place where someone has been brutally murdered. Planted in the yards of the houses on either side were “For Sale” signs.
We parked in front and sat quietly, the windows rolled down. There were few streetlights, I noted. At night it would be very dark, and if the killer was careful and wearing dark clothing, he wasn’t going to be seen.
Marino said, “He got in the kitchen window around back. It appears she got home at nine, nine-thirty that night. We found a shopping bag in the living room. The last item she bought had the computer-printed time on it of eight-fifty P.M. She goes home and cooks a late dinner. That weekend it was warm, and I’m assuming she left the window open to air out the kitchen. Especially since it appears she’d been frying ground beef and onions.”
I nodded, recalling Brenda Steppe’s gastric contents.
“Cooking hamburger and onions usually smokes or smells up the kitchen. Least it does in my damn house. And there was a ground-beef wrapper, an empty spaghetti sauce jar and onion skins in the trash under the sink, plus a greasy frying pan soaking.” He paused, adding thoughtfully, “Kind of weird to think her choice of what to cook for dinner maybe resulted in her ending up murdered. You know, maybe if she’d had a tuna casserole, a sandwich or something, she wouldn’t have left the window open.”
This was a favorite rumination of death investigators: What if? What if the person had not decided to buy a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store where two armed robbers were holding the clerk hostage in the back? What if someone hadn’t decided to step outside and empty the cat-litter box at the very moment a prison escapee was nearing the house? What if someone hadn’t had a fight with his lover, resulting in his driving off in a huff at the exact moment a drunk driver was rounding a curve on the wrong side of the road?
Marino asked, “You notice the turnpike’s less than a mile from here?”
“Yes. There’s a Safeway on the corner, just before you turn off in this neighborhood,” I recalled. “A possible place for him to have left his car, assuming he came the rest of the way on foot.”
He cryptically observed, “Yeah, the Safeway. It closes at midnight.”
I lit another cigarette and played on the adage that in order for a detective to be good, he has to be able to think like the people he’s out to get.
“What would you have done,” I asked, “if it were you?”
“If what were me?”
“If you were this killer.”
“Depending on whether I’m some squirrely artist like Matt Petersen or just your run-of-the-mill maniac who gets off on stalking women and strangling them?”
“The latter,” I evenly said. “Let’s assume the latter.”
He was baiting me, and he laughed rather rudely. “See, you missed it, Doc. You should’ve asked how it would be different. Because it wouldn’t be. What I’m telling you is if I was either type, I’d pretty much do it the same way—don’t matter who or what I am during my regular hours when I’m working and acting like everybody else. When I get into it, I’m just every other drone who’s ever done it or ever will. Doctor, lawyer or Indian chief.”