Postmortem

"Like this really narrows it down," Marino complained. "Now we got to find out if all these women was listed in the city directory. Next we got to consider occupation possibilities. I mean, not a week goes by the missus don't get a call. Some drone selling brooms, light bulbs, condos. Then there's the pollsters. The let-me-ask-you-fifty-questions type. They want to know if you're married, single, how much money you earn. Whether you put your pants on one leg at 9 time and floss after brushing."

"You're getting the picture," Wesley muttered.

Marino went on without pause, "So you got some guy who's into rape and murder. He could get paid eight bucks an hour to sit on his ass at home and run through the phone book or city directory. Some woman tells him she's single, earns twenty g's a year. So I ask you. How the hell we going to find him?"

We didn't know.

The possible voice co

I said, "The pattern of when he hits makes me wonder if he has a job outside of the home, if he goes to work somewhere Monday through Friday. Throughout the week his stress builds. Late Friday night or after midnight, he hits. If he's using a borax soap twenty times a day, then it isn't likely this is something he has in his household bathroom. Hand soaps you buy at your local grocery store don't contain borax, to my knowledge. If he's washing up with borax soap, I suspect he's doing so at work."

"We're sure it's borax?" Wesley asked.

"The labs determined it through ion chromatography. The glittery residue we've been finding on the bodies contains borax. Definitely."

Wesley considered this for a moment. "If he's using borax soap on the job and gets home at five, it's not likely he'd have such a buildup of this glittery residue at one o'clock in the morning. He may work an evening shift. There's borax soap in the men's room. He gets off sometime before midnight, one A.M., and goes straight to the victim's residence."

The scenario was more than plausible, I explained. If the killer worked at night, this gave him ample opportunity during the day while the rest of the world was at work to cruise through the neighborhood of his next victim and look over the area. He could drive by again late, maybe after midnight, to take another look. The victims were either out or asleep, as were most of their neighbors. He wasn't going to be seen.

What night jobs involve the telephone? We batted that around for a while.

"Most telephone solicitors call right in the middle of the di

We agreed.

"Pizza deliverers," Marino proposed. "They're out all hours. Could be it's the drone who takes the call. You dial up and the first thing the operator asks is your phone number. If you've ever called before, your address pops up on the computer screen. Thirty minutes later some squirrel's at your door with a pepperoni-hold-the-onions. It could be the delivery guy who figures out in a hurry he's got some woman who lives alone. Maybe it's the operator. He likes her voice, knows her address."

"Check it," Wesley said. "Get a couple of guys to go around to the various pizza delivery places pronto."

Tomorrow was Friday! "See if there's any one pizza place all five women called from time to time. It should be in the computer, easy to track."

Marino left for a moment, returning with the Yellow Pages. He found the pizza section and started scribbling down names and addresses.

We kept coming up with more and more possible occupations. Switchboard operators for hospitals and telephone companies were up all hours answering calls. Fund-raisers didn't hesitate to interrupt your favorite television program as late as ten P.M. Then there was always the possibility of someone playing roulette with the city directory or telephone book-a security guard with nothing better to do while he's sitting inside the lobby of the Federal Reserve, or a gas station attendant bored late at night during the slow hours.

I was getting more confused. I couldn't sort through it all.

Yet there was something bothering me.

You're making it too complicated, my i

I looked at Marino's damp, meaty face, at his eyes shifting here and there. He was tired, stressed. He was still nursing a deep-seated anger. Why was he so touchy? What was it he said about the way the killer would think, something about him not liking professional women because they're snooty? Every time I tried to get hold of him, he was "on the street."

He'd been to every strangling scene.

At Lori Petersen's scene he was wide-awake. Had he even been to bed that night? Wasn't it a little odd he was so rabid in trying to pin the murders on Matt Petersen? Marino's age doesn't profile right, I told myself.

He spends most of his time in his car and doesn't answer the phone for a living, so I can't see the co

Most important, he doesn't have a peculiar body odor, and if the jumpsuit found in the Dumpster was his, why would he bring it in to the lab? Unless, I thought, he's turning the system inside out, playing it against itself because he knows so much. He is, after all, an expert, in charge of the investigation and experienced enough to be a savior or a satan.

I suppose all along I'd been harboring the fear that the killer might be a cop.

Marino didn't fit. But the killer might be someone he'd worked around for months, someone who bought navy blue jumpsuits at the various uniform stores around the city, someone who washed his hands with the Borawash soap dispensed in the department's men's rooms, someone who knew enough about forensics and criminal investigation to be able to outsmart his brothers and me. A cop gone bad. Or someone drawn to law enforcement because this is often a very attractive profession to psychopaths.

We'd tracked down the squads that responded to the homicide scenes. What we'd never thought to do was to track down the uniformed men who responded when the bodies were discovered.

Maybe some cop was thumbing through the telephone or city directory during his shift or after hours. Maybe his first contact with the victims was voice. Their voices set him off. He murdered them and made sure he was on the street or near a sca

"Our best bet is Matt Petersen," Wesley was saying to Marino. "He still in town?"

"Yeah. Last I heard."

"I think you'd better go see him, find out if his wife ever mentioned anything about telephone soliciting, about someone calling up to say she'd won a contest, someone taking a poll. Anything involving the phone."

Marino pushed back his chair.

I hedged. I didn't come right out and say what I was thinking.

Instead, I asked, "How tough would it be to get printouts or tape recordings of the calls made to the police when the bodies were found? I want to see the exact times the homicides were called in, what time the police arrived, especially in Lori Petersen's case. Time of death may be very important in helping us determine what time the killer gets off work, assuming he works at night."