The whole profiling team was around the table, including Leo. Katherine was taking it day by day in terms of allowing him to be present at the meetings or not. So far he hadn’t been a hindrance; the opposite, in fact. He was quieter than he usually was, and I could see that after the initial wariness, everybody was relaxing around him.
Ray Motomochi, perhaps out of respect, had toned down the sartorial excesses and was sombre in a blue shirt and navy suit. He had the floor and he’d spread the anonymous letters across the table so we could see them.
“All these and the note to Christine were written by the same person. Let’s call him Moses. So far we have not been able to lift any distinguishable print. Not even on Christine’s billet-doux where there is less contamination from other sources. I have hopes I’ll be able to lift a partial or even, God give us luck, a full print. I haven’t had the chance to try everything yet so it does seem as if Moses was being careful.”
“He must have written the letters with latex gloves on,” said Katherine. “You have to leave some trace otherwise.”
“I agree. Moses knows what he’s doing. The note found in Deidre’s car was definitely written by somebody else. Let’s for purposes of clarity call that person Roadrunner, as he’s in a hurry.” Ray was trying to be respectful of Leo but he couldn’t totally suppress the habit we all had to introduce as much humour as possible, no matter what.
“The paper of the Moses letters is slightly unusual in that it’s yellow lined writer’s paper. Easy to get and undistinguished but not everybody’s choice. All the letters were written with an ordinary ballpoint pen, black ink. The envelopes are standard; all were clearly franked, except for the recent one, so we have dates; the stamps are the sticker kind.” He gave us a little grin. “As we know a good source of DNA material can be a licked envelope but all of these ones have been glued, white school glue you can buy anywhere. Another example that our chappie or chapette is in the know. I’ve got lots of partials but it was handled by many different people and I doubt if that will help us much. Fingerprints is willing to do the donkey work for us, bless them. They may come up with a match from the files but I rather doubt it.”
A brief word here. Computers don’t make fingerprint matches. It is a boring, labour-intensive job done by four people who sit around their computers all day long looking at countless variations on swirls and loops. It requires skill and experience and always has to be verified by at least one other member of the team. It’s not a job I’d like but it is an essential one. I’ve heard the Fingerprint Department is legendary for cutting loose after hours and I don’t blame them.
Back to the meeting.
“Anything you can tell us about the note we found in Deedee’s car?” Leo asked.
“As you can see, lined paper, torn at the side. It comes from a small-sized notebook. The writer used pencil. The problem of course is that it got wet…” He paused awkwardly. Nobody wanted to draw attention to this and leave Leo open to his own recriminations. “The pencil didn’t wash out, fortunately, but I couldn’t pull any print.”
“Thank you, Ray,” said Katherine. “Jamie, what’s your take on the geographic profile? Let’s put Chris in the equation and Grace Cameron as well as Deidre. See what we’ve got.”
Ray quickly collected up his plastics where he’d put all the letters. Jamie had cut himself shaving and there was a bit of toilet paper sticking to his chin that was slightly distracting.
He put down the city map which he’d enlarged and marked.
“Deidre was found here in Memorial Park. Her residence was here on Mary Street. The casino is, of course, way over here. You can enter the park from two sides, north and south, if you are driving, but it is accessible from any point if you are walking. Houses are well set back from the park and the pier would not have been visible to anybody who was not in the area itself.” He wasn’t telling us anything new and I shifted restlessly. Lack of sleep was making me cranky.
“Given the apparent connection provided by the letter writer, I have marked Christine’s apartment. G here stands for Grace Cameron, who is the current resident of an apartment once occupied both by Nora Cochrane and briefly by Hannah Silverstein, who was a close friend of Deidre’s. As you can see, except for the casino, all of these locations fall within a very small area. Walking distance of each other. We accept the fact that Miss Larsen knew her attacker well enough to accept a ride from him or her. According to Inspector Chaffey, all of the bus drivers and taxi drivers who were working during our window of time have not made an identification.”
“A bus driver wouldn’t necessarily notice if he was busy, would he?” said Leo abruptly.
