“No. He’d been with several firms over the years.”
“Any trouble anywhere?”
“None.”
“Criminal cases at those firms, too?”
“Yes, but I can hardly remember what…”
“Can you tell us which firms those were, Mrs. Norden?”
“You don’t really believe this can be someone he lost a case for, do you?”
“We don’t know, Mrs. Norden. Right now, we have almost nothing to go on. We’re trying to find something, anything.”
“I’ll write out a list for you,” she said. “Will you come inside, please?” In the doorway of the funeral home, she stopped and said, “Forgive me if I was rude to you.” She paused. “I loved my husband very much, you see.”
5
On Monday, April 30, five days after the first murder had been committed, Cynthia Forrest came to see Steve Carella. She walked up the low, flat steps at the front of the gray precinct building, past the green globes lettered with the white numerals 87, and then into the muster room where a sign told her she must state her business at the desk. She told Sergeant Murchison she wanted to talk to Detective Carella, and Murchison asked her her name, and she said, “Cynthia Forrest,” and he rang Carella upstairs, and then told her to go on up. She followed the white sign that read detective division and climbed the iron-runged steps to the second floor of the building, coming out onto a narrow corridor. She followed the corridor past a man in a purple sports shirt who was handcuffed to a bench, and then paused at the slatted wood railing, standing on tiptoes, searching. When she spotted Carella rising from his desk to come to her, she impulsively raised her arm and waved at him.
“Hello, Miss Forrest,” he said, smiling. “Come on in.” He held open the gate in the railing, and then led her to his desk. She was wearing a white sweater and a dark-gray skirt. Her hair was hemp-colored, long, pulled to the back of her head in a ponytail. She was carrying a notebook and some texts, and she put these on his desk, sat, crossed her legs, and pulled her skirt down over her knees.
“Would you like some coffee?” Carella asked.
“Is there some?”
“Sure. Miscolo!” he yelled. “Can we get two cups of joe?”
From the depths of the clerical office in the corridor, Miscolo’s voice bellowed, “Coming!”
Carella smiled at the girl and said, “What can I do for you, Miss Forrest?”
“Most everyone calls me Cindy,” she said.
“All right. Cindy.”
“So this is where you work.”
“Yes.”
“Do you like it?”
Carella looked around the room as if discovering it for the first time. He shrugged. “The office, or what I do?” he asked.
“Both.”
“The office…” He shrugged again. “I guess it’s a rat trap, but I’m used to it. The work? Yes, I enjoy it, or I wouldn’t do it.”
“One of my psych instructors said that men who choose violent professions are usually men of violence.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” Cindy said. She smiled faintly, as though enjoying a secret joke. “You don’t look very violent.”
“I’m not. I’m a very gentle soul.”
“Then my psych instructor is wrong.”
“I may be the exception that proves the rule.”
“Maybe.”
“Are you a psych major?” Carella asked.
“No. I’m studying to be a teacher. But I’m taking general psych and abnormal psych. And then later, I’ll have to take all the educational psychology courses, ed psych one and two and…”
“You’ve got your work cut out for you,” Carella said.
“I suppose so.”
“What do you want to teach?”
“English.”
“College?”
“High school.”
Miscolo came in from the clerical office and placed two cups of coffee on Carella’s desk. “I put sugar and milk in both of them, is that all right?” he asked.
“Cindy?”
“That’s fine.” She smiled graciously at Miscolo. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, miss,” Miscolo said, and went back to his office.
“He seems very sweet,” Cindy said.
Carella shook his head. “A violent man. Terrible temper.”
Cindy laughed, picked up her coffee cup, and sipped at it. She put the cup down, reached into her handbag for a package of cigarettes, was about to put one in her mouth, when she stopped and asked, “Is it all right to smoke?”
“Sure,” Carella said. He struck a match for her, and held it to the cigarette.
“Thank you.” She took several drags, sipped more coffee, looked around the room a little, and then turned back toward Carella, smiling. “I like your office,” she said.
“Well, good. I’m glad.” He paused, and then asked, “What did you have on your mind, Cindy?”
“Well…” She dragged on the cigarette again, smoking the way a very young girl smokes, a little too feverishly, with too much obvious enjoyment, and yet at the same time with too much casualness. “They buried Daddy on Saturday, you know.”
“I know.”
“And I read in the newspapers that another man was killed.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you think the same person did it?”
“We don’t know.”
“Do you have any ideas yet?”
“Well, we’re working on it,” Carella said.
“I asked my abnormal-psych instructor what he knew about snipers,” Cindy said, and paused. “This is a sniper, isn’t it?”
“Possibly. What did your instructor say?”
“He said he hadn’t read very much about them, and didn’t even know whether or not any studies had been done. But he had some ideas.”
“Yes? Like what?”
“He felt that the sniper was very much like the peeper. The Peeping Tom, do you know?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. He thought the dynamic was essentially the same.”
“And what was that? The dynamic?”
“A response to infantile glimpses of the primal scene,” Cindy said.
“The primal scene?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the primal scene?” Carella asked innocently.
Unflinchingly Cindy replied, “The parents having intercourse.”
“Oh. Oh, I see.”
“My instructor said that every child watches and attempts to pretend he is not watching. The sniper comes equipped with an obvious symbol, the rifle, and usually makes use of a telescopic sight, repeating the furtive way things are carried out in childhood, the looking and not being seen, the doing and not being caught.”
“I see,” Carella said.
“Essentially, my instructor said, sniping is a sexually aggressive act. Witnessing of the primal scene can manifest itself neurotically either through peeping—the voyeur—or through the reverse of peeping, in effect a fear of being peeped at. But the dynamic remains essentially the same with both the peeper and the sniper. Both are hidden, furtive, surreptitious. Both find sexual stimulation, and often gratification, in the act.” Cindy put out her cigarette, stared at Carella with wide, young, innocent blue eyes and said, “What do you think?”
“Well—I don’t know,” Carella said.
“Doesn’t the department have a psychologist?” Cindy asked.
“Yes, it does.”
“Why don’t you ask him what he thinks?”
“They only do that on television,” Carella said.
“Isn’t it important for you to know what’s motivating the killer?”
“Yes, certainly. But motives are often very complex things. Your abnormal-psychology instructor may be absolutely correct about an individual sniper, or maybe even ten thousand snipers, but it’s possible we’ll run into ten thousand others who never witnessed the—primal scene, did you call it?—and who…”