The thought went through me like a low-voltage shock. “What about Matt Petersen? Any chance he might have been at the hospital that night, perhaps to see his wife?”
Marino replied, “Says he was in Charlottesville. This was a Wednesday, around nine-thirty, ten P.M.”
The hospital certainly could be a connection, I thought. Anyone who works there and has access to the records could have been familiar with Lori Petersen and might also have seen Brenda Steppe, whose address would be listed on her ER chart.
I suggested to Marino that everyone who may have been working at VMC the night she was treated should be turned inside out.
“We’re only talking five thousand people,” he replied. “And for all we know, the squirrel who took her out might’ve been treated in the ER that night, too. So I’m juggling that ball, too, and it don’t look real promising at the moment. Half the people treated that shift was women. The other half was either old geezers suffering heart attacks or a couple of Young Turks who was tanked when they got in their cars. They didn’t make it, or else are hanging around in comas even as we speak. A lot of people was in and out, and just between you and me, the record-keeping in that joint stinks. I may never know who was there. I’m never going to know who might’ve wandered in off the street. Could be the guy’s some vulture who drifts in and out of hospitals, looking for victims— nurses, doctors, young women with minor problems.” He shrugged. “Could be he delivers flowers and is in and out of hospitals.”
“You’ve mentioned this twice,” I commented. “The bit about flower deliveries.”
Another shrug. “Hey. Before I became a cop, I delivered flowers for a while, okay? Most flowers is sent to women. If I was going around wanting to meet women to whack, me, I’d deliver flowers.”
I was sorry I’d asked. “That’s how I met my wife, as a matter of fact. Delivered a Sweetheart Special to her, nice arrangement of red and white carnations and a couple of sweetheart roses. From some drone she was dating. She ends up more impressed with me than with the flowers, and her boyfriend’s gesture puts him out of business. This was in Jersey, a couple years before I moved to New York and signed on with the P.D.”
I was seriously considering never accepting delivered flowers again.
“It’s just something that jumps into my mind. Whoever he is, he’s got some gig going. It puts him in touch with women. That’s it, plain and simple.”
We crept past Eastland Mall and took a right.
Soon we were out of traffic and gliding through Brookfield Heights, or the Heights, as it’s usually called. The neighborhood is situated on a rise that almost passes for a hill. It’s one of the older parts of town the young professionals have begun to take over during the last ten years. The streets are lined with row houses, some of them dilapidated and boarded up, most of them beautifully restored, with intricate wrought-iron balconies and stained-glass windows. Just a few blocks north the Heights deteriorates into a skid row; a few blocks beyond are federal housing projects.
“Some of these cribs are going for a hundred g’s and up,” Marino said as he slowed the car to a crawl. “I wouldn’t take one if you gave it to me. I’ve been inside a few of ’em. Incredible. But no way you’d catch me living in this neighborhood. A fair number of single women here, too. Crazy. Just crazy.”
I’d been eyeing the odometer. Patty Lewis’s row house was exactly 6.7 miles from where Brenda Steppe lived. The neighborhoods were so different, so far from each other, I couldn’t imagine anything about the locations that might link the crimes. There was construction going on here just as there was in Brenda’s neighborhood, but it wasn’t likely the companies or the crews were the same.
Patty Lewis’s house was squeezed between two others, a lovely brownstone with a stained-glass window over the red front door. The roof was slate, the front porch girdled in freshly painted wrought iron. In back was a walled-in yard dense with big magnolias.
I’d seen the police photographs. It was hard to look at the graceful elegance of this turn-of-the-century home and believe anything so horrible happened inside it. She came from old money in the Shenandoah Valley, which was why, I assumed, she was able to afford living here. A free-lance writer, she struggled over a typewriter for many years and was just reaching the tier where rejection letters were war stories from the past. Last spring a story was published by Harper’s. A novel was due out this fall. It would be a posthumous work.
Marino reminded me the killer, once again, got in through a window, this one leading into her bedroom, which faced the backyard.