Sam gazed out the window again. A squirrel sitting on a fencepost was cutting on a beechnut that it held in its paws. The squirrel could see him but wasn’t intimidated in the least. It merely sat there chomping away at his nut, probably wondering how much longer before he had start to storing the things away for the winter.
Sam stubbed out his cigarette, stood up and went back into the kitchen to warm up his coffee. He plotted out his day, deciding that after breakfast he’d take a shower then drive into town to work on the Bradley story. He had just replaced the coffee carafe when the phone rang. He went back into the den to answer it.
“Feeling crispy this morning?” Roger’s voice asked, gruff but alert.
Sam feigned a groan. “I’ve felt better. What in the hell are you doing up so early? I thought you worked the afternoon shift today.”
“Something’s come up. I think you ought to come down to the station ASAP-you’re gonna want to hear this.”
“What is it?” Sam asked.
Roger sighed impatiently. “We got a call from the New York P.D. earlier this morning. It may be something, or it may be nothing. I’ll explain when you get here.”
“Something to do with the case?” Sam asked, feeling his pulse quicken.
“Possibly. Just get your ass down here and I’ll give you the details.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Sam said before hanging up the phone.
He drained his coffee, went into the bathroom and washed up, dressed and was out of the house in five minutes.
When he arrived at the Smithtown Police Department, Sam could see Roger Hagstrom in his office huddled over some paperwork. He walked up to the desk sergeant, Mark O’Brien, greeted him and made his way over to Roger’s smoke-filled cubicle. His friend looked the worst for the wear and apparently had been rousted out of a coma-like sleep and ordered to come down to the station by the chief. He was unshaven and still wearing the same clothes he’d worn the night before.
“Yo,” he greeted as Sam strode in.
“Rough night, eh?”
Roger glanced up at him and grimaced. “You don’t look so hot yourself. But it was a pretty decent drunk, you gotta admit.”
“Yeah, but we’re paying dearly for it now. What’s going on?” Sam asked, sitting down on the other side of the desk.
“Do you remember Sara Hunt?”
Sam thought for a moment then replied, “Yeah. She graduated in our class at high school. Then her family moved away not long afterwards.”
“Well, she’s dead. Murdered in New York City a few weeks ago,” Roger declared grimly.
Sam raised his eyebrows. “Jesus! What happened?”
Roger Hagstrom lit up a Camel filter, glanced down at the report he had been reading and peered across his desk at Sam.
“Raped and strangled.”
He studied the incredulous look on Sam’s face before continuing.
“I’ll give it to your from the beginning: we got a call this morning from a Lieutenant Mancuso of the N.Y.P.D. He told me that he was following up on a homicide investigation he’s been working on and was requesting our cooperation. He went on to say that Sara Hunt’s body had been discovered in her apartment by her roommate at around 2:30 a.m. Her assailant had entered her apartment, beat the shit out of her, raped and strangled her, then left her apartment without having been seen or heard by a single solitary soul in the building. Not a single clue to his identity had been left at the scene. No prints, no murder weapon, nothing. All the murderer left behind were a few strands of hair and his semen, deposited inside and upon Sara’s body.”
Roger took a drag, exhaled and resumed. “Mancuso suspects that Sara had known her assailant. Although the lock on the door of her apartment building had been broken and non-functional for several weeks prior to her murder, the door to Sara’s apartment showed no signs of being tampered with, indicating that she most likely had invited her assailant inside.” He paused a moment and yawned. “I need some more java. You want some?”
Sam nodded. “So this Lieutenant Mancuso thinks that Sara Hunt’s killer is the same guy who killed Marsha Bradley?”
Roger stood up. “Hold your horses a second and I’ll explain. Mancuso didn’t even know about Marsha Bradley’s murder until I told him.” He walked over to the coffee maker and poured Sam a cup, warmed up his own then went back over to his desk.
“I’m confused,” Sam said.
Roger sat back down with a groan. “Mancuso called us on a lark. He said that evidence has been so scarce in the case that he and his men were scouring every potential piece of evidence. They’d found a Smithtown High School yearbook stashed away underneath Sara’s bed and hadn’t thought much of it at first, but later on discovered that a page of the yearbook had been marked with a tiny piece of paper tucked just out of sight.” He shuffled through the papers piled in front of him and handed Sam a couple of documents stapled together. “He faxed these to me.”
Sam looked over the documents. In his hand were copies of two consecutive pages of The 1970 Smithtown High School yearbook depicting a couple dozen graduating seniors’ headshots in alphabetical order, beginning with “Jamison” and ending with “Martin.”
Roger said, “Mancuso wants us to do a background check on all of these people-the males, that is. He wants to know where they are now, what they’re doing, and most importantly, if any of them have a police record. It was after he’d made this request that I mentioned the Marsha Bradley case, noting the uncanny similarities between her case and Sara Hunt’s. He was quite interested, to say the least.”
Sam looked over the individual names and accompanying pictures, silently counting up how many were males. “Nine guys,” he mumbled.
“Yeah, and I can account for five of them already. You probably can, too.”
“Let’s see… Tony Jamison, Bob Jones, Bill Kellerman, Dick Korns-they all still live in Smithtown,” Sam said.
“You forgot Harold Justice-he works at the Seven Eleven in Milford.”
“Didn’t know that.”
“So that leaves us with four guys that we might have to do a little digging up on,” Roger said. “Anyway, Mancuso admitted that the yearbook angle is a long shot and the odds are slim that any of these guys are linked in any way to Sara Hunt’s murder. But it’s definitely a good thing he followed up on it, as it turns out. Otherwise, he may have never found out about the Bradley murder, and we probably wouldn’t have learned out about Sara Hunt. Now we have two murder cases that are not only curiously similar to one another, but involve victims who we know for a fact had at one time been Smithtown residents.”
Sam’s eyes widened as this correlation suddenly sank in. “Jesus, Rog! There has to be a connection! Look at the odds-”
“Wait-it gets even more interesting,” Roger interrupted. “There was a lipstick mark on Sara Hunt’s left breast.”
Sam gasped. “No shit?”
“I shit you not. And a lipstick vial, presumably Sara’s, was found near her body. It looks as though the murderer started to write a little message and changed his mind for some reason or another. Maybe he had to make a sudden getaway.”
“What does this Mancuso think about all of this?”
“He just about lost it when I told him about Marsha and the lipstick message. He thinks there’s a very good chance that the same guy did them both in.”
“And what do you think?”
“Hell’s bells-I agree! But not quite 100%, though. There are a few things that don’t quite stack up.”
“Like?”
“For one thing, it just doesn’t seem feasible that it could be the same guy. New York City is over five hundred miles away. The murders took place only weeks from one another. Unless this guy had a perfect game plan devised, I don’t see how he could possibly pull off both murders so goddamn flawlessly in such a tight time frame. Furthermore, who ever killed Sara Hunt had beaten the mortal shit out of her. Mancuso told me she had bruises and contusions all over her body-excessive ‘excessive force’ was how he put it-much more than was needed for Sara’s assailant to have his way with her. It’s more than obvious that this bastard wanted her to suffer a helluva lot before murdering her. Marsha Bradley, on the other hand, had been virtually unharmed physically, with the exception of the marks left on her neck from strangulation. The killer’s M. O’s just don’t jibe.”