“No, and the process of trying to find witnesses is going on.” Jamie sighed. “That’s what we desperately need, of course. But let’s assume for now she got a ride into town and that her intention was to go to Memorial Park as the note suggests. What we don’t know of course is where she was actually, er, killed. There are two possible scenarios. A person as yet unknown but who was not her attacker gave her a ride and let her off at the park. From there she may have met with the writer of the note. This person may be her killer but it is very unlikely that she was killed in the park itself. That means this person must have had access to a vehicle which she got into. She was, er, killed somewhere else and her body taken a few hours later to the pier where she was found in the water.” There was a tense silence, nobody wanting to imagine Leo’s daughter the victim of a torturer, and we all knew only too well that these things happened.
“There was no sign of trauma to the body other than the strangulation,” said Katherine with a quick involuntary glance at Leo. “Jamie, you said two scenarios. Spell out the other one for us.”
“I think if we take the note found in the car as significant, Deidre would have been in a hurry to get to the Memorial, so let’s say, for the purpose of argument, she got a lift with somebody who subsequently attacked her. She might not have arrived at the park at all. Perhaps she was driven somewhere else, subdued, and killed in his car. Then, later on when there is the greatest likelihood of the park being deserted, he drives onto the pier, buys himself some time by filling her pockets with stones, and drops her into the water. This is a relatively short window of opportunity and we can focus our enquiries on a pretty precise time period. She finished playing at 10:40, and we have her exiting the casino at 10:43.”
I interjected my information at this point. “The casino has got the exit and entrance CCTV tapes. We can follow up on cars leaving the premises.”
“That might help us a lot,” said Katherine. “Let’s get that information as soon as possible.”
David hadn’t said anything to this point. He was drinking a glass of some poisonous-looking thick purple fluid. He hadn’t offered to share it with anybody, thank goodness. He raised his forefinger to get Katherine’s attention. She frowned at him.
“Yes, go ahead.”
“With respect, Jamie, you said two scenarios but there is really a third, isn’t there? What if she got a ride to the park with an uninvolved person who left her there and went on their own way. She did not meet with Zachary Taylor because she was late. She isn’t that far from her house so she sets off to walk home. Along the way, she meets her assailant, who offers her a ride. From what we know of her, she would have to have accepted willingly because she was a strong and fit young woman. She gets into the car; this person somehow and somewhere subdues her… strangles her, keeps the body as we have said, etc., etc.”
He was quite right and he gained respect points from me for sure. I knew there was a reason he was on the team other than as a covert apostle for alternative living.
“Good, well put, David,” said Katherine.
“If this scenario is the correct one,” said Ray, “we are looking for a disorganized killer who happened upon her by chance. Her death may not be in any way connected to the notoriety surrounding her baby. And the letter writer is a completely different person from her killer.”
Profilers are not immune in the least from wishful thinking. A case that is neat and tidy is much easier to deal with than one where the possibilities are virtually unlimited. Or so it often seems in the early stages.
Leo spoke. “Whichever way we turn it, I’d say we are dealing with somebody local. Somebody she knew or at least recognized by sight. It was a miserable night. She would have wanted to get home as soon as she could. But come on folks, we’re nattering on about scenario this and scenario that. Let’s not overcomplicate the story. She got a ride into town, was dropped off, met Zachary Taylor as planned, and he was the one who killed her, as I may remind you, he threatened to do.” His tone was truculent. We all understood what he was feeling. He wanted an answer, a face, and I knew he was in a rush to judgement.
“We’ve got a red alert to find Zachary Taylor.” Katherine flicked her thumbnail on her pen, not looking at Leo. “The difficulty here is to keep an open mind.”
She said it gently but Leo flushed. He knew it was him she was addressing. Like an invisible wraith, the presence of his son, Sigmund, hovered in the room. Where did he fit into all of this?
Leo’s eyes met mine and I grimaced, a “we’ve all done it” sort of expression. I don’t know if that would have calmed him down or not because Janice came into the room.
“Sorry to interrupt but Ed Chaffey just called. He said they’ve picked up Zachary Taylor’s trail.”