After a long silence, I asked Wesley, "Didn't Reed at any point suggest placing a trap on her line?"
"Wouldn't have done any good," he answered. "Pin taps or traps aren't easy to get. The phone company needs a long list of calls, hard evidence the harassment is occurring."
"She didn't have hard evidence?"
Wesley slowly shook his head. "It would take more calls than she was getting, Kay. A lot of them. A pattern of when they were occurring. A solid record of them. Without all that, you can forget a trap."
"By all appearances," Marino added, "Beryl was getting only one or two calls a month. And she wasn't keeping the damn log Reed told her to keep. Or if she was, we haven't found it. Apparently she didn't tape any of the calls either."
"Good God," I muttered. "Someone threatens your life and it takes a damn act of Congress to get anyone to take it seriously."
Wesley didn't reply.
Marino snorted. "It's like in your place, Doc. No such thing as preventive medicine. We're nothing but a damn cleanup crew. Can't do a damn thing until after the fact, when there's hard evidence. Like a dead body."
"Beryl's behavior ought to have been evidence enough," I answered. "Look over these reports. Everything Officer Reed suggested, she did. He told her to get an alarm system and she did. He told her to start parking her car in the garage and she did, even though she was planning to turn the garage into an office. She asked him about a handgun, then went out and bought one. And whenever she called Reed it was directly after the killer had called and threatened her. In other words, she didn't wait and call the police hours, days later."
Wesley began spreading out the photocopies of Beryl's letters from Key West, the scene sketches and report, and a series of Polaroid photographs of her yard, the inside of her house, and finally of her body in the bedroom upstairs. He perused the items in silence, his face hard. He was sending the clear signal it was time to move on, we had argued and complained enough. What the police did or didn't do wasn't important. Finding the killer was.
"What's bothering me," Wesley began, "is there's an inconsistency in the MO. The history of threats she was receiving are in keeping with a psychopathic mentality. Someone who stalked and threatened Beryl for months, someone who seemed to know her only from a distance. Unquestionably, he derived most of his pleasure from fantasy, the antecedent phase. He drew it out. He may have finally struck when he did because she'd frustrated him by leaving town. Maybe he feared she was going to move altogether, and he murdered her the moment she got back."
"She finally pissed him off big time," Marino interjected.
Wesley continued looking at the photographs. "I'm seeing a lot of rage, and this is where the inconsistency comes in. His rage seems personally directed at her. The mutilation of her face, specifically."
He tapped a photograph with an index finger. "The face is the person. In the typical homicide committed by a sexual sadist, the victim's face isn't touched. She's depersonalized, a symbol. In a sense, she has no face to the killer because she's a nobody to him. Areas of the body he mutilates, if he's into mutilation, are the breasts, the genitalia…"
He paused, his eyes perplexed. "There are personal elements in Beryl's murder. The cutting of her face, the overkill, fit with the killer's being someone she knew, perhaps even well. Someone who had a private, intense obsession with her. But watching her from a distance, stalking her, don't fit with that at all. These are acts more in keeping with a stranger killer."
Marino was toying with Wesley's.357 door prize again. Idly spinning the cylinder, he said, "Want my opinion? I think the squirrel's got a God complex. You know, as long as you play by his rules he don't whack you. Beryl broke the rules by leaving town and sticking a FOR SALE sign in her yard. No fun anymore. You break the rules, you get punished."
"How are you profiling him?" I asked Wesley.
"White, mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Bright, from a broken home in which he was deprived of a father figure. He may also have been abused as a child, physically, psychologically, or both. He's a loner. This doesn't mean he lives alone, however. He could be married because he's skilled at maintaining a public persona. He leads a double life. There is the one man the world sees, then this darker side. He's obsessive-compulsive, and he's a voyeur."
"Yo," Marino muttered sardonically. "Sounds like half the drones I work with."
Wesley shrugged. "Maybe I'm shooting blanks, Pete. I haven't sorted through it yet. He could be some loser still living at home with his mother, could have priors, been in and out of institutions, prisons. Hell, he could work downtown in a big securities firm and have no criminal or psychiatric history at all. It seems he usually called Beryl at night. The one call we know about that he made during the day was on a Saturday. She worked out of her home, was there most of the time. He called when it was convenient for him versus when he was likely to find her in. I'm leaning toward thinking he has a regular nine to five job and is off on the weekends."
"Unless he was calling her while he was at work," Marino said.
"There's always that possibility," Wesley conceded.
"What about his age?" I asked. "You don't think it's possible he might be older than you just proposed?"
"It would be unusual," Wesley said. "But anything's possible."
Sipping my coffee, which was cool by now, I got around to telling them what Mark had told me about Beryl's contract conflicts and her enigmatic relationship with Gary Harper. When I was finished, Wesley and Marino were staring curiously at me. For one thing, this Chicago lawyer's impromptu visit late at night did sound a little odd. For another, I had thrown them a curve. The thought probably had not occurred to Marino or Wesley and, before last night, certainly not to me, that there actually might be a motive in Beryl's slaying. The most common motive in sexual homicides is no motive at all. The perpetrators do it because they enjoy it and because the opportunity is there.
"A buddy of mine's a cop in Williamsburg," Marino commented. "Tells me Harper's a real squirrel, a hermit. Drives around in an old Rolls-Royce and never talks to nobody. Lives in this big mansion on the river, never has nobody in, nothing. And the guy's old, Doc."
"Not so old," I disagreed. "In his mid-fifties. But yes, he's reclusive. I think he lives with his sister."
"It's a long shot," Wesley said, and he looked very tense. "But see how far you can run with it, Pete. If nothing else, maybe Harper would have a few guesses about this 'M' Beryl was writing. Obviously, it was someone she knew well, a friend, a lover. Someone out there has got to know who it is. We find that out, we're getting somewhere."
Marino didn't like it. "I know what I've heard," he said.
"Harper ain't going to talk with me and I don't got probable cause to force him into it. I also don't think he's the guy who whacked Beryl even if he did have motive, maybe. Seems to me he would have done it and been done with it. Why draw it out for nine, ten months? And she'd recognize his voice if it was him calling."
"Harper could have hired somebody," Wesley said.
"Right. And we would have found her a week later with a nice clean gunshot wound in the back of her head," Marino answered. "Most hit men don't stalk their victims, call 'em up, use a blade, rape 'em."
"Most of them don't," Wesley agreed. "But we can't be sure rape occurred, either. There was no seminal fluid."
He glanced at me, and I nodded a confirmation. "The guy may be dysfunctional. Then again, the crime could be staged, her body positioned to looked like a sexual assault when it really wasn't. It all depends on who was hired, if this is the case, and what the plan was. For example, if Beryl turned up shot while she was in the middle of a dispute with Harper, the cops put him first on the list. But if her murder looks like the work of a sexual sadist, a psychopath, Harper doesn't enter anybody's mind."