17
Marino reaches inside and lifts out a handbag, brown leather with a double handle, an unassuming, moderately pricey satchel. He unzips it.
“Bingo,” he says sarcastically. “One more present to piss us off.”
“That’s not why he left it.” Benton is matter-of-fact.
He doesn’t look surprised or particularly interested as Marino pulls out a wallet. He opens it and produces Gail Shipton’s driver’s license.
“If he took her someplace first, explaining why her clothes are gone, then why leave this here?” Marino studies the license, his jaw muscles clenched. “Why not throw it in a dumpster somewhere?”
In the photograph she’s in her late teens or early twenties when her hair was much shorter and she had bangs. She’s wearing heavy framed glasses that mask her prettiness, and her expression is self-conscious, her smile frozen, her eyes askance. She doesn’t have the open, friendly face of someone who is accessible or warm, but perhaps the camera made her shy.
“His motivation isn’t about pissing us off,” Benton says as Marino goes through the wallet’s compartments. “It’s about showing off, and what he does is deeply personal. It’s about what he feels and not about us.”
“How is leaving her pocketbook showing off?” Marino asks.
“It’s brazen. He’s assisting with the ID. He’s helping us because that gives him a rush.” Benton says and it tells me he’s found the victims’ IDs in the other cases.
“I don’t see it,” Marino says.
“It sounds like you’re talking about some sort of psychopath, like a serial killer.” Machado looks impressed and at the same time incredulous. “I’m sure as hell not passing that up the chain unless we’re sure.”
“I wouldn’t suggest you pass anything up the chain or anywhere else right now,” Benton replies.
“The trial that’s about to start is what we should be considering, you ask me,” Machado says in a tone meant to remind us that his police department is in charge. “You know, maybe someone wanted her dead. I don’t know why you’d be thinking some sort of deranged psychopath. I sure don’t want a rumor like that getting out. If we’re going to involve the FBI, there need to be some ground rules.”
He stares at Benton and I can imagine Machado’s unspoken thought. The FBI hasn’t formally been invited into this investigation. Benton is being given free rein as a courtesy simply because he showed up. He’s my husband and they know him and I sense doubt again. I have a feeling Marino has been badmouthing him to Machado, flaunting himself, by disparaging Benton.
“Credit cards.” Marino leaves them in their slots. “AmEx, Visa, ATM, maybe she had others. No cash. We’ll process this for DNA, for prints.”
“Then if she had cash, he took it, which seems to argue against someone killing her because of the trial coming up,” Machado considers. “Not that I’m an expert in professional hits but taking her money doesn’t fit with what I know. Usually you don’t want any connection with the victim, am I correct?” He directs this at Benton. “Just offering that thought as a possibility since Gail Shipton was involved in a hundred-million-dollar lawsuit.”
“Hit men usually don’t steal.” Benton watches Marino go through the handbag, his gloved fingers lightly touching items by the tips and edges, impacting as little surface area as possible.
A compact. Lipstick. Mascara. Black ballpoint pens. A pack of tissues. Throat lozenges. A round hairbrush.
“I’m just putting it out there,” Machado says. “It sure as hell is convenient for the defendants that she’s suddenly dead.”
“Usually contract killers have as little physical contact with their targets as possible,” Benton replies. “They don’t conspicuously leave evidence such as a tool or a pocketbook for the police to find. They have no interest in showing off or attempting to impress those working the case. Quite the contrary. Typically, they don’t want to draw attention to themselves and they’re not delusional.”
“This guy’s delusional?”
“I’m saying successful contract killers aren’t.”
Marino lifts out a black notebook, pocket-sized, with a green elastic band around it that he slips off.
“So that brings us back to the possibility that what happened to her could be random,” Machado says. “A motive that involves robbery.”
Marino flips through pages that look like graph paper, white with a fine grid, as if intended for math or diagrams. The notebook is filled with small, neat handwriting and precise columns of dates and numbers that seem coded and mysterious. The writing ends midway through the notebook with an entry made in black ink:
61: INC 12/18 1733–1752 (<18m) REC 20-8-18-5-1-20
“If you don’t mind?” I take a picture of it with my phone in its military-grade case that is similar to Gail Shipton’s phone and similar to Lucy’s.
“Looks like a log of some sort. Maybe something the lawyers were making her keep track of.” Marino tucks the notebook back inside the handbag and next produces a small sheet of stickers, each one red with a white X in the center. “Got no idea.” He tucks the stickers back inside.
I think of the last telephone call Gail Shipton received, the one from a blocked number.
I interpret the note as meaning the call was INC, or incoming, yesterday at 5:33 p.m., ending slightly less than eighteen minutes later, which was when Gail would have been behind the Psi Bar, standing near a dumpster in the dark.
While I can’t be certain how to interpret the rest of the entry, REC may indicate the call was recorded, and it’s possible the string of numbers is an encryption, and I imagine Gail Shipton ending the call and pausing long enough to make the entry in her notebook. Maybe she used a flashlight app on her smartphone so she could see what she was doing, and I continue forming an impression of her. Possibly introverted and insecure. Precise, deliberate, possibly rigid and obsessive-compulsive.
I imagine her preoccupied with her niggling, coded recordkeeping and not necessarily aware of what was going on around her. Was a car parked back there? Did someone pull up and she paid no attention? What I do know is that she called Carin Hegel next and the connection was quickly lost. At around six p.m. Gail must have encountered her killer.
“When you looked at Gail’s phone,” I say to Marino, “did you notice if there were any recordings on it? Video or audio, for example?”
“Nothing like that. Just incoming and outgoing calls, e-mails, text messages,” he replies distractedly as he listens to Machado and Benton go at it with each other politely but stubbornly.
“She was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Machado asserts. “She ducked out of the bar to make a phone call and there he was, sitting in his car.”
“That part I don’t accept,” Benton replies.
“And he saw her, an easy target, a victim of opportunity.”
“She was exactly where he knew she’d be.”
“How do you know robbery wasn’t a motive?” Machado is getting testy.
“I’m not saying he didn’t take money or souvenirs.” Benton repeats what he’s said several times now. “Human behavior isn’t just one thing. There can be a mixture of traits and inconsistencies.”
“He may have taken her jewelry,” I point out. “Unless she wasn’t wearing any, not even earrings. Of course we don’t know what she had on when she was abducted.” I don’t hesitate to use that word now.
“So he took her money and possibly her jewelry. Probably kept her clothing, too,” Marino says as the dispatcher comes back over the air. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and he left his DNA on her wallet, maybe on her purse. And the pipe cutter,” he adds sarcastically.