Names. A swirling sea of them. Hundreds. Aliases. Criminal records. Warrants. Not a sea, a bottomless pool. A suspect pool, and Behr deep-dove it. Using Breslau’s password, he had worked all through the weekend and into the following week and was able to search and cross-reference offenders with assaults against women, attacks on prostitutes, rapists, murderers, and all types of other delights. Toward the end of the week, Susan had gone out of town with Trevor for a long weekend to visit her folks in the suburbs of Chicago, something they did every month or so. She’d floated a halfhearted invitation to him. Behr had been up there a few times. It was one thing sitting in a La-Z-Boy next to her father, not much to say, during the summer while a Sox game was on every afternoon and her mother was cooing at the baby. But it wasn’t baseball season and he was busy, so he stayed home printing reams of information and combing over name after name. He didn’t let anything rule out a suspect other than death or lengthy incarceration during the period of the crimes. By the time he was done with his initial pass, the pile of paper stacked next to his desk reached from the floor to his thigh. He didn’t wait. He jumped in. He pounded coffee and started making two piles: a “who knows?” and a “no way.” The “no ways” got taller, but there were still a ton of candidates in the “maybe” stack. He worked through Thursday night, Friday, slept three hours Friday night, and kept pounding until Saturday afternoon, plagued by the thought that maybe this killer wasn’t among the records he was searching, or maybe had no arrest record at all, when he finally passed out again.
Waking up in the dark, Behr didn’t know what time, or even day, it was for a moment. He shook his head and looked at the clock and saw it was 8:30 Saturday night. He brewed himself a double-strength pot of coffee that smacked him in the face and sat down to his desk, where his “suspects” now awaited him. There were several dozen of them—representing days, if not weeks, of background checks and other investigative work to winnow them down—but one name jumped out from all the rest: Jerold Allen Prilo. It wasn’t by some advanced investigative technique or intuitive genius that Behr got to this idea. It was much simpler. Jerold Allen Prilo was already a convicted murderer.
Behr remembered the case. Five years earlier a twenty-one-year-old girl named Mary Beth Watney, who was not retarded but was borderline incompetent based on her low IQ, had become a fixture in her local bar—a place called the Wishing Well that had a pool table along with some old video game machines and a dartboard in the back. Behr had been there, and besides being on the other side of town, it wasn’t very different from the Trough, Gene Sasso’s place.
One spring afternoon a long-haul trucker who lived in the area stopped in and was seen playing a game of pool with young Mary Beth Watney. He left first but stayed in the parking lot, according to surveillance cams that showed her leave the bar next to, converse with, and walk out of frame with a waiting Prilo.
Apparently the two had gone back to the house where Prilo was living with his girlfriend, who was also a long-haul driver, away on a run at the time. They had drunk whiskey and had sex and that’s where the story broke down. Prilo had said it was consensual and rough by request, and that though it had gotten out of hand and she might have been injured, the girl had left on foot afterward and it was the last he’d seen of her. Watney’s body, cut to pieces, wasn’t found until weeks later, down south, in an escarpment below Weed Patch Hill in the Knobs. By then Prilo was in Arizona dropping off a load of pipe before picking up a consignment of sheet metal, which he hauled to Washington State and dropped off, before picking up a load of lumber, which he drove back to Indiana. The police were waiting for him when he arrived.
The prosecutor’s version of events included plying a mentally disabled girl with alcohol, rape, and a vicious beating with fists and foreign objects that left the walls and ceiling in need of repainting, which Prilo had done, before the calm disposal of the body. The problem was there was no proof that Prilo’s version wasn’t true. The body was found among large rocks. A fall amidst them could have caused some of the initial damage. There was further degradation of the corpse due to weather and animal activity. As for the dismemberment, the specifics of that came to light only later. The prosecutor was concerned about putting the case in front of a jury that might acquit the man outright.
Authorities scrambled to match assaults and murders along Prilo’s trucking routes with the dates he’d driven them. There were missing-persons reports and concerned eyewitness accounts of young truck-stop hookers seen in Prilo’s company and then never seen again. But once more, there was no concrete proof. The only thing law enforcement could agree on was that Prilo should be off the streets and locked away for the good of everyone.
Finally, with the help of a savvy defense lawyer, Prilo pleaded to sexual assault and no contest on manslaughter, not murder, and cut a deal. He fleshed out his version of consensual bondage and rough sex with the details that something had gone wrong with a “choking game” they’d been playing and that he had panicked when the girl stopped breathing. He said he’d cut her up and tried to dispose of her body out of simple fear. When it came to suspicions over other seemingly related murders, authorities were unable to bring charges. Due to the condition of the body, prosecutors were frightened of a successful insanity defense with a short stay at a mental facility. So they made a deal under which Prilo instead got a seven- to nine-year term in maximum security, with consideration for the time and expense saved on a trial. The sex charge bought law enforcement the bonus of Prilo having to register as a sex offender for life. It was cold comfort to the family of the victim, and the general public. But the outcry simmered down after a few weeks had passed. There was nothing for the prosecutor to do about it, and by the time Prilo served three and a half years of his sentence and was kicked to a halfway house on the Near Westside of Indianapolis due to prison overcrowding, the case had been largely forgotten.
Until now, Behr thought.
Behr noticed, though, that there were a few vexing aspects in regard to Prilo as a suspect. Namely, two of the murders had occurred while Prilo was in jail. But they happened to be murders that were on the far edges of the pattern. Perhaps those killings were unrelated. He wasn’t sure, but he knew someone who might be. He saw it was already 10:15, but he picked up his phone anyway.
“Hi, it’s Frank Behr, not too late to call, I hope,” he said.
“Behr. What the fuck is up?” Lisa Mistretta said back.