Lawrence Block - A Ticket To The Boneyard

I couldn't see anything. He took my hand and guided my fingers to a spot. She was cold to the touch, of course, and there was a flaccidity to her flesh. I could see what he'd found; there was a spot where the flesh was softer, less resilient. There wasn't much in the way of discoloration, however.

"And you said the inside of the thigh? Let's have a look. Hmmm. Here's something. I don't know if it would be a particularly sensitive pressure point for pain. Not an area I've got much expertise in. But there's been some trauma here. You want to see?"

I shook my head. I was unwilling to look between her parted thighs, let alone touch her. I didn't want to see any more, didn't want to be in that room any longer. Havlicek evidently felt the same way, and Wohlmuth sensed it and led us back to his office.

There he said, "I, uh, checked the children for semen."

"Christ!" Havlicek said.

"I didn't find any," Wohlmuth added quickly. "I thought I ought to check, though."

"Couldn't hurt."

"You saw the stab wounds, right?"

"They'd have been hard to miss."

"Right." He hesitated. "Well, they were all inflicted from the front. Three stab wounds between the ribs and into the heart, and any one of them would have done it."

"So?"

"What did he do, sodomize her and then roll her over and kill her?"

"Maybe."

"How did you find her? Lying on her back?"

Havlicek frowned, summoning the memory. "On her back," he said. "She'd slid down off the foot of the bed. Stabbed through the nightgown, and it covered her to her knees. Maybe that semen was from much earlier."

"No way to tell."

"Or later," I suggested. They looked at me. "Try it this way. She's on her back in bed and he stabs her. Then he rolls her over onto her stomach, lifts her nightgown, and pulls her halfway off the bed so he can get at her better. He sodomizes and turns her over and pulls her nightgown down, and in the process she slides the rest of the way off the bed. Then he goes into the bathroom to wash up and rinses the knife while he's at it. That would account for the evident lack of struggle, wouldn't it. They don't offer a whole lot of resistance when they're already dead."

"No," Wohlmuth agreed. "They don't insist on a whole lot of foreplay, either. I don't have any knowledge of the man you're talking about. Is that kind of behavior consistent with what you know about him? Because I don't think it's in conflict with the physical evidence."

I thought of what he'd said to Elaine, about dead girls being as good as live ones if you got them early on. "It's consistent," I said.

"So you're talking about a monster."

"Well, Jesus God," Tom Havlicek said. "It wasn't Saint Francis of Assisi killed those kids."

"James Leo Motley," Havlicek said. "Tell me about him."

"You know about his priors and what he went away for. What else do you want to know?"

"How old is he?"

"Forty or forty-one. He was twenty-eight when I arrested him."

"You got a photo of him?"

I shook my head. "I could probably dig up a photo but it would be twelve years old." I described Motley as I remember him, his height and build, his facial features, his haircut. "But I don't know if he still looks like that. His face wouldn't have changed much, not with the kind of strong features he had. But he could have gained or lost weight in prison, and he might not still have the haircut. As far as that goes, he could have lost the hair. It's been a long time."

"Some prisons will photograph a prisoner at the time of his release."

"I don't know if that's policy at Dannemora or not. I'll have to find out."

"That's where they had him? At Dannemora?"

"That's where he finished up. He started at Attica, but after a couple of years they transferred him."

"Attica's where they had the riot, isn't it? But that would have been before his time. The years seem to go by faster and faster, don't they?"

We were having lunch at the Italian place he'd recommended the night before. The food was good enough but the decor had a determinedly ethnic feel to it, and it came off like a stage set from one of the Godfather movies. Tom had turned down the waitress's suggestion of wine or a cocktail. "I'm not much of a drinker," he said to me, "but you go right ahead."

I'd said it was a little early for me. Now he apologized for having stranded me after we'd left Wohlmuth. "Hope you found things to keep you busy," he said. I told him I'd had a chance to read the newspapers and walk around town a little. "What I should have told you," he said, "is we've got the Pro Football Hall of Fame right off Seventy-seven in Canton. If you're any kind of a football fan, it's something you wouldn't want to miss."

That got us onto football, and that carried us through to the coffee and cheesecake. Massillon, he said, was like Kansas during the Civil War, with brother against brother when it came to the Browns and the Bengals. And they both had good teams this year, and if Kosar stayed healthy both teams ought to make the playoffs, and that was about as much excitement as the town could be expected to handle. They'd never face each other in the Super Bowl, not with both of them being in the same conference, but it was conceivable that they'd be matched up for the conference championship, and wouldn't that be something?

"We were talking about a subway series this year," I said. "The Mets and the Yankees, but the Mets lost out in the playoffs and the Yankees were out of it completely."

"I wish I had the time to follow baseball," he said. "But I just don't. Football, I have about half my Sundays off, and I'm almost always free to watch the Monday night games."

Then, over coffee, we got back on track. "Why I asked about a photo," he said, "is at this point you haven't given me enough to justify reopening the case. We'll have to see what we get from the lab work they'll be doing at Booth in Cleveland. If they can say for sure that semen's from somebody else, maybe that'll tilt the balance. Meanwhile, what we got is a piece of mail mailed and delivered in New York City, and that doesn't mean a lot to my chief here in Massillon."

"I can understand that."

"Let's assume you've got the right reading on this and your man did it. The murders took place a week ago last night. I'd say he'd have had to've been in town a few days beforehand, and possibly as much as a week. I suppose it's theoretically possible that he committed the murders the day he arrived, but I'd say it was more likely he took some time to look the situation over."

"I would certainly think so. He's a planner, and he had twelve years to let it all ripen. He'd figure to take his time."

"And he left town with a clipping from Thursday night's paper, so he was still here when the paper hit the street that afternoon. There's a downtown newsstand that gets it around four, but most places don't have it for sale until five or six. So he was here that long, and maybe overnight. When was the postmark?"

"Saturday."

"So he clipped a newspaper Thursday night in Massillon and mailed it Saturday in New York. And it was delivered Monday?"

"Tuesday."

"Well, that's not so bad. Sometimes they take a week, don't they? You know what the post office and the Florsheim Shoe Company got in common?" I didn't. "Half a million loafers they'd love to unload but nobody wants 'em. Why I asked about the postmark, if he mailed it Friday we could be pretty sure he flew from here to New York. Not a hundred percent, because you can drive it in ten hours if you push it. You happen to know if he has a car?"

I shook my head. "I don't even know where he lives, or what he's been doing since they cut him loose."

"I was thinking we could check with the airlines, look for his name on the passenger manifests. You think he'd use his right name?"