The dignity of death was missing. The skillful surgery that had been performed on each, slowly and intricately, had wiped all that out. It was more like taking a look inside a slaughterhouse on a hot day.
Or maybe that was just my opinion because I had seen this kind of horror before and could be almost objective about it now. Not quite, but almost. The one thing that stood out was that, at one time, those two girls had been pretty.
I handed the grisly photograph back to Dave Miles.
“I remember reading about it,” I said. “Early this spring, right? But this doesn’t really resemble the Sharron Wesley killing.”
Dave had called me early at the Sidon Arms-seven o’clock. He had seen the write-ups in both the local and New York papers, saw my name, and called me. He said to come right out to his Quonset hut office at the brick manufacturing works near Wilcox. I pushed a note under Velda’s door, grabbed a napkin-wrapped cruller and paper cup of coffee at Big Steve’s, and took the heap for a thirty-mile spin.
“The common thread,” Dave said, “is beautiful nude women. Dead ones.”
“That’s typical fare on a sex killer’s menu.”
“Mike, my gut tells me it’s the same sick bastard. And there’s another kill, one none of the police authorities have ever connected up.”
One time Dave had been a big man, physically and professionally, an inspector in the New York PD, and Pat’s immediate superior.
But even as an inspector, Dave couldn’t stay off the street and two years ago he had gone in an apartment after a killer and a blast from the punk’s shotgun had taken off his lower leg, and he’d had to retire. He wound up as head of security at the brick-making plant that was Wilcox’s only industry besides tourism.
Now he sat behind his desk, looking slightly shrunken in an old suit, his plastic leg a disembodied thing propped against the windowsill behind him. A frown creased his face into a caricature of weariness and he shook his head.
“Oh, hell, Mike. Maybe you’re right to be skeptical. I just saw the write-ups in the papers this morning, and your name in the middle of it, and…”
I jammed a butt in my face and lit up. “Okay. So what’s this other kill?”
Some life came into his eyes and he leaned forward. “Six months ago a girl was strangled with her own nylon stocking out on a stretch of beach. Her clothes were gone. Never found. She lay there with the stocking that killed her still knotted around her throat.”
“Where was this?”
“Down a side road, about halfway between here and Sidon.”
He had my attention. Two strangulations. Two dead naked females, pretty ones.
“Whose case?” I asked.
“The Suffolk County Sheriff’s department.”
“What do you know about them?”
“They’re closer to real cops than the Sidon crowd, or our bunch here in Wilcox either. But it was months ago, and they weren’t able to run anything down.”
“Months ago when?”
“The strangled girl was early last fall, right after the season ended. You probably remember from the papers that the girls strung up in the barn were found on the other side of Wilcox. Just outside town but within the city limits.”
“Making it a Wilcox PD matter.”
“Yeah. Why, is that significant?”
I shrugged, blew a smoke ring and watched it dissipate. “Maybe. If you have a sex fiend at large, you may just have a smart one. For the sake of argument, say he did kill the Wesley dame, too. That means in a fairly small area, he has managed to spread the killings out among three different jurisdictions-two small-town police forces and the sheriff’s department.”
“Can a maniac be that organized?”
“They never caught Jack the Ripper, did they? Look, what makes you tie it in? You’re not a cop, anymore. This has nothing to do with guarding a brick-making factory on the Island.”
Those hard pale blue eyes stared into my own and a grimace touched his mouth. “Because once you’re a cop, Mike, you never stop. Do I have to tell you? And I can smell it. These murders are connected.”
“Smells don’t hold up in court,” I said.
“But they sure can lead you to the rotten source though, can’t they?”
I chuckled dryly and had another drag on the Lucky. “I came to listen, Dave, and I’m almost interested. Make it fit. I don’t know the details.”
“They were women, they were young, they were pretty, now they’re dead. There’s a sex angle to each of them.”
“Sharron Wesley wasn’t all that young-she was in her late thirties. And she wasn’t molested.” Doc Moody’s autopsy had said as much.
“ None of these victims were molested, and that’s a telling link. Stripping them and killing them, that’s the sex angle.”
Which meant it didn’t have to be a “he”-they made killers in both male and female models.
“There’s one difference,” I reminded him. I thumped the crime-scene photo on his desk. “These kids were tortured to death.”
Dave Miles grinned at me, a hard, nasty grin. “I’m disappointed in you, Mike. Don’t you see the similarity in the crime scenes?”
“Are you kidding? A barn? The beach? A body found draped on a stone horse in a park, a week after the killing? There’s no similarity at all.”
“Sure there is. Maybe you just haven’t rubbed the sleep out of your eyes.”
I had another look at the photo.
And it came to me: the murderer had arranged each crime scene with a dramatic flair designed to turn his victims into a sort of grotesque tableau.
“Those crime scenes,” Dave said, “are staged for effect. For maximum impact. Like they were posed for a shot in a sleazy true-crime magazine.”
I tossed the photo back on the desk. “Okay. You have a point. But this isn’t New York, Dave. Who did the autopsies on the Wilcox barn girls?”
“We have a competent coroner in Wilcox. He says the girls were slowly slashed to death. Death by a thousand cuts. Hung up for slaughter, with their ankles bound above them and the wrists roped, and the fiend took his sweet time. The dirt floor was caked with blood an inch thick.”
He was trying to get me going. Pushing every button he could. Why?
I stayed professional. “The two strangulations make a similar modus operandi, but this torture kill, it’s different. You’re throwing me a curve, buddy. What did the Wilcox police have to say?”
His grin seemed to tighten down. “That’s the kicker, Mike. We don’t really have any. The city force has nine men who are only employees and don’t do much more than tag cars or arrest an occasional drunk. Yes, there’s this factory here, but otherwise we’re as much a tourist town as Sidon.”
“So who makes up this lackluster force?”
“They’re all local men who get hired when there’s an opening, given a briefing, then issued a uniform, badge and gun and assigned a beat. Most of them are military returnees using it as a between-jobs bridge. Out here we have an elected constabulary system with three men patrolling for speeders.”
Could a thrill killer have selected this little part of the world to take advantage of the kind of half-assed policing that Sidon and Wilcox had to offer? If so, that was damn shrewd-here we were, in Manhattan’s backyard, but well away from the jurisdiction of the kind of trained scientific professionals represented by Captain Pat Chambers.
I muttered, “Big fish in a little pond…”
“What, Mike?”
I stabbed out the spent Lucky and got another one going. “How about the Suffolk sheriff’s office?”
“That’s the other kicker. Last November John Harris didn’t run for re-election. He was a damn good man… made Deputy Chief Inspector in New York before he came up here, but he was diabetic and couldn’t take it after two terms in office.”
“Yeah, I know John. You’re right. Good man.”
Dave shrugged. “Maybe he could have taken care of this thing, but he died a month back.”
“Hell. I hadn’t heard.”
“His deputy was the only other trained person around, but when Harris quit, so did the deputy-took a job someplace out west.”