"The cemetery is right next to the church."
He moved a photograph closer to me.
"It looks quite old," I said, admiring weathered brick and slate.
"It is and it isn't. Was built in the seventeen-hundreds, did all right until maybe twenty years ago, when bad wiring did it in. I remember seeing the smoke, was on patrol, thought one of my neighbor's farmhouses was burning. Some historical society took an interest. It's supposed to look just like it used to inside and out.
"You get to it by this secondary road right here" - he tapped another photograph - "which is less than two miles west of Route Sixty and about four miles west of the Anchor Bar, where the girls were last seen alive the night before."
"Who discovered the bodies?"
Marino asked, eyes roaming the photograph spread.
"A custodian who worked for the church. He came in Saturday morning to clean up, get things ready for Sunday. Says he had just pulled in when he spotted what looked like two people sleeping in the grass about twenty feet inside the cemetery's front gate. The bodies were visible from the church parking lot. Doesn't seem whoever did it was concerned about anybody finding them."
"Am I to assume there was no activity at the church that Friday night?"
I asked.
"No, ma'am. It was locked up tight, nothing going on."
"Does the church ever have activities scheduled for Friday nights?"
"They do on occasion. Sometimes the youth groups get together on Friday nights. Sometimes there's choir practice, things like that. The point is, if you selected this cemetery in advance to kill someone, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. There's no guarantee the church would be deserted, not on any night of the week. That's one of the reasons I figured from the start that the murders were random, the girls just met up with someone, maybe in the bar. There isn't much about these cases to make me think the homicides were carefully planned."
"The killer was armed," I reminded Montana. "He had a knife and a handgun."
"The world's full of folks carrying knives, guns in their cars or even on their person," he said matter-of-factly.
I collected the photographs of the bodies in situ and began to study them carefully.
The women were less than a yard from each other, lying in the grass between two tilting granite headstones. Elizabeth was facedown, legs slightly spread, left arm under her stomach, right arm straight and by her side. Slender, with short brown hair, she was dressed in jeans and a white pullover sweater stained dark red around the neck. In another photograph, her body had been turned over, the front of her sweater soaked with blood, eyes the dull stare of the dead. The cut to her throat was shallow, the gunshot wound to her neck not immediately incapacitating, I recalled from her autopsy report. It was the stab wound to her chest that had been lethal.
Jill's injuries had been much more mutilating. She was on her back, face so streaked by dried blood that I could not tell what she had looked like in life, except that she had short black hair and a straight, pretty nose. Like her companion, she was slender. She was dressed in jeans and a pale yellow cotton shirt, bloody, un-tucked, and ripped open to her waist, exposing multiple stab wounds, several of which had gone through her brassiere. There were deep cuts to her forearms and hands. The cut to her neck was shallow and probably inflicted when she was already dead or almost dead.
The photographs were invaluable for one critical reason. They revealed something that I had not been able to determine from any of the newspaper clippings or reports I had reviewed in their cases on file in my office.
I glanced at Marino and our eyes met.
I turned to Montana. "What happened to their shoes?"
14
You know, it's interesting you should mention that," Montana replied. "I never have come up with a good explanation for why the girls took their shoes off, unless they were inside the motel, got dressed when it was time to leave, and didn't bother. We found their shoes and socks inside the Volkswagen."
"Was it warm that night?"
Marino asked.
"It was. All the same, I would have expected them to put their shoes back on when they got dressed."
"We don't know for a fact they ever went inside a motel room," I reminded Montana.
"You're right about that," he agreed.
I wondered if Montana had read the series in the Post, which had mentioned that shoes and socks were missing in the other murder cases. If he had, it did not seem he had made the connection yet.
"Did you have much contact with the reporter Abby Turnbull when she was covering Jill's and Elizabeth's murders?"
I asked him.
"The woman followed me like tin cans tied to a dog's tail. Everywhere I went, there she was."
"Do you recall if you told her that Jill and Elizabeth were barefoot? Did you ever show Abby the scene photographs?"
I asked, for Abby was too smart to have forgotten a detail like that, especially since it was so important now.
Montana said without pause, "I talked to her, but no, ma'am. I never did show her these pictures. Was right careful what I said, too. You read what was in the papers, didn't you?"
"I've seen some of the articles."
"Nothing in there about the way the girls were dressed, about Jill's shirt being torn, their shoes and socks off."
So Abby didn't know, I thought, relieved.
"I notice from the autopsy photographs that both women had ligature marks around their wrists," I said. "Did you recover whatever might have been used to bind them?"
"No, ma'am."
"Then apparently he removed the ligatures after killing them," I said.
"He was right careful. We didn't find any cartridge cases, no weapon, nothing he might have used to tie them up. No seminal fluid. So it doesn't appear he got around to raping them, or if he did, no way to tell. And both were fully clothed. Now, as far as this girl's blouse being ripped" - he reached for a photograph of Jill "that might have happened when he was struggling with her."
"Did you recover any buttons at the scene?"
"Several. In the grass near her body."
"What about cigarette butts?"
Montana began calmly looking through his paperwork. "No cigarette butts."
He paused, pulling out a report. "Tell you what we did find, though. A lighter, a nice silver one."
"Where?"
Marino asked.
"Maybe fifteen feet from where the bodies were. As you can see, an iron fence surrounds the cemetery. You enter through this gate."
He was showing us another photograph. "The lighter was in the grass, five, six feet inside the gate. One of these expensive, slim lighters shaped like an ink pen, the kind people use to light pipes."
"Was it in working order?"
Marino asked.
"Worked just fine, polished up real nice," Montana recalled. "I'm pretty sure it didn't belong to either of the girls. They didn't smoke, and no one I talked to remembered seeing either one of them with a lighter like that. Maybe it fell out of the killer's pocket, no way to know. Could have been anybody who lost it, maybe someone out there a day or two earlier sightseeing. You know how folks like to wander in old cemeteries looking at the graves."
"Was this lighter checked for prints?"
Marino asked.
"The surface wasn't good for that. The silver's engraved with these crisscrosses, like you see with some of these fancy silver fountain pens."
He stared off thoughtfully. "The thing probably cost a hundred bucks."
"Do you still have the lighter and the buttons you found out there?"